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Spirograph was ace!
Which is why I can fill a 20″x10″ floor
That's about half a metre. 😁
A mate managed to rip his Stretch Armstrong apart. It was full of a viscous green gel IIRC and was even more useless as a toy with a leg missing.
Wasn't it also really toxic? I've half a memory that it was recalled or banned or something.
Which reminds me. Remember the things that were like a rubber sausage but the topology of a donut so you couldn't keep hold of them? Something like "magic snakes" or similar, they were all the rage for almost minutes. Apocryphally perhaps, they were allegedly filled with nasty water too.
Cougar
Full Member
I had a thing that at the time I loved but looking back was pretty poor, its name escapes me. There was a lift with an Archimedes screw, a dozen steel ball bearings, three rubber-skinned drums and a catchment area at the far end which was nominally some sort of scoring system.
Cascade.
Another Super Flight Deck victim here.
Utterly beyond shite.
Always wanted Stock Car Smash Up.
Ended up with Action Rebound.
Meh.....
Amyone remember the John Craven newsround edition on the Moonbase 1999 Eagle space craft toy?
It came with yellow barrels, about the size of a 1/2 of an AA battery complete with radioactive stickers attached
Some genius parents found these and thought they were actually radioactive due to the stickers.
The fact they were constructed from the finest Chinese plastic was lost on them and there were police involvement and possibly the bomb squad
They removed the stickers on future models iirc although i could be totally wrong and dreamt this.
The evel keneivel stunt bike was a bit rubbish – the version that was like a easy-rider chopper was properly awful. it only did one thing which was…. fall over.
Sounds pretty realistic to me...
The Avante was released in 1988. I was sponsored by RiKo back then so raced one for a couple of years. I'd rather have had a Yokomo Dog Fighter but that would have meant paying for it.
Flight deck was great! Not so great?
Battling tops (wanted it for 4 or 5 Christmases on the trot, what a massive disappointment when my parents relented)!
Scalectrix (My dad was beside himself with excitement, I was bored with it after 5 minutes).
Etch a sketch
Rock em sock em robots (shit plastic boxing robots)
Sea Monkeys - utter shite.
ZX81 - 16K RAM Pack - again, utter shite.
There was some real shite for sure. But early 70s chemistry sets had a lot more explosive oomph than (thankfully) anything I was able to buy for my kids...
Never had a Big Trak myself, but the rich kid in our class said it was a major disappointment.
I had a Big Track and loved it.
And it always seemed to list to one side, whether that was down to build quality or nap of the carpet I don’t know.
Yea, mine did that as well.
ZX81 – 16K RAM Pack – again, utter shite.
Revolutionary you mean!! The joy of copying code out of computer magazine and watching in awe as letters flew around the screen. 😱
ZX81 – 16K RAM Pack – again, utter shite.
Revolutionary you mean!! The joy of copying code out of computer magazine and watching in awe as letters flew around the screen. 😱
You mean the utter frustration of spending hours copying code out of a magazine only for a butterfly to flap its wings in the Amazon and the whole lot would disappear before you managed to commit it to tape. I only found out years later that there was a design flaw in the interface that meant if you even looked at it funny it would disconnect losing all power and therefore all the code you had painstakingly typed in.
I bought a as new,boxed, original Big Trak from a charity shop for £12 👌😂
ANy remote control car that was affordable to a normal family then!
The cheaper Tamiya's were affordable, something like a Thundershot or Madcap. I'm being a dick anyway and know exactly what you mean. Tandy were serial offenders.
Yokomo Dog Fighter
Forgot all about them but they were the boys! Yeah, Avante was/is a lovely looking thing but always outperformed bitd.
Zoids! Hours building the bastards just to watch them saunter across the Lino and start to fall apart like a necrotic transformer. Good luck if you just had carpet in your house.
I had a pair of those strap on roller skates that had a switch underneath designed to stop you from going backwards. They did this by just locking up and attempting to kill you.
to keep it going… (if you know, you know).
Oh I know. And the little pickups that wore through. Maddening.
design flaw in the interface that meant if you even looked at it funny it would disconnect losing all power and therefore all the code you had painstakingly typed in.
This was probably the end of my aspiring career with computers.
My kids will look back at crap toys. It's not my fault their favourite toys are cardboard boxes and empty bubble bath bottles.
The cheaper Tamiya’s were affordable, something like a Thundershot or Madcap.
For some value of 'affordable'. I still have my Madcap, I was in my 20s when I bought it.
Lego
And it always seemed to list to one side, whether that was down to build quality or nap of the carpet I don’t know.
I put it down to the nap of my carpet but it just added to the challenge. Forward 10 left 1 repeat to navigate my parent's long narrow hallway.
I didn't have the trailer for it but u remember the ad where the kid used it to deli er the apple to his dad.
Other than lego it was my only decent toy. Im not posh either, IIRC it was a joint Christmas and birthday present from parent and grandad parents.
Ambush. It was a mix of a board counter game where you could move your cowboys around the board, and a shooting game where you could bump your opponents cowboys off if they got close to your end of the board. All played on a moulded plastic relief board so they could nominally hide behind hills.
In theory great, cowboys and shooting!! In practise, unless you were playing someone with a total lack of co-ordination it was impossible to get your men close, and in any case someone would inevitably nudge the flimsy placcy board and knock all the figures over every single turn, meaning 90% of the game was standing the figures back up and arguing over what spot they were on.
Honorable mention for Scalextrix and Subbuteo. Both great games, but took so long to set up that by the time you were ready to start you couldn't be arsed any more. But HMHB said that way better than I could......
Lego
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Bloody hell! People criticising toys, that I couldn’t have even dreamed of when I was little! I still have my original teddy bear, I would have had Dinky, Corgi and Matchbox toys, or I was given books. Which is why I was able to read well by the time I went to primary school.
<span style="font-size: 0.8rem;">No toy was rubbish, everything was a treasured item, given and received with love. </span>
Even a cardboard box was reused into a play item
Oh, and I was given a little bike with stabilisers on, fell off trying to ride it up the garden path and badly grazed my leg on a rough garden wall, refused to ride it after that. I was about five or six. Then I was promised a grown-up bike for my birthday, so I took the little bike up the road away from the traffic, came back ten minutes later, saying I can ride it, can I have a new bike, please? I would have been about ten, then. Took a while, mind, and then it was second-hand.
Sold it eventually, it was a BSA StarRider, and I wish now I’d kept it, it ran 27”, or whatever they’re called now, and had a 3-speed Sturmey rear hub. Could have put light bars on, a better hub, and gravel tyres.
We didn’t have much money, a new toy car or something once a month, if I was lucky, or a comic every now and then - I don’t recall anything that had batteries, other than maybe a torch.
Seeing pre-teens wandering around with a smartphone is almost impossible to comprehend to my very much younger self.
I'm a +1 for Lego.
Early '80s Lego. We had a big ice cream tub of it. Just blocks and plates. I'd go at it thinking I could make a house, manage a single wall and then go outside and "do something less boring instead" like football, throwing things at other kids or bike riding.
It was a million miles away from the stuff my kids have spent more of their lives doing than anything else. They've never had expensive kits, but can take the parts from all of the kits they do have and create something completely different out of their heads.
Bit younger here by the looks of it.
Sega mega cd. What a pile of turd.
Fmv games or mega drive games with red book audio. Waste of money.
Sonic Cd was good. Rest was rubbish:
Sewer shark, road avenger, cobra command, Sherlock holmes, night trap. All crap.
Didn't double dip and get a 32x though.
I had a dog and my brother's old bike! Best toys ever!
Never had a Big Trak myself, but the rich kid in our class said it was a major disappointment.
Didn't it get a re-issue a few years back?
He used to liven it up with lighter fluid and a box of matches.
We used airfix planes with flight deck. Stuff a French banger in the fuselage, followed with some meths soaked cotton wool, catch it on fire then try to land the flaming plane before it blew up!!!! Great memories............
convert
Full Member
Child of the 70’s – check.
Father in the Royal Navy serving on Ark Royal – check.
God father was a Phantom pilot – check.So how the **** did it take until 2022 on some nerdy mountain biking site that I discover there was a toy literally intended for me!!!! Ok, sounds like I didn’t miss out on much but even so – jeez Dad (RIP), how come I didn’t get a Super Flight Deck????!!??
I would imagine your dad and his work mates 'tested' one and relised it was shit.
My dad was a depot supervisor at a HST maintenance depot bitd, he bought me a British Rail HST set, and it was taken to work to check it all out first (play with), being Hornby is was all good so I did get it on Christmas Day.
After my time, but... Transformers. I mean, WTAF? A robot that transforms into a cassette tape?!? What, to render itself helpless? Or penetrable by a biro? Hell, even the Porsche 911 was a step down from the robot form that could fly. Clearly a concept invented by the Mattel execs looking for a Christmas bonus.
@gobchul
Yep, Bigtrak brought back recently, I bought a load for coding/programming fun at school. Totally original spec so had to faff with D cell batteries and 1 unit of distance was still a foot so kids using 30cm rules had to account for the discrepancy when trying to drive them long distance around the school corridors! 🤣
I had a thing that at the time I loved but looking back was pretty poor, its name escapes me. There was a lift with an Archimedes screw, a dozen steel ball bearings, three rubber-skinned drums and a catchment area at the far end which was nominally some sort of scoring system. Boing, boing, boing, ka-chunk. In truth, the skill was in setting the bloody thing up so that the balls made it to the end and returned perpetual-motion style. It took hours and the markings on the playmat thing was way off.
. @Cougar - Cascade.
The massive D-cell batteries that powered the Archimedes screw tower lasted all of 8 minutes.
https://www.doyouremember.co.uk/memory/cascade
I had a Sketch-a-Graph, a sort of pantograph thing. I remember being very taken by it thanks to its adverts, mainly so I could use it to upscale drawings I think. It turned out to be so flimsily constructed that it couldn't accurately reproduce anything, especially when configured to upscale. And my dad had access to a photocopier at his work so it was only the upscaling feature that was particularly appealing to me.
. @Cougar – Cascade.
Yeah, Rusty identified it earlier. Cheers.
I found an overly long video on YT which confirmed my memories. Clever ideas, shonky electrics and an absolute pain to set up. That noise though... 😁
Mousetrap. Never ever met a set where all the different things would work, if you could even get half of them balanced in the first place.
On the other hand, if you want to recreate the magic of playing games when you were 5, buy Buckaroo. You'll find that as adult, you can easily get all the stuff on the donkey without setting him off. Now fill all the hollow backs of the bits with blu-tac, then have a couple of pints or so of beer, and suddenly it's a massive shock again when he jumps... just like when you were tiny 🙂
Ker-Plunk.
Played twice because setting it up was such a faff. Like trying to reupholster a porcupine.
singletrackmind
Full MemberAmyone remember the John Craven newsround edition on the Moonbase 1999 Eagle space craft toy?
It came with yellow barrels, about the size of a 1/2 of an AA battery complete with radioactive stickers attached
Some genius parents found these and thought they were actually radioactive due to the stickers.
The fact they were constructed from the finest Chinese plastic was lost on them and there were police involvement and possibly the bomb squad
They removed the stickers on future models iirc although i could be totally wrong and dreamt this.
So I just today picked up these from a facebook ad locally:
Only one radioactive barrel sadly but they go well with my own one...
The cheaper Tamiya’s were affordable, something like a Thundershot or Madcap
After a long time pouring over the catalogue I can confirm The Grasshopper was the cheapest, followed by The Hornet and then The Striker. Thunder shot was 4WD and mid range (I was super excited when I got one).
I'm not having subbuteo in this list.
When you got it, yes it was crap. A bit like a snooker table, when you celebrate wildly a break of a red, any coulour and another red before putting the white. Or you're first bike when you can't ride.
But the magic of subbuteo, waslike riding a bike, like snooker, with enough hours, it suddenly becomes awesome. When you know what your doing and can spin the little fella's fairly consistently and accurately and have a bit of "touch", it suttenly turns into a really fast game, running round the table end to end. At Uni, my mates and I couldn't do more than 15 minute halfs, we'd be exhausted. But you needs to see it being played by people who are half good, before it makes any sense.
Subbuteo football was OK, but Subbuteo cricket was total rubbish.
...and leaving the room to get a Vimto...
Anagram of vomit
Matchbox Motorway, now that was properly awful. Really disappointed within about two minutes at a procession of (my) Matchbox cars around a track.
A continuous spring ran in a groove in the track, you stuck a plastic peg to the underside of the car, engaged it in the spring coils and the car was pulled around. No overtaking, massive friction so very slow, a bit like a 60s imagining of the M25
I still have the Matchbox Motorway, and can confirm it was rubbish. The only slightly good thing was you could put loads of cars onto the same spring and pretend it was a real motorway (but way??).
Very noisy as well.
No overtaking, massive friction so very slow, a bit like
a 60s imagining ofthe M25
FTFY