The Toys of Christmas Past

It’s the late 70’s and I’m not yet ten years old and it’s Christmas Day and I’ve just pulled the appendage of a man wearing only a skimpy pair of pants.

No one ever questioned the absolute WRONGNESS of giving a young child STRETCH ARMSTRONG as a toy. In case you’re wondering, the concept of Stretch Armstrong was that you pulled his limbs and they stretched to about three feet long, because he was made of some kind of tough jelly-like polymer (Wikipedia says “gelled corn syrup.”) The stretching necessitated an almost total absence of clothes, but in those innocent days before gays were discovered a decade later (even camp TV celebrities like John Inman and Larry Grayson were considered no more than just “disinterested in women”) no one could accuse Stretch Armstrong of being any more homo-erotic than Mick McManus, the similarly skimpily-panted wrestler with the slicked-back, dyed-black Dracula hairstyle, who was a mainstay of World of Sport and another to appear on the “We-never-knew-he-was-gay” list of 70’s closet dwellers.

It made more sense when they developed a STRETCH HULK, so we got one of those another Xmas and threw darts at it to MAKE HULK MAD and watch the gel seep from his wounds before clotting.

Another favourite toy was the Six Million Dollar Man and his arch-enemy Maskatron (who never appeared in the series as I remember.) You could roll back the Bionic Man’s skin. On his arm, that is, to reveal his bionics. Not his willy. Like Stretch Armstrong and Action Man, Steve Austin had no willy, not even a bionic one. In the 80’s they started adding pants with a subtle bulge to these sorts of Action figures, thus making it worthwhile to have them dry-hump Barbie. So, I’m told.

Moving on...

But amongst my vast array of boys’ toys, I was once given my own Nookie Bear ventriloquist’s dummy. You could pull a string to make him go cross-eyed and you could make him talk without moving your lips any more than his real-life side-kick, Roger de Courcey. Because, as you’ll know if you ever saw him, Roger de Courcey perfected all the attributes of an excellent ventriloquist act except for one: The ability to speak without moving his lips. So, he had a huge Dutch porn-star’s moustache to try and hide this fact; but when he spoke, this wriggled around like the Magic Roundabout’s Dougal with epilepsy. Nookie Bear wasn’t the sort of toy you could have much fun with, though. Far better was my brother’s toy version of Rod Hull’s Emu, which made for many a great fight between us. (Emu always went for the face as well, the nasty bastard.)

Then there was Fuzzy Felt. This wasn’t a reference to the first time you got to 2nd base with a girl; it was a Velcro board on which you arranged shaped pieces of felt to make a themed scene. Equally (un)creative, was Etch-a-Sketch, with its famed design fault, an inability to draw diagonal lines without them looking like uncurled pubes.

Possibly the most disappointing toy was Scalextric. Absolute shit. I value the lesson it teaches you for later life, which is to slow down as you approach a corner. I do this in real-life perhaps too excessively, but my decision has been validated by the fact that I have yet to find myself spinning through the air after trying to take a corner in 4th gear at 30mph.

A close 2nd to Scalextric for disappointment was Mouse Trap. Once you set it up and set it off, then what the fuck were you supposed to do? Apparently you had to throw dice and move round the board before you were allowed to set it off. How shit is that? How was that marketed? “Buy Mousetrap – half a minute of fun for all ages.”

That was something that irked me as an adult, that sign on the packaging that read “Ages 7-70.” What; do you need a fucking license to play after you’ve turned 70 then? Do you have to re-apply to Waddington’s version of the DVLA for permission to be Professor Plum for another 5 years?

My third-place toy of disappointment would have to be a mini-snooker table. It was like playing snooker when you’re pissed. Any skill you might have had was negated by the crappy quality of the balls and baize and cue, which was great if you wanted HOURS of fun, because you’d never fucking pot anything and someone always knocked it and sent the balls all one inch sideways, so you’d have to restart anyway.

One for the real nostalgia-lovers amongst you, something that just hasn’t ever appeared since, is a board game called Buccaneer. The theme was pirates and buried treasure and I once took one of the game pieces, a plastic ruby, and put it up my nostril. I was probably about nine when I did this. Ignorant of the anatomy of the nose and throat, when I then lost that ruby completely, I believed that I was going to die. For days I was hoping it would reappear, just fall out my nostril, or I’d pick it out while rooting for a bogey. But it never reappeared and as the days turned into weeks, I suspected that perhaps it would be a long slow death that I’d suffer.

Right, I’m off to get the Argos catalogue to choose my favourite toy on each page and draw a biro circle around each one. Merry Toymas.