Category: 1970s

Last year, right at the bottom of the wardrobe, I discovered some old Star Wars cards.

I don’t mean baseball cards, or cards from a sticker album. No, these were ‘backing cards’ – originally with a plastic figure attached, the backing card had a photograph of the person (or droid (or creature)) in question and remained intact long after the figure had been removed and played with.

Well, intactISH. It is a fact that back in the late-seventies the wily marketing teams at Palitoy and Kenner would encourage sales by offering freebies. Buy half a dozen toys and you can send off for another one free. All we excitable ten-year-olds had to do was cut the names out of the backing cards, as proof we’d bought them, and send them off for a freebie. A Boba Fett! A Nein Nunb! A collection of gasmasks and backpacks and guns (oh my)!

In other words, right at the bottom of my wardrobe, I discovered some old Star Wars cards from which the names had been cut out by a Star Wars obsessed schoolkid back in the day. Not much use them cluttering up the wardrobe (I thought) let’s sling them on eBay, somebody might offer a fiver for them.

Somebody did… Rather more than a fiver in fact. Presumably some of those ten-year-old Star Wars obsessed schoolkids grew up to be fifty-something Star Wars obsessed middle-aged folk with rather too much disposable income on their hands.

So maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so scandalized the other day by the high prices of Rotadraw on eBay – because, clearly, one man’s tat is another man’s overpriced, nostalgia-infused, um, tat. And in fact, selling those cards funded almost our entire Christmas shopping last year.

For once, I feel, the force was with me.

One of my very earliest Christmasses, I got a Lego fire station and my brother the Lego space launch site. It was, as I occasionally tell people and watch their eyes either boggle at how I can be SO old or glaze over at how I can be SO boring (sometimes both) – it was so long ago that the Lego sets didn’t even come with Lego people. The fire station had three fire engines of increasing sizes (or decreasing, depends which way you arranged them) and the space command centre had an Apollo-style rocket and a lunar buggy. But no firemen, and no spacemen. (Or women, or women).

The first Lego people I ever saw was a few years later when I got the Lego hospital for my birthday. This was a real leap into the future (I may have first heard it being explained by Michael Rod on Tomorrow’s World but don’t quote me on that) because it included Lego people. Lego doctors and nurses and porters and patients.

Well, sort of. These weren’t the jolly, articulated, smiley figures of today – these were immobile, non-prehensile, featureless blocks, occasionally given just a hint of personality by wearing a hat. But for all their simplicity, I was very excited by this wild new development.

Ironically, other than a Lego boat from my Aunt (which brilliantly came with a weight on the bottom so it would actually float in the bath) I don’t recall getting many Lego kits after that. Nowadays I get the feeling it’s more acceptable for grown-ups to enjoy Lego, but unfortunately that’s a revolution that has come too late for me.

Still, I always enjoy recalling how many hours of fun we had with it back in the day; and remembering the (Lego) people we used to be. 

A month or two back, over tea, I remembered Rotadraw.

That’s not quite true. I half-remembered  “round thing, like a record, you draw through slot one, turn it, draw through slot two…” and eventually we identified it as a children’s toy from the early-70s called (as no doubt you remember (from the opening sentence if not the early-70s)) Rotadraw.

I assumed, rather vainly, that this toy for 7 or 8 year olds had ceased production when I’d ceased being 7 or 8 – but the internet, having already furnished us the name, reveals that the brand carried on at least into the mid-80s, as we found pictures of an A-Team set. (If you want illustrations, if nobody else does art, and if you’ve got the Rotadraw, maybe you can sketch… and so on.)

So anyway, and having previously scored a hit with a still mint-in-box Spirograph I bought for her birthday, I thought I’d track down a Rotadraw for my other half for Christmas. I assumed, naively this time, that some fifty year old plastic discs allowing you to render a Bambi or a Tom and/or Jerry, would be easy to find.

Alas, not so – or rather, easy but not cheaply. If only I’d had the presence of mind never to play with the Rotadraws we had as a child and had instead locked them away in a cupboard, I could now have been sitting on a goldmine. Especially if it had been the DC Super Heroes set (currently £150 on eBay).

To cut to the chase, and much as I love Mrs Curnow, she’s definitely NOT getting a Rotadraw (not Robin Hood, not Masters of the Universe, definitely not DC Super Heroes) for Christmas. So I’ll just have to think of something else, and quickly.

Back to the (rota)drawing board!

One thing I miss about being a child at Christmas, is the Selection Box.

Obviously there’s no law against getting one as an adult – but it’s a very unlikely present to receive, or if you do get one it’s probably meant to be ‘ironic’. I don’t mind ironic chocolate (it’s the dark stuff I can’t stand) but it’s not quite the same as the simple, unadulterated pleasure of having spent twelve months being warned of the dangers of too many sweets, only to not just hit the mother lode but actually be presented with it come Christmas.

I’m a child of the seventies, so of course our Selection Boxes were slightly, um, adulterated not just by perennial party pooper the Bounty, but also by the now-thankfully discontinued Topic – cursed with a catchy slogan forever proclaiming it as the answer to the question “What has a hazelnut in every bite?” (Or rather, one of TWO answers, the other of course being “a hazelnut” and NOT, as a friend in secondary school tried to convince me, squirrel s**t.)

Other than that, I seem to recall Curly Wurly and Mars being the big stars, alongside stalwarts such as Twix and the Double Decker – if comparative newcomers such as the Wispa ever reached selection box status, it was after my time.

Obviously I can hardly stress enough, this is simply an exercise in nostalgia. It’s important to make that clear because the danger of mentioning how much you miss getting a selection box at Christmas when there’s still a week to go, is that one runs the risk of everybody suddenly deciding to buy a selection box, with the result that I might end up with, well, with a whole selection of them.

Gosh. Goodness. Dear me. I certainly hope THAT doesn’t happen…

Maybe I just missed the memo, but I don’t remember Gingerbread being a Christmas ‘thing’ in my childhood. Mind you, I’ve often said the same about the Nutcracker and that’s apparently been around since 1892, so what do I know? (Rhetorical question.)

When I was young, the bakery up the road from us used to sell gingerbread men. They were very hard, and had currants for eyes, and because the currants were added before cooking, it meant they came out shrivelled, crunchy and burnt, like tiny bitter rabbit droppings. Needless to say, I loved them.

Gingerbread men nowadays tend to be soft and bendy rather than hard and brittle; and, unfortunately for my wife, they also tend to be full of butter. She is lactose intolerant (and quite prejudiced against oranges too) so has to be careful what she eats. Sometimes, perhaps with just a hint of paranoia, she’ll point out that not only does such-and-such contain milk or butter, the manufacturer also lists actual lactose amongst the ingredients, which they’ve presumably bunged in just to make quite sure they finish her off.

We recently discovered almost a whole shelf in Lidl full of Christmassy gingerbread, none of which contained lactose in any form whatsoever. As you might imagine, she was like a kid in a sweet shop (almost literally) and we came home with what I can only really describe as one heck of a stash.

I thought that the plan might be to make them last until Christmas, but I suppose I can’t blame her for taking advantage of the fact that for once there’s something she can actually binge on.

With the result that, rather like the gingerbread man crossing the river, the not-so-little Lidl pile is already three-quarters gone…