TV Cream Toys Lite. Steve Berry

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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.

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