Steve Berry - TV Cream Toys Lite

1 One of Graham Greene’s last novels, The Captain and the Enemy , is about a boy who is won from his father by a con man in a game of backgammon. Possibly one to omit from the bedtime story selection for the little ones, there.

Barbie had been knocking around since the arse-end of the ’50s in one permatanned form or other, but we’re most interested in the so-called ‘aspirational’ late ’80s when manufacturer Mattel realised they could sell the dolls as collectors’ items as well as mere playthings. Or, as the marketing speak of the day put it: to improve profitability and maintain consistent revenue streams, Mattel began a strategy of maximising core brands while simultaneously identifying new brands with core potential. Ah yes! There’s the insipid corporate message at the heart of your Dream Glow Barbie.

But then she’s always been one for the commercial tie-up, has Barbie. From the days of her first-run adverts during the Mickey Mouse Club to Barbie couture and those straight-to-DVD CGI-saturated movies, she’s monetised every innovation, trend and fashion in search of global dominance. In fact, she’d probably use a word like ‘monetise’ without blushing. If she wasn’t wearing so much blusher in the first place.

See also Sindy, Rainbow Brite, Girl’s World

Fair play to the girl, though–always impossibly glamorous and immaculately turned out, Barbie has proved to be a role model to a million all-American, body-conscious Diet Coke heads. And she sure shifts some units, taking upward of three billion dollars over the counter each year. 2 What could be more upwardly mobile than that?

As Mattel’s trademarked mission statement solemnly avows, Barbie is ‘more than a doll’. What exactly she wants to be, though, is still unclear. Model, gymnast, fashion designer, rock star– Barbie’s had a punt at every job under the sun, presumably packing each one in after a few days in floods of tears before settling down in front of Trisha with a packet of milk-chocolate digestives ‘consider her options’. 3

Call her anything you like, but don’t call her unpatriotic. There is a Barbie doll in a time capsule due to be opened in 2076 to celebrate 300 years of the American Revolution: she is dressed in a stars-and-stripes dress featuring a line of soldiers in uniform on the hem. Cut her down the middle and she’d have the letters ‘U’, ‘S’ and ‘A’ stencilled through her like a stick of rock. Blow her head off and the blood on the wall behind would be red, white and blue.

1 Just as a matter of record, we’d like to point out that no-one at TV Cream thinks that Barbie is a whore (nor, indeed, that she lives next door). We’re just being flippant, based on perceived notions of the doll’s proportions as being just that bit too anatomically unrealistic. Christ, we’re only three words in and already there’s a footnote.

2 Initial profits from Barbie allowed Mattel to become a PLC in 1960. Goodbye garage-based workshop, hello stockholder-pleasing listings on the Fortune 500

3 In recent years, Barbie’s fortunes have seesawed, as she suffered declining sales in the face of the Spice Girl-indebted Bratz dolls.

Battling Tops? Why, ’tis a grand olde European folk game, sir, as famously depicted in sixteenth-century paintings by Brueghel and his ilk. However, we suspect his Battling Tops weren’t housed in a blue-plastic arena, presumably didn’t go by such wrestling-ring monikers as Super Sam, Tricky Nicky, Twirling Tim, Dizzy Dan or, erm, Smarty Smitty, and certainly were far from Ideal.

Yep! Since 1968, the company that invited you to wind up Evel Knievel had been dishing up more red-plastic crank-powered fun with their repackaging of an old wooden favourite. With defiantly un-medieval box art depicting various ’50s-type kids and their worryingly Barry Cryer-like dad enraptured by the centrifugal tournament taking place under their noses, this was the tabletop arena game to end all tabletop arena games. Wind the spindle with string, give a yank on the starting cord and away you go!

See also Crossfire, Raving Bonkers Fighting Robots, Hungry Hippos

A similar game, Space Attack , was an air-hockey variant on the rotating theme. Crank the red handle with all your tiny might and stop the spinning top being knocked into a trough with a plastic slider. Or, as they put it, ‘Fight off the lightning alien attacks!’ The ‘space’ theme was provided by a piss-poor ‘galactic’ backdrop on the field of play, with a pointless concentric red ring design overlaid. They might as well have written ‘Look, it’s in space, all right? Use your bloody imagination, you ungrateful little sods!’ and been done with it. Ideal at least went the whole hog and–in the wake of Star War s mania–launched a rebranded Battling Spaceships game, which also included some extra, Monopoly -inspired round-the-board progression.

Space Attack and Battling Spaceships shared one gameplay drawback–the frequency with which one of the spinning combatants would be knocked right out of the ring. Frequently the victorious top would be the one that found its way under the radiator, still merrily buzzing away on the lino long after the rest had limped to a standstill.

Although the original is still out there, produced under licence from Mattel, 1 no additional TV Cream points will be awarded for spotting that this game and its various spin-offs over the years have left us with the legacy that is Beyblades. Now those things really do look like you can take someone’s eye out with them. They’re like Chinese throwing stars. Seriously, they’ve even got ‘blade’ in the name. Why hasn’t someone reported them to Trading Standards?

Space AttackOn the rebound

1 You won’t be astounded if we tell you that the arena of this new game is bleedin’ tiny now, will you? This isn’t just a case of ‘the memory cheats’–we know Wagon Wheels and Creme Eggs are the same size and our hands just got bigger. But with these games, they’re deliberately shrinking our childhood!

See also Up Periscope, Computer Battleship, Chutes Away

Way before The X Files , back in the mysterious 1980s, part-work magazines such as The Unexplained and telly shows like The Crazy World of Arthur C. Clarke 1 –he invented satellites, you know–cashed in on our periodic fascination for paranormal phenomena. Strange how, in cycles of almost exactly 20 years, ESP, spontaneous combustion, spoon-bending and all that bollocks inexplicably suckers in an entirely new generation. One might say that the regularity itself is almost…supernatural. Woooo!