The Ronco cheese and pickle dicer, yours for £9.99! (Reminiscences of obsolete products)

Member Name: thedevilinme

Product:	Reminiscences of obsolete products
Date:	25/11/08 (324 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Memories...

Disadvantages: Those were the days my friends..I thought they would never end...

The older ones here will remember the good old days when Christmas adverts lasted an hour and pretty much every bad actor that hadn't worked all year would work appear in those commercials. The Woolworth's advert would go on forever (unlike the business, their share price just three pence this week, the business unlikely to last the month) and drive us up the wall and racing to the kettle. But the high street has changed a lot in the last ten years and with the internet reenergizing mail-order it's not going to recover quickly, meaning we will no longer see the days of TV adverts trying to sell us all manner of crap. If it was on the telly in the 60s and 70s then bored housewives would be at the mercy of the advertisers, meaning pretty much anything would sell in enough quantity to make it worth while. I miss those days.

+ + + K-TEL & RONCO + + +

The older ones will remember these two ubiquitous brands dominating Christmas TV ads. They basically sold gadgets and music compilations the big brands wouldn't bother with. Ronco did mostly silly kitchen implements for lazy housewives, the Ronco tin openers and bottle cap twisters all the rage in the suburbs, whilst K-Tel were more into releasing naff music and various L.P and tape cleaning methods, but still dabbled in hair crimpers and pet brushes in the summer.

+ + + HARMONY HAIRSPRAY + + +

In those days if girls wanted a boyfriend they would wear a flowerly Laura Ashley dress and then spray a fire extinguisher worth of hairspray on their head, where ever they may be, be that in the highs street or at the dentist. This would immediately get men's attention (presumably because they were choking from the volume) suddenly gagging for these fragrantly haired pretty women. Harmony Hairspray is the sole reason why the zone layer disappeared in the 80s.

+ + + IRAQI SUPER GUNS + + +

These were built up north by real men in real factories in something called 'heavy industry', which used to be practiced in the north before Margaret Thatcher closed it down. But not before she allowed a Sheffield iron mill tacit permission to build some ridiculously long ranged cannons for Britain's number one arms buyer on the time, Saddam Hussein, presumably to target Iranian cities in the grueling eight year war with chemical weapons, helping to destabilize the Middle East and so control the oil price more. And guess who sold them the chemical weapons plants? Yep! A factory up north!
The gun was made of pipe like lengths that were supposed to fool customs officers and then be reassembled in the desert as this bizarre telescopic gun, like something Terry Gilliam would dream up. Alas the scam was rumbled and the Tory's had to own up to arming Saddam in the High Court to avoid the Sheffield factory owners going to the gallows for treason as the war turned against the west.

+ + + TEXAN BARS + + +

There are lots of forgotten chocolate bars and sweets out there, Spangles and the Banjo bar to name but two, but my fav was the Texan Bar, a chocolate sandwich affair that made the fatal mistake of being horrible. I recall it was a greasy chocolate melt poured over a crispy wafer affair, but too much wafer and not enough chocolate, nudging it into biscuit territory. It used to produce more crumbs than Trafalgar Square after a flock of pensioners have fed the pigeons and the wrapper would always tick to the chocolate and then your hands, even in the winter.

+ + +REMMINGTON SHAVERS + + +

Victor Kiam, of course, proudly told us he had made his name and millions in men's grooming, specifically because of his Remington electric shaver range. He hadn't, of course, the idea of the ad campaign being one of a self fore-filling prophecy ploy, which wasn't, of course, the elegant blue/gray haired American gentleman never seen again.

+ + +HI KARATE AFTRSHAVE + + +

Just as young men today will practically be ravaged by sexy young girls if they spray Lynx body spray under their armpits on the high street - apparently - Hi Karate was also supposed to have the same effect on those beautiful women. Their aftershave rivals like Brutt and Gillette had gone for the sports celebrity approach, like Kevin Keegan and Henry Cooper, to plug their wares, where as 'Hi Karate' went for pure sex appeal, a quick spray and a hi kicking beautiful women would appear from behind a strategically placed pot plant and smash everything to pieces with their long legs and fast hands until they got their hands on you. British men fell for it on mass and bought into the dream that cheap cologne would indeed get them beautiful women-where as the rich bald men who marketed 'Hi Karate' would just wave the tenners from the profits for much better results with the those women.

+ + + GOLD RUSH BUBBLEGUM + + +

I loved Bazooka Joe gum and the little waxy cartoon wrapped inside made it a very joyous thing for kids back then, but you didn't get much for your buck. After about twenty chews the flavor was gone from the American gum. I preferred the Gold Rush bubbly, little yellow nuggets stuffed into a waxy bag with gold written across it, a little draw string to keep them snug. They had a lovely rich flavor and I'm sure you could blow much bigger bubbles than Bazooka Joes. You could reuse the bags too.

+ + + JOKERS POP + + +

In the seventies most Coca Cola and Pepsi drinks were sold in those iconic and heavy bottles. If you took them back to the shops you would get money for them. It was quite an earner when we were kids. We would even raid pub and shop back yards to make extra pocket money by bringing the empties back to the same shop or pub the next day to make yet more money. We knew how to recycle back then. But my mom couldn't afford Coke in iconic bottles so we had generic pop, Jokers my favorite, vivid in my memory. The cans would have little comic strip tales on the side of the cans to appeal to kids near the checkout, and at about 4p each, perfect for mums to shut us up!

+ + + SPUDGUNS + + +

When we were kids there were no angry young ghetto boys with firearms, 'Snappits' and cap guns the weapons of choice. But they were too noisy for middle-class kids and would upset the neighbors so mum and dad would give little Johnny small plastic 'shooters' that fired vegetables, usually potatoes, hence the name. You would push the spud into the end of the gun so it would make a pellet, which would then be propelled out again at great speed when fired by a feeble amount of compressed air, held back by an elastic band, both the band and the spud cube falling about 30ft in front of you with a big downward arc and a pathetic 'plop', your enemy still coming at you fast. This was not an effective weapon of urban street warfare and so you would go and play with your big brothers illegal pellet gun instead, which worked on the same air pressure principal, but would fire a near deadly 1.6mm metal pellet at 150mph over 300ft! I packed serious 'heat' back then girls!

+ + + LUCKY BAGS + + +

When mom gave me my 25p pocket money on a Saturday morning I would spend it on a Lucky Bag at the local post office, a delicious assortment of sweets and treats, now both defunct. I can't remember what was in it, apart from those rather odd polystyrene flying saucer sweets, but it was the pure volume of stuff in there that made it a winner. I think you got a Sherbet Dip as the big ticket item, a dynamite stick of liquorices and sherbet gunpowder, which you would prime by whipping out the liquorices and coughing on the dust. Ten years later the kids would be sniffing glue out of the same bags.


+ + + SODA STREAM + + +

I'm not sure if these are still going but they were all the range in the 70s. They were basically a tool to carbonate any drink you so choose, little green bottles of carbon dioxide gas loaded into a plastic device that held the bottle in place that would pump bubbles into your orange squash. They were great fun but not the sort of thing that sold well in the third world (which was most of the world back then), but mostly ending up in people's drinks cabinets in the suburbs for swinger parties where naked flabby people would end up spray each other with them.

+ + + VIDEO 2000 + + +

In the late 70s some 'techy' had the crazy brainwave that the home cinema revolution would be best served by lasers beam reading the film from a metallic looking disc in a flat bed player. Huh! Imagine that taking off! Beta Max would lose out to the bigger VHS video tape for the home movie market and the rest is history. Thirty years later we are watching films on jumpy old laser discs.lol.


WATNEY PARTY SEVEN

For some reason beer and ale was sold in huge cans in the 70s.You got the normal 330 ml, 4 packs for parties but they also sold five and seven pint behemoths. These were heavy too, my dad preferring the Tartan ale five and the Double Diamond six-pinter at weekends. Worthington E also did one of these babies; armed with an exceedingly large ring-pull like a grenade, I recall, having the same explosives results in the house when my dad drank it all on the same night. I don't want to see these come back. I hope my dad is up there now in heaven drinking one and regretting that.

Summary: Dooyoo writing school time