Why didnt my Action Man have a willy? (Favourite Childhood Toys)

Member Name: thedevilinme

Product:	Favourite Childhood Toys
Date:	17/11/08 (428 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Memories....

Disadvantages: Kids of today!

As it's always been, boys get macho toys and girls get girly ones. Sadly some five year-old working class girls take the tiny pushchair rather too seriously and have real kids to put in the big ones ten years later, the pink mini buggy trade clearly a cunning perpetual earner for the toy trade. Boys, of course, also take their Hummel plastic soldiers and Action men far too literally, many urban hooded warriors ready to go war in Iraq when they hit 16. Either way the state pays for our perfunctory toy choices in so many ways. But in the 70s we were good boys and girls...sugar and spice and all things nice...our toys of an innocent age when Playstations were kid's playground in parks and not over prices game consuls. And those play ears would actually be kids in them, not locked up in the family home by mum fearing little Jacasta will be overrun by ferrell runts, child perverts and the bull-bars of the Chelsea Tractors. Sadly the perverts are the parents in those houses and the bull-bars are on the other mum's cars of the other Jacasta...

Top toys I remember ...

Lego

In my day Lego had competition, Clickey and Meccano the front runners. There was another one from Holland that came in a yellow lorry container shaped box where you joined the bits with plastic rivet style poppers but I can't remember that name of that one. Poppers and the Dutch aye! The reason Lego had competition was because they got lazy around the late 70s, the toy becoming less about the creativity of making curves with squares and deciding to add pre molded curved shapes for ships hulls and airplane wings etc, taking away the whole point of the thing in that Lego bricks were learning toys for your kids on how to construct stuff and discover symmetry and balance in engineering. Now you only need three bits to build the Lego Space Shuttle, the whole set up just an expensive collecting exercise now. I believe you can buy a Britney Spears Leo figure now. No wonder there's been a fall off in kids taking the sciences in school! I recall building a complete cable car system with Lego, some old kite twine stretching the length of my parent's sizeable garden as the cables, peeling the Lego rubber tyre wells off and using the red wheels as runners for the twine to run over...

Monopoly

20 years ago I wrote a letter to the Monopoly people and suggested they had city versions and could I do the Northampton one. They never wrote back but did indeed introduce city versions soon after, Paris being the first. I'm sure they had it in mind anyway but I would love to have done the Northampton one. In fact I did do that Northampton one, a rough made out of cardboard and Sellotape, neatly penned with my felt tips. I still have it in fact.lol.
What would also be fun would be a politically correct version, 'do not go to jail because your human rights lawyer has got you off', type community chest cards. You certainly wouldn't get £200 when you land on the bank!

The VIC20

The home PC in the 70s and 80s didn't exist, simple as, kids blowing all their pocket money buying Pannini football stickers and in the local video game arcades, which I still feel were far more fun activities than what the kids have today that keeps them stuck in their stuffy bedrooms.
First there was the Atari home consul, followed by the ZX81 and the BBC computer, both black n white texts and lower memory operations. But then came the Commodore VIC20, bringing color to the screen and so the feeble games to life, where the home video game revolution started. All of a sudden you could play all your favorite arcade games like Space Invaders and Pacman at home, so kid's evenings and weekend habits would change forever. Middle class moms and dads no longer had to worry where little Johnny was late at night.

Games and PCs are sadly everything now; homework copied off the internet so time is freed up to game away between facebook and snacking. Thirty years from now who knows where we will be as far as home gaming and PC living goes? All because of the VIC20. But because the Vic20 was a chunky affair with its ram pack boost sticking out of the top left hand corner, it couldn't keep up with the increasing memory needed to run game technology, the new improved Commodore 64 rushed out to feed that power. The 64 was the moment game consuls were born but also home PCs. The VIC20 total power output is less than 0.1% of today's Nintendo Wii. Muggins here bought the Vetrix gaming system with the still unplayable 'Asteroids' game on it whilst everyone else was going with Sony and Mitsubishi.

TCR

Forget Scalextric, TCR was the way to go with car racing. But the rather ironically named Total Control Racing game was anything but, the lightly grooved tracks allowing you to fling the cars all over the place. With Scaletrix there were rules that you went one way and one way only, where as TCR you can send one car one way and another car the other way, and coupled with the Jam Car, one that was independent of any controller and would chug around at a set slow speed, big crashes were the only way to play. The Scalextric cars were bigger and chunkier with pins that gripped the track, where as TCR had little copper brushes that conducted the current to sling it around the track. You also had figure-of-eight track section to spice it up and you could also disconnect the track but keep the electronic circuits open, meaning the cars can do jumps. It's a mystery today why TCR didn't dominate the market and become the cool retro toy Scaletrix became today for students.

Hot Wheels

Apart from the fact that burning hot wheels tracks was fascinating viewing for kids as the blue-green flames dripped off with a delicious whooping sound, setting fire to just about anything you so desired as a naughty boy, it was also the toy to have in the 70s. The more imaginative kids would build tracks all around the house, a loop-the-loop in the kitchen, a sweeping curve hurling the cars into the lounge, and those two little flags at the end deciding the winner. But the Hot Wheels bit referred to the matchbox cars that whizzed down the super smooth orange plastic track, over sized wheels for maxim acceleration, causing the maximum amount of damage when they left the track and clatter your mum's ornaments.

Clackers

Nowadays you only see the odd training shoe hanging from the overhead telephone wires, but in the seventies you would see what looked like two snooker balls on a string tangled up their, like some sort of stray martial arts weapon that narrowly missed its target after being hurled by a Ninja. These were 'clackers', a sort of violent Yo Yo game, but applied horizontally, the idea to get the two balls to bang together like those desktop executive toys do you see where the metal ball bearings clang into each other. Clackers, of course, made a clacking sound when you got a rhythm up, hence the name, but they also made that sound when smashed onto someone else's skull, hence them being banned pretty sharpish.

Chess

The greatest game ever made should not be classed as a toy as it's also the greatest ego destroyer there has ever been. No wonder 'Death' choose Chess to beat his doubters. If you think you're a genuinely intelligent person and you lose to someone who you feel isn't, its hard to recover from that cerebral kicking. It's a game that takes you to the mental brink, one of extreme strategy and also skillful sacrifice, the later uniquely key to victory. It's also the game that only one in twenty players no every rule to, the one off, 'un pasant` move, a real mystery. It is one of the few games you really do need to be smart to play, let alone win. I played people on yahoo games and they will just drop out of the game and void it rather than go down. They at least wait for the black ball on yahoo pool.

Action Man

My first Action Man wasn't actually an Action Man, but cheap American hybrid called Johnny Strong. It didn't last long but at least it had a plastic penis. The real Action Man had no penis -a bit like Jamie Lee Curtis. When I did eventually get an Action Man (the blond one) it was the more expensive 'gripping hands' version. These hands didn't grip for long because after the tenth time you hung him off the fridge door the fingers had enough of being flexi and pulled about and just broke off. Yes, the gripping hands Action Man, like the cricketer Nasser Hussein, had a serious flaw. Continuously busted fingers!

Action Man would also be the downfall of my outstanding character (at the time). My one and only shoplifting phase at the grand old age of eight involved stealing accessories for my treasured soldier. I stole both the deep sea diver and the rubber inflatable set over one long weekend, before getting over-confident and tried to nick the Action Man tank, half the size of little old me, Bart Simpson style. The shop assistants caught me around the back of the store sitting on the curb assembling Action Mans harpoon gun in my short trousers with chocolate on my mouth. It was back home in the police car and then off to the cop station for a serious ticking off and I never misbehaved again! The old Panda Car outside of your mum's house back then was the talk of the street. That's why you never did it again.

Tonka Toys

Not only did boys religiously play war in the 70s but we also did construction, the indestructible Tonker toys our chosen weapon of choice for some serious earth moving. These where huge great yellow and orange things, made from the same steel as the real lorries and tipper trucks, just like the JCB diggers we remember as kids. It didn't matter how hard you dropped or smashed them into things they would never break, their big thick rubber tires making them bounce around the concrete like Richard Hammonds head. I remember burying one as a kid and forgetting where it was. Ten years later when I was helping mum with the garden I accidentally dug it up! Not a scab of rust on it. They don't make toys like that anymore.

The Rubik's Cube

I've solved it, many times! I don't really have a method but I basically do the eight corners first by various twiddles and chance factors and then the easier eight middle bits. Once you get the corners your statistically fiddling will drop the middle segments in. It's all to do with symmetrical moves that can easily be controlled, keeping the cubes where you want them at all times. You could, of course, do what the cheating b*******ds did on Blue Peter. Researchers (not Konnie, of course) would just peel off the colors and stick them back on in the right place.

The 'Slinky'

That big spring that went down stairs by lifting one end up and throwing it over the edge was great to watch and brilliant physics, but like looking into the Grand Canyon for the first time, after an hour or so it's seen it done it, what's next? But as with your earphone cables on your I-Pods, they tangle easy and so soon hidden away in the cupboard to untangle themselves on their own.

'Slime'

Older ones will remember this green and pink goo that came in a small plastic dustbin, the fun being it was liquid slime that would roll over your hands like a Tory MP going into Parliament, but leave no mark or moisture on your hands. It looked and behaved like bogeys and you could scare girls with it by putting on your face. But if you didn't seal the lid overnight it would crystallize and be useless in the morning, again a bit like a Tory MP.

Airfix Kits

In the 70s we kids loved playing pretend war and self assembly models were the way - and not only for boffin kids with glasses. However hard you tried to put the kits together properly though there was always something left on the number tabs on the plastic scaffolds that held the bits in place in the box, usually a gear stick or a steering wheel, the fiddliest bits to attach. You wouldn't see them on the finished product anyway because the cockpit would be smeared with glue. Because of the glue control-or lack of it- you didn't have to paint the inside of the cockpit and rear gunner pods either because of that clumsy mess. I always stuck the flaps to the wings wrong so they wouldnt work.

Putting on the decals and the painting was the best bit, the lovely feel and sweep of the matt paint (conveniently the same brand) going on to the plastic wings and fuselage was one of the greatest as a kid. Then you would complete the model by dipping your transfers into water, then sliding them off the saturated backing and onto the model in one skilful move. I would always put the schwashstiker or RAF symbol on the bottom of the wing last, before getting some cotton and hanging them from my roof to admire from below, the planes angled in dogfight anger. Somehow you just can't imagine today's 'chavs' ever enjoying that innocence.

Summary: It was so innocent back then