Entertainment For Lively Minds
Crazes
Posted by Patrick Crowther on 2 February 2010 - 7:28pm.
Loki posted a cartoon of the Smurfs on the site and I was momentarily transported back to the late 1970s and the brief period when the entire world was full of weird, blue freaks (apart from Smurfette, who was sweet). It's got me thinking about crazes. One I remember particularly fondly was 'Slime', a viscous, green... err... slime that came in a green pot. There was also, I seem to recall, 'Slime Worms', which was a viscous slime with worms. It was ace.
Do you have memories - fond or otherwise - of these fleeting fads?
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Spinners.
Yo yos that spun at the bottom. Coke did them in the early 80's. They were class. And they were named after a Liverpudlian folk combo.
Spinners.
Yo yos that spun at the bottom. Coke did them in the early 80's. They were class. And they were named after a Liverpudlian folk combo.
Silly Putty
Didn't do much, apart from bounce.
http://crabfisher.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/silly_putty_html_m43a19f36...
Why did it come in an egg?
Putty - Silly Putty, Potty Putty, Theraputty
Silly Putty has made a welcome return to my life.
I now use it in teaching children with special needs - it's called Theraputty and it's good for strengthening hands and developing fine motor skills. When a lesson goes pear-shaped, we put on Eno's "Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks" and break open the putty. Harmony is restored.
Apart from bouncing and moulding it, don't forget that you can flatten it out, press it down on your latest copy of Whizzer and Chips, and - hey presto! - you have an imprint of the latest goings on at "Strange Hill" in putty form.
If you put some in a small pot and push your fingers into it..
..you get wonderful farty noises.
Hours of fun.
Clackers
You remember them: ClackaClackaClackaClackaClackaOuch!
Or in my case...
... clackaOUCHclackaOUCHclackaOUCHclackaFUCK!
Slight diversion, but...
...surely the individual on the left has been indulging in a different craze, coincidentally popular in the late 70's?
Do you mean the ingestion of vast quantities of...
this?!
This earlier design for the Space Dust packaging was never used:
He went on to become
a member of Snow Patrol surely.
You can still get it
Under the name of Pop Rocks. I was beyond thrilled to see it in a sweet shop in Colchester, immediately bought and consumed two packs, then realised why I spend so much time at the dentist's these days.
Of course, I was careful not to consume any carbonated drinks at the same time because anyone who spent time in a playground in the 70s will remember a friend of a friend who did that and their stomach burst! No, it's true - it happened to a cousin of a mate of my brother's.
A little research shows the Scrubs has been keeping the story alive http://www.poprockscandy.com/
That's Clint Boon
of the Inspiral Carpets on the right.
I've seen him before.
Someone had his fizzog as their avatar on one message board or other, but I can't remember who it was.
Sodastream
mixing the lime with the orange and the super sticky sweet cola in order to produce the most teeth-achingly sugary sensation. I'd love to have them back
Top Trumps
Blimey - hydrosynchronicity
see below
Now this
is getting weird!
Loved Trop Trumps
I remember having the Cars one, and a tennis one..lots of fun
Beyond Cars, Bikes & Planes
I had an uhealthy obsession with collecting the Football ones.
From Memory: First Division, England, Internationals, Strikers, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Goalkeepers & abou 5 or so packs of "General".
Used to play with about 3 packs mixed up - took ages.
Took even longer when you mixed Football up with Cars
Top trumps - the original ones
A schoolroom staple in the late 70's. I can remember the elation upon the turning over of:
- a particular card in the 'Tanks' pack (was it the Scorpion?) for its superior speed and number of personnel carried
- an Ilyushin airliner with winning dimensions
- the only car with a Wankel rotary engine (cue sniggering)
Spookily
similtaneous thought. You weren't born in July 1965 were you?
Crikey - almost!
Early August '65. Guess that is why I was a minute later with my post.
Ah, yes!
I remember the Wankel one!
It was the B-52 with 8 jet engines that beat everyone else in my first set. I even managed to save up enough coupons for the 'you can't buy it in the shops' World Record Holders set.
Then there was Ace Trumps whose cards were more-or-less clones of Top Trumps. I got one of their sets dedicated to aerobatic display teams, but due to there not being that many teams to chose from, there were only eight different cards with four copies of each. It made games long and drawn out with many ties,
The particularly thick kids would seem to make up their own rules for their games that bore no relation to what was actually printed on the card, probably because they had problems with numbers over 100.
I had that one with the Concordski
the Tupolev T144, forever burned into my memory. Later in life (late 70s) I worked with someone who was ex-De Havillands (and involved with the Concord design team) who had lots of very obscure facts about that one, like how the designs had been stolen from the UK, but before the UK team had realised that putting the engines in the obvious place would shake the thing to pieces, hence what happened to the Russian one (crashing at the Paris air show).... a variant of this seems to have survived as a conspiracy theory on Wikipedia to this day.
And the sports cars one with the Ferrari (and wankel, Stratos, Alfa Montreal....) which beat everything.
Happy daze. My son recently inherited my old packs, and was given a couple of new sets by the grandparents.
What were those tube things
looked a bit like a hoover hose but when you swung them around, above your head, they made a strange, wailing kind of noise?
Deely Bobbers
The point of them was?
I first saw them on the 6 O'Clock Show
Danny Baker made a quip along the lines of "I'm getting Radio 1 on mine" and I thought he was being serious. When I first tried a pair on, I was SO disappointed!
(They were my sister's, BTW, so at least I didn't spend my own pocket money on them!)
a couple of months with a Cup o'Slime
Had much fun with it in the halls of residence but it's a bad idea to pour it over a longhaired man (self) for comic effect/impress the girls.
After a few weeks I took it home and poured it onto a flat piece of Formica™. nope, no idea why I had flat piece of Formica™
Left it for a month and went back to art school, when I returned it had crystalised into a muddy green ruin with long strands of dark brown hair and other studenty detritus.
Peeled it of and binned it.
Superball...
This seemed like the beginning of the future to me and my mates in the mid/late 60's. If you got everything right (angle of trajectory, power input, stance, ambient temperature, mum too busy indoors), you could bounce it right over your house. Of course, I bounced mine over the house one day and that was the end of that. Or, to put it another way:
'elastic ball made of Zectron, which contains the synthetic rubber polymer polybutadiene, as well as hydrated Silica, zink oxide, stearic acid, and other ingredients[1] vulcanized with sulfur at a temperature of 165 degrees Celsius and at a pressure of 80 atmospheres. The Super Ball has an amazingly high coefficient of restitution.'
Are we forgetting the obvious?
I was the school champion!
I was presented with a little shield to commemorate my victory. I used to complete it in under a minute 9 times out of 10, which just goes to show that I had way too much time on my hands in those days.
Skateboards.
Late 1970s. Half the class appeared to get one for christmas - all had given up by Easter.
Magic Plastic Balloons
http://www.hamleys.com/Magic_Plastic_Balloon_Tube_%7C_Hamleys_Toys/83977...
Just weird. Creating them almost tore your still-developing lungs out, and if you did succeed in creating a fist-sized bubble of freakery, it would invariably drop off the end of the tube to the floor and pick up cat hairs. Meanwhile, the smell (and taste) of that resin stuff suggested its original purpose may have been for something a bit sinister. Note: Hamleys have been selling them since 1947.
Showing our collective age again.
Hula hoops and space hoppers
Those ridiculously high platform shoes in the glam early 70s
Oxford baggies and really wide kipper ties (guilty, m'lud)
Roller skates (predating skate boards etc)
Age is just a label attached to us by The Man,
man.
the iPod
even I succumbed
I don't 'randomise' tho that's just plain meringue