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!