Child Of The 1980's

Magna Doodle was one of the best drawing toys available during the 1980′s.  Unlike the classic Etch-A-Sketch you could draw directly onto a panel rather than twisting little knobs to move a pen horizontally or vertically.  Probably it’s closest rival for ease of use were the old Magic Drawing Slates, which may have been much cheaper but were much easier to damage than the Magna Doodle.

Once you had finished drawing your masterpiece you simply had to pull a little lever across to erase the screen completely and start drawing something else.  I seem to recall you also got a couple of magnetic shapes which could be used like stamps, or could be dragged around the panel to make a big thick line.

But how did it work?  Well, the pen was obviously magnetic, and looked as if it had been pinched straight from a Wooly Willy face drawing toy.  The drawing panel was made up of hundreds of little hexagonal cells, which contained a mixture of magnetic particles and a thick gloopy liquid.  Rubbing the pen over the surface of the panel attracted the magnetic particles upwards, and they then stayed in place thanks to the liquid stopping gravity pulling them back down again.  Simple really, but still very clever.

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Scalextric may have weathered the course of time as the most popular slot car racing system, but back in the eighties there were several challengers to the model car racing crown, the most successful of which was Total Control Racing, or TCR for short.

Unlike Scalextric which had pegs on the bottom of the cars which sat in slots on the track, Total Control Racing had little brass contacts on the cars which connected with metal wires that were embedded in the track.  This allowed the TCR system to be a little more flexible in the features it offered, as well as making putting the cars back on the track when they spun off much simpler.

First and foremost, the big advantage TCR had over Scalextric was that the cars were not limited to driving in one lane.  A button on the trigger controllers allowed you to make your car hop across to the other lane, which if done at the right time could knock an opponents car off the track.  It also allowed for what became known as a “Jam Car”, which was a third car that moved around the track automatically but at a slow pace, meaning the players had to swerve round it.

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(Image modified from original picture uploaded by unloveablesteve on Flickr – check out the website and book TV Cream Toys for more cool toys).

Do you remember Uncle Remus Play Kits? I have fond memories of these from my childhood, although I think they may well have disappeared from shops by the early 1980′s. No matter, I enjoyed them, so they’re being included here.

Nothing to do with the Uncle Remus associated with Brer Rabbit and the Disney movie Song of the South, Uncle Remus toys were more often than not craft kits of some kind or another, and were more likely to be found in newsagents than in toy shops, hanging on one of those rotunda stands that shops sometimes have. They were fairly cheap but ever so cheerful, and were the perfect rainy afternoon distraction. They came for the most part in cardboard wallets with a distinctive logo consisting of a friendly looking balding old man pointing at the word REMUS.

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When these came out in the late 1980′s I really wanted a set, but there were two drawbacks. First they cost a fair whack, and secondly you really needed a group of friends with them to make it worthwhile. Suffice to say I never got a Laser Tag set, but that was OK, as since then I’ve had the chance to play the game in places such as Laser Quest and Quasar, and I’m pretty rubbish at it.

Laser Tag was a laser gun game (of course, it didn’t actually use lasers but infra red, something like the system used by TV remote controls – Infra Red Tag doesn’t sound quite so cool though does it?) where each player carried their own laser gun and wore a vest with a sensor on it. The idea was to fire your gun at your opponent’s sensor in order to take one of their lives, without getting shot yourself. A bit like paintball but less messy and a lot less painful when you get shot by some idiot in the knee cap or nether regions…

The packaging and advertising for Laser Tag was, as you might suspect, a very futuristic affair with people shown running around in a variety of Bladerunneresque costumes consisting of lots of lycra and body armour, shooting each other in some science fiction themed warehouse setting. Contrast that to Peter and Billy running up and down the street with only lamp posts for cover and wearing the sensor over their school uniform. Not quite the same, but then that’s why we’re given imaginations, isn’t it?

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On Sunday my nephew showed me one of his new DVDs, the computer animated film Fly Me To The Moon, about three flies who hitch a ride on a space craft to the moon.  One of the interesting features of this DVD was that as well as the standard version there was also a version of the film that was in 3D, requiring you to wear a pair of those funny glasses with the blue and red lenses.

We watched a bit of it, but soon switched back to the standard version so we did have to watch everything in a strange purple tinted monochrome, and because it made your eyes ache after a while.  The 3D effect was quite good though, assuming you could get the cardboard 3D glasses close enough to your eyes to make it work – tricky if you wear glasses.

Anyway, all that aside, this reminded me of the good old View-Master toy, which was capable of generating an incredibly good 3D effect, even if it was only with still images.  The View-Master was usually made of red plastic, and looked like a really odd pair of binoculars.  Insert one of the special picture discs and look through the eye holes and you’d see a scene which popped out at you in three dimensions.  Pull the little lever at the side of the toy and the disc would rotate to reveal the next image.

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The Orb Puzzle came out in the early 1980′s riding on the popularity wave of the Rubik’s Cube, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you’ve never heard of it before.  The Orb was the puzzles US name, but in the UK it was also known as Orb-It.

It consists of a silver plastic sphere that has four rings of coloured beads running parallel to each other.  The top ring contains eight blue beads, the next twenty green beads, the next ring twenty red beads and the bottom ring eight orange beads.  The beads can be pushed around the channel of the ring.

So far not very puzzling!  However the ball is split in two, and the two hemispheres rotate through 45 degree increments.  This has the effect of joining the rings together into either a single continuous ring that snakes its way around the sphere (as pictured), or two individual loops, thus allowing the beads to be mixed up.  Obviously your task is to get the beads back into their original configuration.

I was given an Orb by some relatives who went on holiday to America and bought me one back as a gift, and I personally think I prefer it as a puzzle to the Rubik’s Cube.  Whilst it could be difficult to get the beads to run freely when the sphere was in the never ending chain configuration, the puzzle itself was a bit easier to solve than the Rubik’s Cube, which meant it was less likely to be retired to the back of the cupboard in a muddled up state.

If you have one of these knocking about and want a solution to get it all nicely organised again then pay a visit to Jaap’s Puzzle Pages, which has details on loads of puzzles beside the Orb.

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Surely everyone must have own a rubber ball at some point in their lives?  They’re a mini Physics lesson all to themselves, teaching you all about the concepts of conservation of energy and the co-efficient of restitution (ooh, smarty pants me!) without you even realising it.  In other words, they bounced…

The humble rubber bouncy ball is one of those cheap and cheerful toys that for some reason amuses no end, providing many happy hours of throwing it at various things to see how much it would bounce back (the conservation of energy bit).  Drop it on the hard kitchen floor and it would bounce back almost to your hand, whilst dropping it on the living room carpet was most unsatisfying (that’ll be the co-efficient of restitution then).

Whilst merely dropping the ball from a reasonable height was fun in itself, it was even more fun if you threw the ball at the ground as hard as you could, in the hope it might bounce off the floor and hit the ceiling.

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During the late 1980′s one of the most popular themes for toys aimed primarily at young boys was to make something that looked repulsive or disgusting in some way.  For example, the sugary sweet Cabbage Patch Kid was reinvented as a gruesome series of trading cards known as Garbage Pail Kids.  The subject of this post, the Madballs series, was another toy created around this kind of an idea.

Madballs were basically rubber balls that had been made to look like different kinds of strange and ugly creatures.  Egyptian Mummies, oversized eyeballs and skulls were actually the more normal end of the range of designs available, with the other end being odd slime drenched or vein covered abominations of nature.

Each ball was about the size of a baseball, but made from soft bouncy rubber.  They could be used as normal balls of course, although the lumpy facial features often made predicting where they would roll or bounce a little tricky.  Each ball had a name to match its looks, such as Slobulous, which had a massive drooling tongue and one eye popping out slightly, or Oculous Orbus, which was the aforementioned giant eyeball.

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