Brighton Breezy
New member
Carrying on from 80s toys thread. I wrote this article for uni mag and it covers the big ones.
Toys we all wanted but never got
We all had one. A toy we would religiously pine over and spend months leading up to Birthdays or Christmas pleading with our parents to buy for us, but no matter how much we wanted it to be, the gift we opened come our birthday was never quite the same shape as the one we wanted. Here are a few to remind you of those days spent staring at the pages of Toys r us catalogue and glued to the advert breaks in-between ‘Sharkey and George’ and ‘Saved by the Bell’. You can still buy find most of these items in old dusty toy shops, stacked away behind a Space Hopper and sandwiched in-between a box of Top Trumps and some subbuteo teams; or online in the depths of E bay and similar auction sites. No doubt we can afford them for ourselves now, but quite why we never just saved up for them back then is beyond me…
Allocart Kitchen: Being a young boy I never wanted one of these but I would look on transfixed at the television whenever the advert for this came on. ‘How come’, I would ponder, ‘is the man on the advert allowed to have Swiss roll and baked beans for breakfast when I am assured by my parents it is the most important meal of the day?’ Looking back it was simple, he was an adult and the ‘rules’ did not apply to him. I did feel for his daughter though, so pleased she must have been to unwrap her brand spanking new toy kitchen only for her Dad to demand she woke up at 5 every morning in order to prepare his breakfast in time to wake him with it at his bedside. This was, you understand, task made harder by the fact the kitchen was made of plastic and thus reacted badly with the heat needed to cook. Perhaps then it was the children who didn’t get this for Christmas who should be truly grateful ...or perhaps, as has been suggested before, I just think about adverts a little too much.
An Electric Piano: This may perhaps have just been me, but I yearned for an electric piano. It was around the time of the late nineteen eighties when ‘Huey Lewis and the News’, power chords and all, had been brought to the British people by ‘Back to the future’. As a child you would walk around the local Dixon’s wide eyed in disbelief at the gigantic electric ‘synthesisers’ and marvel as the showman demonstrated all the different demos it could play. ‘At the touch of a button you to can sound like you are an expert pianist’ was the promise. The reality was the one you got was always smaller and after weeks of practice all you could play was the start to ‘Chariots of Fire’. In some cases you actually got one of those miniature ones tucked in your stocking, brought off the local market for a pound. These could fit in your pocket and had easy to follow instructions. Of course we were never happy with them then, bigger was ALWAYS better, but looking back perhaps we should have taken advantage of the smaller, much more chic ones when our fingers were small enough to play them. Many is a day I have wanted to whisk out a small 5 inch piece onto the table in Resnikov and woo crowds with my eccentric finger work…but alas… that is a distant dream.
Hair Cut Model Head: This was not the technical name, but as I don’t know it that is the best description I can give. It was, in essence, a plastic head whose hair girls could style into whatever shape took their fancy. In reality though, it was so much more then that. For girls this was their passport to social acceptance and the first step on the road to a Hairdressing and beauty therapy course at the local community college. The Sharon’s, Tracey’s and latter day Brittany’s of this world didn’t always work at ‘Quick Cuts’. Oh no. They started out on the long road to success whiling away afternoons on one of these things. Perhaps our parents were not a misguided as we thought, perhaps we they didn’t buy their daughters one of these for a reason. Could it be that they did in fact know best and showered you not with stylist toys such as this but with Enid Blyton books because they didn’t want you to end up a hairdresser? Maybe they had grander plans for your future and didn’t want anything to stand in the way of their daughter becoming a lawyer or doctor. Or perhaps they just remembered their own deprived childhood and thought ‘If I didn’t get my Golliwog Doll in 1955 then she isn’t getting her new fangled hair cut toy now’. We may never know but next time you are sat in a lecture almost falling asleep, think how worse things could be had your parents given in to you at the age 9. ‘Something for the weekend luv?’
Mouse Trap: This was the height of sophistication as far as board games were concerned, especially if your best friend had it and all you were limited to was ‘Cludo’. The excuses were always the same: “the bits are too fiddly”; “you will stand on it and then it will be useless”. Our parents thought they new best but we knew that at the age when you think ‘Land of the Giants’ was as gripping as television drama could get, you knew that nothing could compare to that moment when all those involved realised the trap had been set off. The ball would roll, the diver would leap into the bath of his own accord and the trap would fall down in some unsuspecting plastic mouse and all this set to an unrivalled flow of adrenalin that made you giggle for no reason much in the same way Cola Bottle sweets made you blink. I got this for one Christmas…and it broke and I never played with it again. Ok so my parents had been right all along, but the one solitary time I saw that mouse get caught I had a feeling our Neanderthal ancestors must have felt the first time they picked up a sharpened flint and chased a prehistoric cow around…I felt that I had truly lived.
Mr Frosty: The Big One. I have lived my life so far with only two provisos. 1.Be nice to people and they will generally be nice back, and 2.Anyone who had a Mr Frost was a spoilt brat. The first made me friends, the second couple with my bouts of jealousy made it impossible for me to like someone who had a Mr Frosty. There are two kinds of people, the ‘us and them’. People who had one and those who didn’t. My birthday was in October so the first argument from my parents was that it was a ‘summer toy’. This was easily rebuffed by saying I would gladly not open it until the temperature warranted a crushed ice drink, but no, they wouldn’t accept it. “You will run out of flavourings and then you will never get any use out of it.” “There are too many E Colours in it anyway” and if they didn’t work they would frantically wave their arms about hollering, “All it does is crush ice…badly!” I was one of the lucky ones, we didn’t have a Mr Frosty but we did have a soda stream and in my experience if you have one of them you have friends. I can only imagine what t must have been like for those who had neither. The only way I coped without a Mr Frosty was by constantly going to the shop to buy ice pops, bringing them home and crushing them with a hammer. I asked my Mum why she had deprived me of this obvious human right, she said she hadn’t realised how much Id wanted one. She was right. It wasn’t our parent’s fault it was ours. We cried wolf too often. We always wanted every new toy, how could they be expected to know which ones we really would ‘die if we didn’t have one’? I can only feel for the makers of Mr Frosty. They saw a niche in the market, went for it and failed to sell as many as they should have. They must have sat around their boardroom scratching their heads wondering how the toys were not flying off the shelves. How were they to know our parents just didn’t believe that every child in the country wanted, no HAD TO HAVE, a small white plastic snowman that crushed ice a little bit when you turned his tummy?
Toys we all wanted but never got
We all had one. A toy we would religiously pine over and spend months leading up to Birthdays or Christmas pleading with our parents to buy for us, but no matter how much we wanted it to be, the gift we opened come our birthday was never quite the same shape as the one we wanted. Here are a few to remind you of those days spent staring at the pages of Toys r us catalogue and glued to the advert breaks in-between ‘Sharkey and George’ and ‘Saved by the Bell’. You can still buy find most of these items in old dusty toy shops, stacked away behind a Space Hopper and sandwiched in-between a box of Top Trumps and some subbuteo teams; or online in the depths of E bay and similar auction sites. No doubt we can afford them for ourselves now, but quite why we never just saved up for them back then is beyond me…
Allocart Kitchen: Being a young boy I never wanted one of these but I would look on transfixed at the television whenever the advert for this came on. ‘How come’, I would ponder, ‘is the man on the advert allowed to have Swiss roll and baked beans for breakfast when I am assured by my parents it is the most important meal of the day?’ Looking back it was simple, he was an adult and the ‘rules’ did not apply to him. I did feel for his daughter though, so pleased she must have been to unwrap her brand spanking new toy kitchen only for her Dad to demand she woke up at 5 every morning in order to prepare his breakfast in time to wake him with it at his bedside. This was, you understand, task made harder by the fact the kitchen was made of plastic and thus reacted badly with the heat needed to cook. Perhaps then it was the children who didn’t get this for Christmas who should be truly grateful ...or perhaps, as has been suggested before, I just think about adverts a little too much.
An Electric Piano: This may perhaps have just been me, but I yearned for an electric piano. It was around the time of the late nineteen eighties when ‘Huey Lewis and the News’, power chords and all, had been brought to the British people by ‘Back to the future’. As a child you would walk around the local Dixon’s wide eyed in disbelief at the gigantic electric ‘synthesisers’ and marvel as the showman demonstrated all the different demos it could play. ‘At the touch of a button you to can sound like you are an expert pianist’ was the promise. The reality was the one you got was always smaller and after weeks of practice all you could play was the start to ‘Chariots of Fire’. In some cases you actually got one of those miniature ones tucked in your stocking, brought off the local market for a pound. These could fit in your pocket and had easy to follow instructions. Of course we were never happy with them then, bigger was ALWAYS better, but looking back perhaps we should have taken advantage of the smaller, much more chic ones when our fingers were small enough to play them. Many is a day I have wanted to whisk out a small 5 inch piece onto the table in Resnikov and woo crowds with my eccentric finger work…but alas… that is a distant dream.
Hair Cut Model Head: This was not the technical name, but as I don’t know it that is the best description I can give. It was, in essence, a plastic head whose hair girls could style into whatever shape took their fancy. In reality though, it was so much more then that. For girls this was their passport to social acceptance and the first step on the road to a Hairdressing and beauty therapy course at the local community college. The Sharon’s, Tracey’s and latter day Brittany’s of this world didn’t always work at ‘Quick Cuts’. Oh no. They started out on the long road to success whiling away afternoons on one of these things. Perhaps our parents were not a misguided as we thought, perhaps we they didn’t buy their daughters one of these for a reason. Could it be that they did in fact know best and showered you not with stylist toys such as this but with Enid Blyton books because they didn’t want you to end up a hairdresser? Maybe they had grander plans for your future and didn’t want anything to stand in the way of their daughter becoming a lawyer or doctor. Or perhaps they just remembered their own deprived childhood and thought ‘If I didn’t get my Golliwog Doll in 1955 then she isn’t getting her new fangled hair cut toy now’. We may never know but next time you are sat in a lecture almost falling asleep, think how worse things could be had your parents given in to you at the age 9. ‘Something for the weekend luv?’
Mouse Trap: This was the height of sophistication as far as board games were concerned, especially if your best friend had it and all you were limited to was ‘Cludo’. The excuses were always the same: “the bits are too fiddly”; “you will stand on it and then it will be useless”. Our parents thought they new best but we knew that at the age when you think ‘Land of the Giants’ was as gripping as television drama could get, you knew that nothing could compare to that moment when all those involved realised the trap had been set off. The ball would roll, the diver would leap into the bath of his own accord and the trap would fall down in some unsuspecting plastic mouse and all this set to an unrivalled flow of adrenalin that made you giggle for no reason much in the same way Cola Bottle sweets made you blink. I got this for one Christmas…and it broke and I never played with it again. Ok so my parents had been right all along, but the one solitary time I saw that mouse get caught I had a feeling our Neanderthal ancestors must have felt the first time they picked up a sharpened flint and chased a prehistoric cow around…I felt that I had truly lived.
Mr Frosty: The Big One. I have lived my life so far with only two provisos. 1.Be nice to people and they will generally be nice back, and 2.Anyone who had a Mr Frost was a spoilt brat. The first made me friends, the second couple with my bouts of jealousy made it impossible for me to like someone who had a Mr Frosty. There are two kinds of people, the ‘us and them’. People who had one and those who didn’t. My birthday was in October so the first argument from my parents was that it was a ‘summer toy’. This was easily rebuffed by saying I would gladly not open it until the temperature warranted a crushed ice drink, but no, they wouldn’t accept it. “You will run out of flavourings and then you will never get any use out of it.” “There are too many E Colours in it anyway” and if they didn’t work they would frantically wave their arms about hollering, “All it does is crush ice…badly!” I was one of the lucky ones, we didn’t have a Mr Frosty but we did have a soda stream and in my experience if you have one of them you have friends. I can only imagine what t must have been like for those who had neither. The only way I coped without a Mr Frosty was by constantly going to the shop to buy ice pops, bringing them home and crushing them with a hammer. I asked my Mum why she had deprived me of this obvious human right, she said she hadn’t realised how much Id wanted one. She was right. It wasn’t our parent’s fault it was ours. We cried wolf too often. We always wanted every new toy, how could they be expected to know which ones we really would ‘die if we didn’t have one’? I can only feel for the makers of Mr Frosty. They saw a niche in the market, went for it and failed to sell as many as they should have. They must have sat around their boardroom scratching their heads wondering how the toys were not flying off the shelves. How were they to know our parents just didn’t believe that every child in the country wanted, no HAD TO HAVE, a small white plastic snowman that crushed ice a little bit when you turned his tummy?
