TV Cream Toys Lite. Steve Berry
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Название: TV Cream Toys Lite
Автор: Steve Berry
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Юмор: прочее
isbn: 9780007328512
isbn:
Kitchen-based catalysis
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!
Monkey-faced brown-noser
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).
Still popular in their native Japan (latest variety: Rasta-man Monchhichi an’ t’ing), the thumb-sucking fun carries on to this day, although you’ll be hard-pushed to find a vintage example that hasn’t had its brown nose rubbed clean away ‘with love’. In the mean time, we wait with bated breath for Stephen Gallagher’s next horror opus, The Tiny Tears of Blood.
1Monchhichi was originally created by Sekiguchi Ltd after the founder spotted a doll in a market in Germany So goes the official story. It could have been a really hairy baby Particularly if it was East Germany.
2 The “monkey grip”, as many unsuspecting kids would find out to their cost, could also mean being pincer-grabbed by the school bully just above the knee, thus trapping the nerves in a very unpleasantly ticklish way.
Think once, think twice, think bike!
Okay, we know this book is supposed to be about toys you wanted but never got, and we’re prepared to concede that pretty much everyone owned a bike as a child. Indeed, given our obsession with catalogues, we’d put money down that plenty of ‘em were bought at a rate of a pound a week for fifty weeks from the subs lady who came round on Wednesdays. But the 1970s opened our eyes to the potential of something new–the designer bike–and, in particular, the Raleigh СКАЧАТЬ