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Peter Edgerton
Malaga
Friday, 15 November 2024, 18:15
According to a survey somewhere by somebody or other, one in five toys being bought these days is purchased by adults for their own enjoyment. There are various theories being bandied about as to why this is the case, including the possibility that the current political and socioeconomic state of the world is causing a spike in nostalgia for more comforting times. It’s also possible that we’re just a bunch of big babies.
Anyway, reading about all of this set me wondering which toys from my childhood I would like the chance to play with again should they become available any time soon.
Well, Chad Valley Soccer for a kick-off. Even though they unforgivably called it ‘soccer’, it was a marvellous game, involving flicking back levers with your finger so that a little plastic bloke could boot a ball bearing towards the goal and/or your brother’s eye at a speed more readily associated with the Large Hadron Collider. There were also hapless goalkeepers present but they didn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of saving anything up to and including siblings’ facial features.
Haunted House was another favourite. With this one, ghosts and ghoulies would appear randomly at the windows of a big plastic house and you would endeavour to pick them off with a pistol that fired rubber bullets (no, not those ones). As with most games involving pistols and projectiles, things would inevitably degenerate after about twenty minutes and all players would begin shooting at each other while the bemused ghosts looked on with a somewhat haunted expression.
The next one, I seem to remember mentioning in this column before in some other context but it’s worth revisiting. It was the best of all childhood toys - the magnificent Johnny Astro. This was comprised an electric fan, a balloon disguised as a space craft and a plastic lunar surface. You used the fan to direct the spacecraft first to take off and then to land on the moon in as graceful a manner as possible.
After about twenty minutes - you’ve guessed it - things would degenerate and other, more exotic, locations would be sought for more challenging landings. The favourite in our house was our snoozing father’s head. Extra kudos for the player who could achieve touchdown without waking him unless we wanted to wake him to make us some Toast Toppers for tea. In that case crash landings were permitted, encouraged even.
Well, those are my top three, I’m sure you have your own. Actually, I might just have a quick look on Ebay - you never know.
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