TV Cream Toys Lite

Binatone TV Master

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The Binatone TV Master was the first computer-game experience witnessed by many Cream-era households, nestling as it did in the Argos catalogue alongside the portable black and white TVs (with which it shared a parasitic relationship). Radio Rentals would even lend you one for the night. Aeons before kids sat hypnotised in front of the latest Grand Theft Auto clone, sacrificing great chunks of their lives to completing the next level, this slab of circuit-based entertainment dragged us in off the streets to watch a box-shaped pixel zigzag its way across the screen. What a choking irony, therefore, that this gatekeeper of the soon-to-be-ushered-in console era attempted to mimic a selection of sports games.

Pre-SCART cable connections, the Binatone would have you scrabbling behind the family telly to plug in the RF aerial lead. That is, if you were lucky enough–in the days before a plasma screen in every room–to be allowed to use it in the first place. Typically, you’d be pushed to squeeze in a game of Binatone tennis between dinner and the start of Nationwide (and only then if your parents didn’t want to watch the News At 5.45). Otherwise, play meant sacrificing valuable Swap Shop or TISWAS time–oh, how we wished for a week-long bout of chickenpox.

See also ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Galaxy Invader 1000

As for the games themselves, they were clunky interpretations of bat ’n’ ball favourites such as squash or, erm, football (actually more like doubles tennis)1 on the basic, easy Jet-orange model. The beige variant promised some capacity for Tin Can Alley-style shooting games with a so-called light gun’, which inevitably didn’t work unless you were holding it so close to the telly you left scratches on the screen.2 The two standard controller ‘bats’ were chunky boxes with Etch-A-Sketch-type knobs that, fantastically, could be packed away into the Binatone’s battery compartment for storage.

The TV Master was superseded almost immediately by brasher, more state-of-the-art TV games such as Mattel Intellivision and Colecovision and then, fatally, by the home computer. How very British. The Binatone logo (was it pronounced By-na-tone or Bin-a-tone?) was a lovely crown-bedecked affair that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the bass drum of a ’60s Merseybeat band. Those sporty games icons, however, were a constant reminder of the local leisure centre and the fact that they had a proper sit-down Galaxians game that you could go on when your mum was having her badminton class.

1 The lack of ‘play against the computer’ option meant that a lot of Binatone-generation kids grew up ambidextrous.

2 If the gun broke, you could still turn the sound off and watch the silent cube ‘target bounce sss-softly off the imaginary walls of your TV set. A nice precursor (hem hem!) of the Windows screensaver, we feel. Plus, the gun itself, cable tucked neatly into your snake belt, made for an excellent Blake’s 7 ray gun.

Black Box

Atomic mass

Way before Nintendo DS Brain Training and Carol Bloody Vorderman jumping on the Sudoku express, we already obsessed about our IQs. There was always a smart-arsed kid who’d decided to enrol into that original smug-bastards club, MENSA, and would parade his or her certificated ‘intelligence quotient’ of 160 or whatever around the classroom.1 Strangely, rather than resulting in a beating for the boffin, this would actually instigate a school-wide outbreak of competitive puzzle-testing and problem-solving as each pupil sought to out-IQ his or her peers.

While the juniors struggled with such 2D conundrums as spotting the odd one out in a list of prime numbers or reorienting dice from the sides you could see, seniors graduated to proper spatial-awareness posers and brainteasers of the Who was two to the left of the person three to the right of the queen next to the seven of clubs?’ variety. Oh yes, The Krypton Factor had a lot to answer for.

All of which must have alerted the really big brains at the country’s centres of higher learning who–let’s face it–were slouching about in the refectory waiting to appear on University Challenge and wishing someone would hurry up and invent computers so they could practice their FORTRAN and COBOL. Weren’t they?

See also Mastermind, Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons

Well, one such affable graduate was Eric Solomon, already knee-deep in diplomas and employed in civil and structural engineering but, vitally, with a bit of atomic-research work experience under his belt. His game invention, Black Box,2 required players to ‘fire’ X-rays into a darkened vessel in order to determine the positions of ‘atoms’ positioned by an opponent. Hellishly complicated rules governing the behaviour of these beams and their direction apparently revealed the hidden squares, but it was all carried out with coloured pawns and ball-bearings, of course.

Solomon’s other games rejoiced in such fashionably abstract names as Entropy, Hexagrams, Thoughtwaves and, erm, Billabong. Each was clearly intended to be played with a furrowed brow and semi-religious solemnity (except, perhaps, Billabong, which possibly required a corked hat). Widely pirated since (particularly by jealous FORTRAN and COBOL programmers), Black Box’s most recognisable successor is probably the Minesweeper game on your work PC.

1 A hugely impressive score for a teenager–right up there with Sir Jimmy Saville and Lisa Simpson.

2 The game acquired its name not from the flight recorder of a jumbo jet but from a term used by scientists to describe an object or system that operates in an unknown way Although can it be merely coincidence that those Who knows the secret of the Black Magic box?’ Rowntree’s choccie ads were on a lot in the 70s? They should bring those back.

Boglins

Hand-puppets from hell

You have to hand it to some big brain at Mattel: once they’d hit on the brilliant consonant-swapping simplicity of the name, the Boglins story must’ve written itself. Essentially near-relatives of the Finger Fright family these fist-powered fuckers sprung seemingly full-armoured from the ground and on to toy shelves back in the late ’80s. Packed into caged boxes that doubled as display cases (replete with faux bent bars and plenty of ‘do not feed’ warnings), Boglin lore borrowed quite heavily from that other mischievous monster hit of the era, Gremlins.

Apparently fashioned from more old retreads than an ITV Saturday-night lineup, these clammy rubber collectables initially arrived in one of three flavours (Dwork, Vlobb and Drool) and were marketed as pets with puppet pretensions. Given that the average kid had only two hands, we doubt that very many people owned all three. Simple operation (and large glow-in-the-dark eagle-eyes) made for almost instant ‘alien voice’ ventriloquism practice and plentiful under-the-bed ankle-biting assault tomfoolery. Woe betide the little sister who mocked a Boglin.

A worrying element of the Boglin box-top back-story (at least for sensitive souls with a penchant for thinking too much about such things) was the implication that humans had somehow descended from them and the originals had remained–until now–buried in the primordial slime. The non-biodegradable nature of Boglin parts means that they probably will be dug intact from the decaying sludge of human remains when the aliens finally do arrive.

Plenty of other Boglin subspecies were released to cash in on the success of the initial range, including Soggy, Baby, Hairy and Glow Boglins, with astonishingly swift diminishing returns. By 1990, when Matchbox launched a competitor, Monster in My Pocket, Mattel’s lumpy swamp offspring had already decided to take the hint and, well, bog off.1

See also Finger Frights, Squirmles, Slime

1 Ah, but it was good to see one turn up on Fantasy Football’s parody of Toy Story. The Boglin played former Northern Ireland international Ian Dowie (which isn’t fair, as Dowie looks a lot more like a Vogon off the Hitchhiker’s Guide TV series). Although dropped by Mattel, Boglins re-emerged in the mid ’90s under the aegis of none-more-Cream-era toy company Action GT (since absorbed into the uber-family of LIMA licensee of the year 2003 and 2004, Vivid Imaginations).

Buckaroo!

Saddle-stacking balancing game

Does it not now seem that in the 70s the marketing people were trying to sell to parents, not the kids? What else can explain the prevalence of TV ads throughout the decade saturated with cowboy imagery–the likes of Golden Nuggets, Texan Bars, the Milky Bar Kid…and Buckaroo!?

The thing is, mums and dads had most likely been children themselves in the post-WWII era and would’ve been brought up on Saturday matinees, John Wayne flicks and Wild West adventure serials. Somebody, somewhere decided that these were the folk who had the disposable incomes (nobody having yet invented the concept of ‘pester power’). Thus, we have a decade-long obsession with everything whip-crackin’, rootin’, tootin’ and animal abusin’, pardner.

See also Tip-It, Mousetrap, KerPlunk

At least Buckaroo! was blessed with simple gameplay. Easily snapped plastic mouldings (ten-gallon hat, pitchfork, grappling hook, billycan and all that) are gently lowered in turn by players on to a 2D bucking bronco.1 As the ad explained: ‘Put on a shovel, try a pick–if the load’s too heavy the mule will kick.’ Words to live by, we think. Too much weight causes Buckaroo!’s hair-trigger to release, sending the aforementioned implements flying across the living room, under the settee, into the dog’s mouth and so on.2

Later variations cashed in on Spielberg’s Jaws (the eponymous game was Mr a neat reversal of the same conceit: remove skulls, anchors, bits of boat, etc. from mouth of shark before it snaps shut) and, we presume, Cleese’s Fawlty Towers (Don’t Tip the Waiter employed a cardboard waiter on to whose carefully balanced tray players were required to add counters depicting pizza, cakes and sandwiches). Note the use of the exclamation mark in the title to imply excitement and/or surprise. Therein lies an unspoken suggestion that, at the climax, we might want to cry out the name of the game in a moment of catharsis and delight. This is a favourite device of toy manufacturers (see also Sorry! and Stay Alive!, although strangely not Yahtzee), pretentious restaurateurs (Fish!) and musical theatre impresarios (Oliver!, Hello, Dolly!). On a not entirely unrelated note, the phrase ‘fuck right off!’ works with an exclamation mark too.

1 The latest commercially available version of Buckaroo! is rendered in 3D as if, until the advent of CGI, children wouldn’t previously have been able to cope with anything quite so real. Alongside yer bog-standard Buckaroo! (with a design clearly riffing on the donkey from Shrek), you can also buy a seasonal Buckaroodolph! (‘the mule who doesn’t like Yule’).

2 If you’re so inclined, you can also play a variant of the game with your drunk friends. Once they pass out, pile on as many empty cans, fag packets, ashtrays, frozen sausages and shaving-foam squirts as you can until they wake up.

Cadbury’s Chocolate Machine

Obstacle to chocolate

It’s bizarre that this should even make it into a children’s wish list of most desired games or toys, being the very definition of the anti-toy Ostensibly a cross between a savings bank and a chocolate-dispensing machine, it actually fails to live up to the promise of either. But that is to underestimate its novelty.

Although in reality it amounted to a deferral of pleasure, no more than a tuppenny barrier between the chocolate and your mouth, there was still something of the faintly exotic in getting hold of a load more of those mini-Dairy Milks and Bournevilles than you would ever find in a box of Roses.1 In the days before washing-powder tablets and digital cameras, the fascination with anything miniaturised was not to be underestimated.

See also ‘A La Cart Kitchen’, Mr Frosty, Whimsies

The classic dispenser was designed and moulded in ’50s-throwback red plastic (leading us to fancifully imagine that the Fonz himself would dish out his chocolate from one) with properly embossed gold Cadbury’s branding, plus it came preloaded with a dozen baby chocs.2 In theory, a 2p piece slotted in the top would, with a twist of the hidden knob within, release a single, fully wrapped miniature that could then be enjoyed in isolation. In truth, and in part because not only was the chassis of the dispenser made of plastic but also the lock and keys, it took about ten seconds for greed to overcome the flimsy workings of this metaphorical chocolate chastity belt.

With the contents therefore devoured in their entirety (and not so easily replaced, at least not until the next Argos trip), what essentially remained was a moneybox and, given that it generally wouldn’t contain more than about 14p, not a very good one at that.

1 Oh, and Terry’s Neapolitans fitted too, didn’t they? Want to know what happened to Terry’s, once the pride of York, now just a Dawn French-perpetuated brand extension of Kraft Foods Inc, Illinois? The corporate giant bought the 1000-worker-strong factory in 1993 and closed it down in 2005. York Fruits? Produced in Slovakia, mate. Chocolate Orange? Czekoladka pomarañczowy more like. Where’s Michael Moore when you need him, eh?

2 Chocoholics, masochists and fatties rejoice! The freely available Chocolate Machine Money Box from Humbrol is a fair enough modern approximation of the old Peter Pan version. And guess what? The chocolate miniatures are actually bigger than the ones that used to fit in the old machine.

Cascade

Bouncy castle for ball-bearings

Many board games–Othello springs to mind–usually bear a trite slogan on the side of the box along the lines of ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master’. Surely then, the motto for Cascade was ‘A lifetime to set up, a minute to play’. But what a minute it was!

Made by mini-car kings Matchbox, Cascade was bizarrely addictive, totally pointless and definitively uncompetitive–one of those games where eventually no-one really played by the rules, a bit like just reading out the questions from Trivial Pursuit without the board.

See also Crossfire, KerPlunk, Domino Rally

So the set-up, then: an acid-yellow plastic mat had spaces marked out for the five pieces of Cascade furniture. At one end there was a towering Archimedes screw that sucked up ball-bearings and launched them off a short ski-ramp. Then came the bam-bam-bam bounce across three taut red timpani thingies, before the balls hit a mini-pinball table and fell into several scoring slots. Certain balls would be returned to the screw via a three-foot track for another go around the system. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

Of course, lest the gradient tolerance of your bedroom carpet be suboptimal, the little metal buggers would scatter to either side and roll under your bunk bed (we imagine Barnes Wallis felt similarly disheartened in that bit from The Dam Busters). The best improvement via improper game play was to put the launch tower on top of your wardrobe and let the balls really bounce. Constructing little obstacles between the trampolines, such as piled-up Subbuteo team boxes, would assist in efforts to test how high the ball-bearings would really go. A Mars-Staedtler rubber under the edge of each trampoline thingy helped angle them perfectly for extra distance too.

No-one had any idea what the scoring system was, but in the same way that someone can win ten grand on Better Homes without wielding so much as a staple gun, you could ‘win’ Cascade without any personal involvement whatsoever. And it was fun, so who cares?

Chemistry Set

Kitchen-based catalysis

Common-or-garden chemistry set box lids always featured a boy with brown hair in the pudding-bowl style, wearing a white lab coat and peering intently at a few cubic centilitres of vaguely blue compound in a test tube. The over-serious look in his eyes said it all: Why won’t this explode?’

Yes, the substances you’d find inside one of these were always disappointingly dull. An average set included that dependable stalwart, bloody copper sulphate,1 followed by a rack of anonymous-looking off-white powders (‘slaked’ lime, tartaric acid, etc.2) and rubbish like iron filings and litmus paper. C’mon guys, where do you keep all the fun stuff? The red lead? Arsenic? Silver nitrate? A lame spirit burner provided the only hint of impending danger, and there were usually only enough chemicals to do about ten experiments. And one of those was ‘growing a crystal out of sugar’ on a string. (On a string, for crying out loud!) Heaven only knows what we were supposed to do with the mysterious ‘watch glass’. Just sit and watch it, perhaps?

See also Electronic Project, Magic Rocks, Tasco Telescope

But at least the chemistry sets marketed by the likes of Salter and Merit made some affectation towards proper school lab learning. Dreary they may have seemed, but they didn’t patronise us youngsters like the modern-day National Curriculum-approved ‘yukky science’-type sets. Chemistry isn’t fun, no matter how much you dress it up with ‘slimy’ green food colouring and ‘funky’ fizzy sherbet. Write that down. On those earlier sets you’d find abundant warnings of the ‘adult supervision recommended’ kind in the instructions, even though every single kid in the land threw them away. If you couldn’t bang out a batch of stink bombs, then it was hardly worth the effort. The sole experiment conducted thereafter could be noted down thus: ‘Just bung a bit of everything in one test tube; then heat it up to see what happens’ (results: lame fizzing and stuff that glued itself to the kitchen table). As if we were hoping to drink the stuff and then transform, Dr Jekyll-style, into a horrible monster and eat our own parents. No, really…as if!

1 In the presence of water, anhydrous copper sulphate turns blue. To test for reducing sugars (aldehydes), a solution including blue copper sulphate will turn red. So there you have it: the most exciting thing you can do with copper sulphate is watch it change colour. It is the chemical-compound equivalent of a traffic light.

2 Off the top of our heads? Probably ammonium chloride, calcium hydroxide, sodium carbonate, sodium hydrogen sulphate, aluminium potassium sulphate, phenolphthalein, zinc, calcium carbonate, ammonium iron sulphate, iron sulphate and sodium thiosulphate. All that, and a tiny bog-brush for cleaning out test tubes!

Chic-a-boo

Monkey-faced brown-noser

If ever there was a warning about genetic experimentation, then it was Stephen Gallagher’s 1982 debut horror story, Chimera, a prophetic tale of a half-human, half-primate creature developed by scientists for use in slave labour and organ harvesting. In the end, the titular creature went crazy-ape bonkers in the Lake District and killed everyone.

Although slightly less violent in intent, the original Chic-a-boo dolls might as well have been spliced together in that same laboratory. This baby-faced bear/monkey hybrid was created by Japanese boffins back in the 70s, apparently to ‘bring a message to children about the beauty of love’.1 Well, only a mother could love a face like that. Originally marketed in pairs (boy and girl–my God, they could mate!) and sold naked, it was the accompanying Hanna Barbera TV series in 1980 that brought the dolls to international attention.

Alternatively named Futagonomonchhichi, Monchhichi or, in France, Kiki, the popularity of Chic-a-boo helped launch a whole raft of accessories (mainly clothes) and merchandise for girls (mainly stationery). Most notably, the early ’80s saw a huge number of knockoff ‘gripping monkey/bear’ pencil-toppers designed to exploit the hitherto unexplored toy potential of the bulldog clip.2

See also Tiny Tears, My Little Pony, Smoking Monkey

Perhaps in a bid to inspire empathy in preschoolers, Chic-a-boo constantly sought comfort–witness the opposable digit perpetually jammed in its gob. Clearly, though, the toy’s appeal lay largely in its pleading expression. Taking the Disney style–those reassuringly Aryan juvenile features–and exaggerating it to a natural conclusion, Chic-a-boo was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked, button-nosed freak, the forerunner of Japanese Anime characters. What little girl could ignore that cutesy ‘love me’ expression, caught halfway twixt happiness and tears? (What adult fella could ignore the same on imported ‘naughty schoolgirl shags betentacled space monster’ Hentai cartoons?) Chic-a-boo was probably the first truly anthropomorphic toy to break through into a young child’s wish list, although it was swiftly superseded by similarly short-lived, dough-faced progeny (Cabbage Patch Kids, Pound Puppies, SnuggleBumms and many, many more).