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Top 10 Retro Toys
There are many things that make us nostalgic about our childhood and toys are at the top of the list. Before the days of trading standards and child friendly paints, when a bit of acid blue was more than just the name of the paint. Here are the ones that make us yearn for the days when summers were long and cherryade was the drink of choice.
10 Nintendo Game and Watch
The original handheld console, each one was a different game and provided the debut for Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers. They were the game that superseded the now classic it its own right Gameboy. The original version had a single screen with a green background and black animation, this later developed into a two screen and coloured screen versions. They were the days before volume control so parents and random people in public would become increasingly annoyed by the repetitive three note music, those were the days!
9 Fuzzy Felts
These were great and a completely simple idea a plain board and some fuzzy people and various different scenarios. You could create your own hospital complete with beds and little nurses and patients or build an entire farm and the best bit was that once you were bored of the scene that you created you could just remove them and start all over again.
8 Top Trumps
This card game was won by thrashing your opponent with your superior super powers and numbers of enemies and other such important factors. Lunchtimes would not have been the same without the bickering over cheating and demanding to see the other cards, in fact it was banned in many primary schools for being too competitive and causing fights, it seems that levels of super powers was not something to be taken lightly! With such a huge range of cards to choose from you and your mates could argue over anything from cars to power rangers! These cards are still going so if you’re feeling nostalgic pop down to the shops and get yourself a pack!
7 Mr Frosty
The snow man toy that could turn simple ice cubes into hours of snow filled fun, all you had to do was put the ice cubes under his hat replace the hat and crunch the ice by turning the lever, magic! To flavour your ice creation you put the syrup or flavouring in the penguin and squeezed it over the crushed ice and voila a home made slushy! And if you really wanted to you could make funny shaped ice cubes or lollies, but then that did not involve crushing ice which is all we were interested in!
6 Big Trak
The Big Track was the ultimate boys toy an electronic tank with an instruction key pad that you programme and watch it carry out your orders. It could remember up to 30 different instructions, which at the time was immense. Plus it had the big plastic exterior that toys used to have and the general industrial, indestructible casing, probably because the control panel was huge back then not like the thimble sized electronic gizmos you can get these days!
5 Rubik's Cube
The hours, the days spent trying to solve the Rubik’s cube! Just when you thought you were almost there, there would be a white cube on the green side arrrhhhh. Then you would see those kids who could do them in under a minute and the rage increased sometimes culminating in carefully peeling off all the coloured squares and then sticking them back on in the right place, well we hear some people did that..
4 Scalextric
One of the ultimate boys toys that combined cars, electricity and the potential for high speed crashes without any known injury, unless you happened to be standing on the other side of the bend that the car flew off at. What made this toy so great was that you could make the track as simple or as elaborate as you wanted with tunnels made from books and anything else you could get your hands on. Then there was that spark of electricity on the old sets as the cars went speeding by which would probably be a health and safety risk but back then it added character! The only problem was getting your dad off it for long enough so that you and your mates could have a go.
3 Transformers
Transformers were the bees knees when we were younger, a car that can become a robot and change back again, it doesn’t get much cooler than that. Watching the arms and legs of huge indestructible robots appearing out of vehicles and animals provided hours of entertainment. Then there were the epic battles that took place between you and your mates and if you had enough you could put them all together and make one giant transformer, just too cool.
2 Chopper Bikes
Ah the Raleigh chopper bike which 70’s kid didn’t want one of those. Sure they were not the safest or most comfortable of bikes but boy did they look good. The long seat, the back wheel bigger than the front wheel, we have yet to find a bike we like better. The handle bars were perfect for attaching streamers to and some spokey dokeys completed the ultimate retro cool bike. It’s just a shame they don’t make them for adults, we could reduce our carbon emissions and look the business on our way to work on a chopper.
1 Swingball
Whose family didn’t have a Swingball set? The perfect summer day game, once it was spiked into the ground you were good to go, just good clean family fun. The only danger present was being hit in the face with the ball when playing with an overly enthusiastic player or your horrible sibling whose only reason for playing is to give you a black eye! We hear that they are still being made so will now be off to go and purchase one for the Balcony back garden.