A 1980s Childhood
Page 7
University Challenge
Wacaday
Wheel of Fortune
Why Don’t You (Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead)?
Willo the Wisp
Wizbit
Worzel Gummidge
Yes Minister
You Rang, M’Lord?
Films of the 1980s
A Fish Called Wanda
1988
Airplane
1980
Any Which Way You Can
1980
Arthur
1981
A View to a Kill
1985
Back to the Future
1985
Batteries Not Included
1987
Beetle Juice
1988
Beverly Hills Cop
1984
Big
1988
Biggles
1986
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
1989
Caddyshack
1980
Chariots of Fire
1981
Clockwise
1986
Cocktail
1988
Cocoon
1985
Coming to America
1988
Crocodile Dundee
1986
Crocodile Dundee II
1988
Die Hard
1988
Dirty Dancing
1987
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
1988
Driving Miss Daisy
1989
Educating Rita
1983
Empire of the Sun
1987
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
1982
Fatal Attraction
1987
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
1986
Flashdance
1983
Footloose
1984
For Your Eyes Only
1981
Ghostbusters
1984
Ghostbusters II
1989
Honey I Shrunk the Kids
1989
Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade
1989
Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Ark
1981
Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom
1984
Labyrinth
1986
Lethal Weapon
1987
License to Kill
1989
Mannequin
1987
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
1989
National Lampoon’s European Vacation
1985
Never Say Never Again
1983
Octopussy
1983
On Golden Pond
1981
Out of Africa
1985
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
1987
Police Academy
1984
Police Academy 2
1985
Police Academy 3
1986
Police Academy 4
1987
Police Academy 5
1988
Police Academy 6
1989
Private Benjamin
1980
Rain Man
1988
Raise the Titanic
1980
Robocop
1987
Romancing the Stone
1984
Roxanne
1987
Santa Claus: The Movie
1985
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
1989
Shirley Valentine
1989
Short Circuit
1986
Short Circuit 2
1988
Splash
1984
Stand By Me
1986
Teen Wolf
1985
The Blues Brothers
1980
The Breakfast Club
1985
The Burbs
1989
The Cannonball Run
1981
The Fly
1986
The Goonies
1985
The Karate Kid
1984
The Karate Kid Part II
1986
The Karate Kid Part III
1989
The Living Daylights
1987
The Man with One Red Shoe
1985
The Man with Two Brains
1983
The Money Pit
1986
The Naked Gun
1988
The NeverEnding Story
1984
The Tall Guy
1989
The Terminator
1984
This is Spinal Tap
1984
Three Men and a Baby
1987
Throw Momma from the Train
1987
Top Gun
1986
Trading Places
1983
Turner & Hooch
1989
Twins
1988
Uncle Buck
1989
Vice Versa
1988
Wall Street
1987
War Games
1983
Weird Science
1985
When Harry Met Sally
1989
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
1988
Five
TOYS AND GAMES
If your parents are to be believed, the children of their generation had nothing more to play with than a single broken marble and a small piece of lint. Apparently, they had it tough in their day and they never had all the fancy toys we were blessed with when we were growing up. And they didn’t get toys at Christmas either – instead, they were given a satsuma and a clip round the ear, and on special occasions, such as birthdays, the whole family would simply gather round the wireless to listen to the shipping forecast as a special treat. They were poor but they were happy.
Not so my generation. We were materialistic and greedy and we wanted more toys and better toys. We had so many toys we didn’t know where to put them all. I remember our next-door neighbours used to clear out all the old toys each year and take them to the tip to make space for the new toys that would arrive at Christmas.
The 1980s was a period when ch
ildren were spoiled like never before and the number and variety of toys available to children was greater than at any previous point in history. We not only had the cool new eighties toys to choose from, but we still had most of the toys from the sixties and seventies as well, like Space Hoppers, Stylophones, Meccano, Fuzzy-Felt, Play-Doh, Scalextric, Pogo Sticks, Spirographs, Stickle Bricks and Weebles (they wobble but they don’t fall down). In fact, most of the toys we played with in the eighties were toys from the sixties or seventies, but as the decade wore on, an increasing variety of eighties toys were added to the mix.
Let’s take a rummage through the toy cupboard of a typical 1980s child and see what retro treasures we can find.
Big Trak
If you were a 9-year-old child given the task of delivering an apple to your father, how would you choose to do it? Would you a) simply walk over to him and hand him the apple, or would you b) get out your Big Trak robotic transporter toy, programme in a sequence of commands and then watch with glee as the Big Trak delivered the apple in its trailer to your father, before shooting the cat with its built-in photon cannon? I think the answer to that question is fairly obvious. After using the Big Trak for the first couple of times you quickly realised that it took so long to programme the sequence of commands that your dad had given up waiting, and anyway, the chances are you would enter a wrong instruction in the commands and send the Big Trak hurtling off in completely the wrong direction.
Big Trak from MB Electronics – possibly the best toy in the world, ever. (Courtesy of Martin Ling/ Tomhannen/Wikimedia Commons)
Nonetheless, Big Trak was highly entertaining and actually pretty advanced for its time, storing a sequence of up to sixteen commands which were programmed in through a keypad on its roof. It had a series of directional arrows and numbers plus a few other buttons for things like firing the photon cannon and pausing the vehicle. It was even considered educational and my primary school bought one to teach the children basic programming and control, before realising that none of the teachers could figure out how to operate it just like they couldn’t work the Betamax video recorder or the school computer. The children picked it up in no time, though, and had the Big Trak patrolling the school corridors and noisily annihilating teachers with its photon cannon, which was really just a light bulb under a piece of blue plastic.
Though I was desperately hoping to get a Big Trak for Christmas, I never got one and only ever got to play with the one at school or at my friend’s house. I’m still hoping I might get one for Christmas because in 2010 the Big Trak was re-released. And you know the first thing I’d do if I got one? Teach my children how to deliver me an apple!
Rubik’s Cube
The Rubik’s Cube was irritatingly difficult to solve, wasted huge amounts of precious playtime and encouraged smug smart alecs to watch your feeble attempts and then tell you how they could complete the puzzle in under three minutes.
It was created by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture; it measures 2.25 inches on each side and consists of a 3x3x3 assortment of twenty-six coloured squares. The aim is to unscramble the assorted colours by twisting the rows of squares around, so you eventually end up with a single colour on each side. The original Rubik’s cube was invented in 1974 and was called the ‘Magic Cube’, but it wasn’t until the puzzle was licensed to the Ideal Toy Corp in 1980 that it really rose to fame and quickly became the world’s top-selling puzzle game.
I was one of the many frustrated children who spent countless hours trying to solve the cube, achieving no more than two completed sides; I even resorted to peeling off the stickers and swapping them around to make it look like I’d done it. However, a number of children managed to solve the cube with ease and went on to take part in speedcubing competitions to see who could complete the cube the fastest. In 1982 the Rubik’s Cube World Championship was held in Budapest where the assembled crowds witnessed a 16-year-old boy solve the cube in just twenty-three seconds. Since then, the record has been broken over and over again, currently standing at just 7.08 seconds, set in 2008 at the Czech Open. Other crazy cube competitions have featured contestants solving the puzzle underwater, blindfolded and even using their feet! The year 2008 also saw the Guinness world record being set for the most people solving a Rubik’s cube at one time – ninety-six people.
The massive commercial success of the Rubik’s Cube inspired a whole range of new puzzles to be launched under the Rubik’s brand name, including Rubik’s Snake, Rubik’s Magic, Rubik’s Clock and Rubik’s Revenge, but based on my experience of the original puzzle I decided to give all of these a miss.
Paul Daniels Magic Set
Cast your mind back to a time when Paul Daniels was popular. Not only was he curiously popular, but his magician’s skills were unrivalled and millions of us would tune in each week to watch his TV programme (The Paul Daniels Magic Show, 1979–94) just to catch a glimpse of a new trick. There was no David Blaine-style freak-out street magic, no Derren Brown mind control, and no Penn and Teller showmanship; they were just straightforward tricks performed by a middle-aged man in a wig, telling bad jokes between illusions.
In a stroke of marketing genius, it soon became possible for every Paul Daniels fan to emulate their favourite magician when the Paul Daniels Magic Set hit toy stores up and down the UK. The box claimed it contained ‘150 magic tricks’, however, nothing could have prepared you for the disappointment of tearing into your box on Christmas morning only to discover a measly rope, a set of plastic balls, a few thimbles, some playing cards, a wand, some plastic discs and two die. What, no Debbie McGee?
Fortunately, there was an instruction booklet included to help you make some sense of it all, but boy did it require practice if you had any chance of becoming the next Paul Daniels. Those who stuck with it and practised for hours mastered enough tricks to impress the family and all the kids at school. Sometimes you could even get a stand-in Debbie McGee to assist in the show, although, unlike Paul, I never tried sawing any of my assistants in half.
Thanks to the Paul Daniels Magic Set, I have now learned how to become that lovable fake-uncle figure that can pull coins out of children’s ears. If only children were impressed by that sort of stuff these days.
Lego
I guess you could call me old-fashioned but I couldn’t hide my disappointment recently when I discovered my daughter making a beautiful house made of Lego … on the computer. Instead of playing sprawled out on the carpet surrounded by a mountain of small plastic bricks, she was sat comfortably in a chair pushing around ‘virtual’ Lego with the click of a mouse. While the computer helped her create a stunning Edwardian mansion house, complete with beautiful landscaped grounds, she didn’t get to experience the memorable childhood pain of kneeling on tiny pieces of Lego or the sense of achievement that comes from building an ugly, lopsided, multi-coloured box vaguely resembling a bungalow.
Having graduated from spiky plastic Stickle Bricks at an early age, I moved on to Duplo Lego, the large and difficult-to-swallow bricks designed for small hands, and became adept at building enormous towers that reached almost to the ceiling. By the age of 5, I was ready to move on to ‘proper’ Lego with its enormous array of pieces including bricks, windows, doors, roof tiles, furniture, people, animals, vehicles and basically anything you could possibly think of that you might conceivably require to build your own miniature model town.
After filling the living room with veritable cities of Lego, my parents decided to challenge me with the new Lego Technic sets that included more complicated mechanical parts like gears, axles, pins, beams and even pneumatic pieces and electric motors. For my 9th birthday I was given a Lego Technic car kit that contained all the pieces you needed to make a fully working scale model of a motor car, with a working rack and pinion steering system, coil spring suspension, forward and reverse gearbox and an electric motor with remote control unit. Thanks to Lego I not only enjoyed many happy hours of play, but I also learnt some fundamental princ
iples of engineering and general mechanics.
Simon
In the mid-1970s, Atari came up with what it thought was another sure-fire arcade game success story. They innocently named it Touch Me, but the problem was few people ever did, because the actual game stank. However, a few years later, like a phoenix from the ashes, the idea rose again, and this time it was a success. Perhaps it had something to do with the new name, Simon (like Simon Says), because the game itself was still pretty dubious. Milton Bradley’s version followed Atari’s example, having four different coloured lights that flashed in varied sequences which players had to remember and then copy. After its launch at the place du jour, Studio 54 in New York, in 1978, Simon more than earned its place in pop culture and became the must-have Christmas present for that year.
An original MB Simon game, although you would be forgiven for thinking it was a smoke detector. (Courtesy of Ian Falconer/Wikimedia Commons)