The best (and worst) toys of the 1980s

 Toys

Toys, especially the good ones, only happened on birthdays and Christmas. If you were unlucky enough to have your birthday in December, you’d get one of your Christmas presents early/late and told it was a birthday present.  Other toys happened throughout the year but these were usually from the rotating stand in the post office. They cost about £1 (25p in 80s money) and consisted of moulded green plastic soldiers in various immobile poses, a truck whose wheels would fly off the first time it drove on carpet and a paratrooper who you’d throw out of the window in the hope his parachute would open and he’d glide to earth gracefully only to watch it plummet like spent firework into next doors garden, the one with the massive Alsatian.  But what were some of the better toys of the 1980s?

 

Simon

 

A true pop culture symbol of the 80s, Simon was a game which required the player to watch colours light up and bleeps to bloop, then repeat them before the time ran out. Named after the children’s game Simon Says where you had to do everything Simon said (but not the things he didn’t say), meant this was a home version of being at work. It’s a scarily accurate depiction of the working world because in both scenarios they only show you a hugely complicated thing once and expect you to repeat it perfectly; if you don’t, you’re fired. What fun!

Space hopper

Probably more popular in the 70s, the Space Hopper remained a mainstay of the toy section in the Winter Argos Catalogue throughout the 80s. I’m not sure why because this novelty was usable for about twenty minutes before someone dislocated a kneecap or a shoulder.  I think the name ‘space hopper’ came about because the sensation of bouncing around the room on a huge orange balloon with a face drawn on it is exactly the same as that experienced by astronauts when they bounce around their spaceships on large orange balloons with faces drawn on them. If we ever do invent technology that allows common civilians the chance to visit space, I doubt we’ll be hopping in it using these.

 Speak & Spell

Genuinely one of the best things a child could have received at Christmas. Could you imagine anything making spelling fun? This brightly coloured electronic game did, with several functions such as, speaking a word and asking you to spell it, hangman, visual memory and pattern recognition, homophones, abbreviations, contractions and a secret code cipher. It must have made parents up and down the country very happy – especially during a pandemic which necessitated home schooling!

Stickle Bricks

These were what I suppose you could call an ‘homage’ to Lego. You don’t see huge sculptures of famous landmarks made out of stickle bricks though do you? There’s no adventure park called Stickle Brick land is there? Yes, I understand their educational value to toddlers, mashing together these spiky blocks to form what they think is a work of art but to the discerning eye, looks like you threw a packet of sausages out of a tenth-floor window.  This is summed up in the TV advert which aired in the 80s. A small child uses one large red brick as a platform upon which it places two long blue bricks perpendicular, two rectangular bricks above that with another two long blues ones sticking out of the side, a yellow square one on the top and a small blue square on top of that. When the adult asks the child what on earth this abstract monstrosity represents, the child turns and says ‘It’s you daddy!’ and everyone laughs.  You think the stickle brick model is crude until the camera angle changes and shows the father with his big square head, unfathomably wide body and long blue legs.

 

Stretch Armstrong 

I’d love to know Stretch Armstrong’s back story.  At best guess, he tried working out but couldn’t stick to his routine so he drank four bottles of cooking oil and got ab implants.  He was so proud of his new look, he bought a pair of blue pants and refused to wear anything else, ever.  I’m not sure what the target age for this toy was but handing this to anyone let alone a child, is a bit creepy. The sole purpose of a stretch Armstrong however was to try and pull his arms and legs so far from his body that they came off.  I’m just off to Disney to sell them this idea as a plot point for Toy Story 5.

 Teddy Ruxpin

Either this inspired the Child’s Play movies or vice versa. Teddy Ruxpin was a teddy bear with a lazy eye whose face would attempt to imitate whatever cassette you’d inserted into it’s back-hole (by which I mean there was a cassette-shaped hole in his back).  Whether it was a nice bedtime story read by Kenneth Williams or Iron Maiden’s latest album, Ruxpin would move his mouth along with the words.

The bear came with compatible tapes whose left and right track were split into the audio and the instructions for Teddy’s facial expressions. The final tape the manufacturers released was called ‘Teddy Ruxpin visits the dentist’. Compared to previous releases such as ‘Teddy Ruxpin Sings Love Songs: A Special Collection of Teddy’s Favourites’, ‘Lost in Boggley Woods: Teddy and His Friends Meet the Wogglies’ and ‘The Mushroom Forest: You Can Be Anything You Want to Be’ (which sounds like a Happy Monday’s album), it was the best one yet!

 

The 'Home' in the 1980s

There were various gadgets about the house in the 1980s because it was a time for innovation and exciting new labour-saving devices. The microwave exploded (not literally) and came with its own cookbook! CD players were everywhere, the Walkman (which sounded at the time like the worst superhero ever), calculator watches, VHS and the Game Boy all appeared in our houses. But what of the most memorable gadgets?

 

Breville Sandwich Toaster

In the 80s, the Breville Sandwich Toaster was like an opinion - everyone had one and most of them ended up in that cupboard in the kitchen that nobody ever goes in.  The modern equivalent of this contraption would be the Spiraliser. It seemed like a good idea! It seemed like you'd use it forever and then after two unsuccessful attempts at toasting bread and inappropriate fillings, the thing is consigned to the gadget graveyard cupboard along with your bread maker, popcorn maker, juicer and that elastic thing you bought off QVC that you attach to your feet and pull towards you (which you thought would turn you into Arnold Schwarzenegger in 20 minutes). 

The toasted sandwich maker required you to take two pieces of bread and choose a filling as long as one of the ingredients was cheese.  It was no good just having ham or slices of chicken, you needed cheese so that something could give you third degree burns by sticking to the top of your mouth. 

You'd place the filling between the bread and pop them in the toaster.  The Breville had two hotplates which were bevelled (or 'brevilled' maybe?) in order to make your toastie look edible by sealing the bread around the edges and creating stripy burn marks the likes of which you might see on a pork chop.  It didn’t have a timer or indicator light however, you had to keep lifting the top panel to see if the bread had been sufficiently burnt and therefore, the contents were capable of removing your taste buds with a temperature the Devil himself could only dream of.  This tradition was carried on through the ages by the pop tart and the McDonalds Apple pie.  Both of which are too hot for half an hour, just the right temperature for 13 seconds and then too cold to enjoy.

 Henry Hoover

When they invented the vacuum cleaner, everybody who used one must have felt that there was something missing.  Just picking up dust and fluff without having to use your hands wasn’t enough. Worse, was using one of those manual non-electric roller things that picked up 3% of the dust on the carpet. Either way, these contraptions lacked personality so someone came along and put a creepy face on the front.  I’m not aware of any other household appliance that has a face – probably because they don’t need one! Sometimes you get a kettle that looks a bit like Hitler (Google it!) but the last thing you want is your fridge staring at you when you’re trying to make a sandwich. 

Not only did the Henry Hoover frighten children more than Steven King's IT, it had a look on its face like it knew you'd vacuumed up something valuable but you had no idea. It was taunting you, like those faces painted on the side of the Waltzer at the fairground (maybe that’s just me?).  On some models, Henry's nose was the corrugated pipe up which the dirt would travel - like a weird elephant with a special diet.  Things only got weirder when they brought out a female version called 'Hetty' - putting a Henry and a Hetty in the same cupboard just felt wrong.

Rubber Shower Mixer

Back in the misty past, one had a choice of tap in the bathroom. There was a hot one and a cold one. If you wanted to wash your hands you either had to put the plug in and fill the sink with a mixture of one part cold to three parts hot. Either that or remove the skin from your hand by running it under the hot tap before quickly flicking it over to the cold stream before emitting a bloodcurdling scream.  No mixer waterfall taps here I’m afraid. There had to be a solution?

Cue a rubber hose pipe that split into two at one end and had a shower head on the other. You pushed one head onto the hot tap, one onto the cold tap and Bob’s your Mother’s Brother.  Over time, the rubber would fatigue and go hard so the ends were harder to attach to the taps. This inevitably resulted in one of them popping off mid-hair-wash (when you’ve conveniently got your eyes closed to shield from the retina-removing shampoo which always managed to get between your eyelids no matter what) so you were either scalded or blasted with freezing cold water.  As an aside, there was always an instruction on the side of the shampoo bottle for what to do if you got the shampoo in your eyes. However, I couldn't ever read it because I had shampoo in my eyes.

 Record Player

Vinyl as a sound storage medium had been around since the 1940s and hit its peak in the 1980s before being slowly replaced by CDs, then Limewire and then on-line streaming before coming back into popularity in the 2010s for some reason. We all loved that scratchy, crackly, bumpy, vari-speed, warped, humming lack of clarity you got from vinyl didn’t we, especially when fluff collected on the needle? It was much better than that crystal clear high definition menace, the CD. You can make playlists on Spotify these days. Choosing any song at all and adding it digitally to a virtual list you can access on your phone. In the 80s you had two choices. The first was to link your record player up to a cassette recorder and make a mix tape. This did involve locating the LP with the song you wanted, removing the large black disc, popping it on the turn table, dropping the needle at the exact point before the required track, holding down the play and record buttons and waiting through the entire song so you can press stop at the end.  Then repeat twenty times until your cassette is full of songs.

The second way to make a play list was to gather together all your favourite singles, place them all on the top of a stick which protruded from the centre of the turntable and set the player away. When the first song had finished playing, the needle returned to its carriage, the next single dropped down the stick onto the first record and the needle moved back over and played the song.  By the tenth record to drop down the stick, things started to get dicey – the records started to slip over each other, slowing down, speeding up and making the singer sound a bit weird.  However, people who just listened to Bob Dylan records couldn’t tell the difference.

Digital Alarm Clock

Satellite television requires a large metal dish screwed to your chimney stack in order to receive signals fired out of the sky by floating metal. Digital television also requires big metal aerials which stick out of your roof to capture signals which are bouncing around the atmosphere.  In order to pick up the radio on a radio alarm clock however, you need a thin piece of string hanging out of the back.  No matter where you put this string, the radio signal would cut out, crackle and hiss until you found a place where it worked; The only way you could keep the string in this place was to hold it there, not ideal for trying to fall asleep. Also, trying to tune the radio in with that little plastic wheel made you feel like a safe cracker. The difference between Radio 1 and 2 was a barely discernible rotation which would always end up slightly between the two so you could hear both, but neither very clearly.

Every household in the 80s had that small wooden box that emitted an eerie green or red glow in the middle of the night.  It told the time, it had a radio and it woke you up when you told it to, providing you had a degree in the enigma machine and you’d worked out how to set the time on it.  It had a large snooze button which was invented by a sadist. You’d wake up with ample time to get to work but for some reason you’d decide to mash the snooze button and leave your future in the hands of fate.  If you reached for the snooze button a second time, you would have already started getting your story together for when you have to ring in sick at 9am because there’s absolutely no way you’re catching your train now.  The sleep button turned the radio on for an hour and then turned it off automatically – in this time you were supposed to be able to fall asleep with the radio on.