Steve Berry - TV Cream Toys Lite

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.

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?

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!

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).