Child Of The 1980’s

Friction driven pull-back-and-go cars have always been a lot of fun, assuming of course you were trying to race them across a hard floor surface and not the livings room deep pile carpet that is. Pull the car back, let it go, and watch it crash straight into the bottom of the kitchen larder. Cool!

Most of these cars tended to be fairly large in size, certainly bigger than your average Matchbox or Dinky car, until that is the Penny Racers came along. Originally created by Japanese toy company Takara, but released in the UK by Tonka, Penny Racers came out of the Japanese talent for miniaturisation, yielding a tiny little car barely an inch wide and not much longer. They’re tiny size and weight meant that they zipped around like greased lightning.

However, the Penny Racer did just stop at being fast. On the back of each car there was a tiny slot that could comfortably take a one pence piece. Why was this useful? Well, it provided just enough weight and air resistance so that once the tiny vehicle got up to speed it would tip back into a wheelie and career around on just it’s back wheels.

The toys were popular enough that they spawned at least four different videogames, the latest being released in 2002 for PlayStation2. The official Penny Racers brand doesn’t seem to be available any more, at least not in the UK, but fear not, for the good folks at Seven Again have come to the rescue with five Penny Racers for the modest sum of just £2.99!

The Rubik’s Cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian Ernő Rubik, who was both a sculptor and a professor of architecture, and appeared in Hungarian toy shops in 1977, named the Magic Cube. It wasn’t until 1980 when it was signed by Ideal Toys that the cube hit the world’s attention and established itself as one of the most popular toys in the world, probably due mostly to the fact that many of the estimated 300 million cubes sold were cheap imitation models.

In itself the cube sounds like a simple enough concept. You have a cube that has each of it’s faces covered in a different colour. Each face is formed of a 3×3 grid. The cube can be rotated in vertical or horizontal slices, which allows each face to become a mixture of different colours. After liberally mixing up all the pieces by repeated twisting of different slices of the cube, it is up to the player to put the cube back in order again, a task that is far easier said than done.

The craze for the Rubik’s cube meant it became a common sight to see people young and old twisting the cube this way and that, gradually getting more and more frustrated that they couldn’t solve the damn thing. To get one side completed was generally fairly easy but proceeding on from there was much more difficult. Several cube experts cashed in by releasing their cube solutions in book form, and I remember owning one called You Can Do The Cube, written by an annoyingly clever 12 year old named Patrick Bossert. It was a really good book though, with easy to follow instructions that allowed you to solve the cube in no time.

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The craze for Bicycle Motorcross, or BMX, was at it’s highest during the early 1980’s. Popularised by films such as BMX Bandits and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial which featured kids riding around perform stunts and tricks, there was a period where every kid wanted a BMX bike, and it was not cool to be seen riding any other kind of bicycle.

Pictured is the Raleigh Super Burner, which I distinctly remember falling in love with as a boy. Mum and Dad got me a Raleigh Grifter instead, which was disappointing at the time but given that the Grifter had three gears whilst the Burner had none, it was probably a wise decision. It certainly made the bike ride to school and back each day a better experience, and it wasn’t that far off being a true BMX bike in looks. Besides, the chances of me ever becoming enough of a daredevil to jump over ramps and such were never going to be high, if I’m truthful.

Anyway, there are two main disciplines to BMX biking, which are BMX racing and Freestyle BMX. The former is where the BMX craze originated, as it most closely resembles real Motorcross on motorbikes. Races consisted of several riders completing laps around a circuit (usually made on bare earth) that comprised dips, ramps and banked turns which had to be negotiated.

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Today there probably aren’t many kids who don’t own a Nintendo Gameboy or one of it’s many variations. Back in the 1980’s such technology was the thing of Science Fiction, so we had to make do with our Palitoy Pocketeers instead (or the less catchily named Tomy Pocket Games in the US).

Pocketeers were hand held games that took the old Christmas cracker “roll-the-balls-into-little-holes” games a step further. Some were little more than larger versions of said cracker novelties, being mazes that you just had to roll one or more mini ball bearings around by tipping the entire toy. Others added little spring loader flippers and pushers to the mix, allowing the player some more interesting ways of interacting with the ball, and the ultimate addition was to have some form of movement thanks to a clockwork mechanism. Best of all though, the Pocketeers range were available at pocket money prices.

The pictured example is one of the games that I owned as a kid, and is called Space Invader (hmm, wonder where they got the idea for that from). A wind up mechanism moved the three stripy barriers from side to side, whilst you attempted to flick your little ball bearing between them to hit the alien mothership at the top of the game. Doing this caused a little score counter to the side of the alien to flip round. As you can see it was pretty simple, yet also surprisingly involved at the same time, as the mechanics of getting the thing to work were quite interesting.

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If turning a sheet of A4 paper into an aeroplane always left you disappointed because the average paper dart didn’t look particular plane like, then the Polystyrene Glider was the cheap solution to your woes. I remember buying them on my way home from primary school in the corner newsagents. They only cost about ten pence, and came in a little paper envelope with a picture of the plane you had bought on the front.

When you got that little envelope home you’d rip it open to reveal three pieces of shaped polystyrene, a clear plastic nose weight, and a little plastic propellor and peg. The peg held the propellor onto the nose weight, which slotted onto the fuselage section of the model. You then popped out two little strips of polystyrene for the front and back wings to push through - this was always my favourite part of the construction process. Once the wings were in place you were all done, and a light throw sent the plane soaring through the air, propellor whizzing round as it went.

After constructing your little flying marvel, you’d then try to get it to go as far as you could, which meant standing on a chair for extra height, and finding the precise speed at which to launch the plane. Too slow and it would drop to the ground, whilst too fast would cause it to stall, and end up going nose down into the ground.

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Spirograph is one of those enduring toys that will probably go on forever. It was originally invented by Denys Fisher in the 1960’s, and is one of those simple but elegant designs that you take a look at the components involved and it’s immediately obvious what you are supposed to do with it. Basically, it’s used to draw thousands of intricate mathematical curves in the name of art.

The basic set consists of some toothed rings which you pin to a sheet of paper. You then select one of the many different sized wheels, each of which was surrounded in more little cog teeth, and had a number of holes drilled in them. You place the wheel inside the ring, lock the teeth together, then place a pen or pencil in one of the wheels holes. With firm pressure you then repeatedly rotate the wheel around the ring using the pen, performing loop after loop until the line you’ve drawn meets up again with the beginning of the line. The result, a beautiful swirly design, which you could use as a decoration as it was, or you could colour bits of it in if you wanted to.

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Being interested in computers at an early age, as most young boys growing up in the 1980’s doubtless were, meant that you were probably also desperate to own a Big Trak. This was another of those toys that instantly made you Mr. Popular at school, as it was pretty expensive so not many kids owned one, and even fewer owned the add on trailer for it either, of which more later.

Big Trak itself looked a bit like some kind of futuristic lunar rover, but what made it really special was that you could program it to do whatever you wanted, well within reason anyway. The keypad on the back allowed you to enter a sequence of simple commands such as move forward or turn right, a bit like the computer language Logo that you could use on your schools BBC Micro at the time. You entered in your commands then hit the GO! button to set Big Trak on its way, and just hoped that you had got the instructions right so that it avoided the door frame and didn’t run into the sofa.

The most useless, yet still the best thing about Big Trak was the laser gun at the front of the machine. This could be programmed to fire, which just meant it made a laser sound and flashed the lights on and off, but it was still great fun trying to get Big Trak to sneek up on the family pet and pretend to blast it with the lasers.

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Firstly let me pass on a big Child Of The 1980’s Merry Christmas wish to all our readers! We hope you all have a great day, just go easy on the mince pies, okay!

In the spirit of giving though, we thought we’d share the rather excellent Online Etch-A-Sketch website which allows you to relive all those happy hours you spent fiddling about with your Etch-A-Sketch as a kid. It’s not quite the same as it doesn’t involve twiddling the two knobs to make it work, just the arrow keys, but its still a lot of fun. The picture accompanying this post was created using it, unfortunately I don’t know by whom, but why not see if you can do better!