books,gadgets,TV,vintage
The Toys You Pestered Your Parents For
The Big Yellow Teapot
books,games,gadgets,TV
The Big Yellow Teapot
Now-defunct toy manufacturer Bluebird was founded on two very solid principles. Small girls like doll\'s houses. Small girls also like plastic tea sets for serving invisible cups of tea to their dollies. Then someone fell into a filing cabinet at the office Christmas party and came up with the bizarre idea of crossbreeding the two...
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Chic-a-boo
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Chic-a-boo
This baby-faced bear/monkey hybrid was created by Japanese boffins back in the \'70s, apparently to ‘bring a message to children about the beauty of love\'. Well, only a mother could love a face like that.
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Domino Rally
books,gadgets,TV,vintage
Domino Rally
The unique selling point of domino toppling (not much more than ‘set them, knock then down\' as the box blurb reiterated) started to feel a little like too much effort after a while and, as the young player him/herself tumbled inexorably towards adolescence, the plastic set took up final residence in the loft.
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Fuzzy Felt
books,games,gadgets,TV
Fuzzy Felt
This early learning toy was the delight of many an infant school kid, mainly due to its simplicity, highly tactile nature and the opportunity to make rude pictures when teachers weren\'t looking.
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Girl\'s World
books,games,gadgets,TV,vintage
Girl\'s World
Basically the life-sized severed head of an unattractive shop dummy, Girl\'s World served two potential purposes: number one, you could do its hair; number two, you could do its make-up. But oh, the grown-up glamour it encapsulated!
Oh, how times have changed: Girl\'s World today
Hungry Hippos
books,games,gadgets,TV
Hungry Hippos
Billed, typically, as ‘a fast and furious\' game, it might have been better described as ‘10 minutes of slam, slam, slam, then back in the box\'.
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KerPlunk
books,games,gadgets,TV,vintage
KerPlunk
Resembling the central console column of a 1950s Soviet Tardis, the fully assembled KerPlunk rig towered above its low-level rivals with a lurid, Vegas-style promise of raucous gravity-derived antics.
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Mousetrap
books,games,gadgets,TV
Mousetrap
Mousetrap led the charge to leaven the drab 2D world of the dice \'n\' counters board game with a plasticky, vertical dimension - the well-loved trap of the title. The trap itself was inspired directly by the satirical cartoons of Rube Goldberg, whose Inventions! illustrations were intended as an ironic comment on the overcomplicated world of boom-time America. A point that was rather lost on the frantic kids angling to crank another mouse into oblivion.
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My Little Pony
books,games,gadgets,TV,vintage
My Little Pony
While the males of the species were busy trying to cover every available surface in their bedroom with the massed ranks of Zoids and Transformers, what was it that girls were supposed to be doing? The answer, of course, is playing horses, albeit in the most nauseatingly candy-coloured fashion possible.
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Operation
books,games,gadgets,TV,vintage
Operation
Operation was an early and surprisingly durable example of that rare thing - a natural crossover between the worlds of board game, electronic game and delicate medical procedure.
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Perfection
books,games,gadgets,TV
Perfection
The concept was simplicity itself: slot different shapes into their corresponding holes in the playing board. Easy, eh? But where Perfection really scored was the inclusion of the distractingly loud clockwork timer. If you hadn\'t got all the shapes safely home before the thing wound down, the board would ping up, spewing plastic stars, circles, squares and pieces of cheese all over the shop. And that\'s when the screaming would start.
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Rainbow Bright
books,games,gadgets,TV
Rainbow Bright
Like Care Bears, My Little Pony and many, many more, this overpriced doll and her garish companions were more like a worrying cult-in-the-making than a toy, born of an obsession with pretty colours and rainbows and cutesy names and everyone being bloody happy all the bloody time.
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Screwball Scramble
books,games,gadgets,TV,internet
Screwball Scramble
Another one of those games that we would only ever glimpse across the classroom, on someone else\'s desk. Screwball Scramble was a genuinely addictive race-against-time affair from Tomy. Your job was to guide the ball-bearing through a crazy maze via the use of a button, a lever and a knob.
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Simon
books,games,gadgets,TV,vintage
Simon
Its resemblance to the final scene of Close Encounters has often been remarked upon and, just like that effects tour-de-force, Simon was visually hypnotic and staggeringly pointless.
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Frustration
books,games,gadgets
Frustration
Cut from relatively the same cloth game-wise as Sorry! but with its own unique selling point - the addition of a ‘popomatic\' dice roller, turning what could be a fairly dull children\'s game into a noisy festival of explosive fun.
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Speak \'n\' Spell
books,games,gadgets,TV,vintage
Speak \'n\' Spell
Replete with an array of bleeps, parps, toots, and tics, this most vocal of educational toys came fully equipped to instruct and comment - in a gentlemanly American way - on the user\'s ability to spell.
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Speak \'n\' Spell online
Strawberry Shortcake
books,games,gadgets,TV
Strawberry Shortcake
The concept behind \'Shortcake and pals (that line-up including Blueberry Muffin, Plush Custard the Cat and Raspberry Tart) was that they whiffed of fruit. The Strawberry Shortcake franchise was mega, spanning the expected Saturday morning cartoon through to lunch boxes, porcelain trinket-sets books and - well - bins.
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Stylophone
books,games,gadgets,TV,vintage
Stylophone
What to say about this harmonic, monophonic, iconic artefact? If you didn\'t own one, then you wanted to - fact. And it\'s proved a must-have prop for pre- and post-ironic tunesmiths like Jarvis off of Pulp, Phil ‘Orbital\' Hartnoll and Tin Machine\'s David Bowie...
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Tomytronic 3D
books,games,gadgets,TV
Tomytronic 3D
For the record, they were: Planet Zeon (pilot your X-shaped starfighter down a narrow trench), Thundering Turbo (drive around an endless rally circuit) and the TRON-indebted, Sky Attack (tank based overhead target-practice).
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Viewmaster
books,games,gadgets,TV,vintage
Viewmaster
Possibly the toy industry\'s earliest foray into virtual reality, albeit on a budget and with little chance of any horrific, Lawnmower Man-esque side-effects. Pretty much any story that could be told in no more than seven scenes was depicted on a series of rotating, blister-pack cards (featuring such classics as Popeye, Doctor Who and The Seven Wonders Of The World).
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TV Cream Toys
books,games,gadgets,80s fashion,TV,vintage
TV Cream Toys
This feature contains extracts and images from the fabulous new book, TV Cream Toys by Steve Berry, available in all good book stores from 29 November 2007, priced £12.99. To pre-order your copy click here
http://tv.cream.org
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