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:
Second, the whiff of maturity, the wisdom of ages. Backgammon carried the weight of millennia and, though we didn’t know it at the time, we could sense it. The ancient Egyptians, the Byzantine emperors of Mesopotamia and now us–the great unwashed of suburbia–all staring at the pointy triangle things. At the very least, it proffered a vacant seat at the big table–a proper conversation between adult and child as the rules were explained.
Yet also it was accessible, but not too indiscriminate. Unlike the untouchable ivory chess set in your best mate’s dad’s study, you could get your hands dirty with the backgammon counters. Those green, snot-sleeved draughts players with their petulant ‘crown me!’s kept their distance. Backgammon had a vocabulary of its own: bearing off, kibitzers, the gin position, double bumps and mandatory beavers…Hang on: maybe they were just making this up as they went along after all.
See also Othello, Connect Four, Yahtzee
Oh, and we lied up there. There was a third reason why we wanted a backgammon of our own: the huge surge in popularity it underwent in the 1970s. Rather like snooker in the ’80s and football in the ’90s, backgammon suddenly became trendy. Leading players jetted from tournament to tournament, wrote bestselling books (about backgammon, obviously) and made the front pages in ‘my hotel sex-romp roast hell’ tabloid headlines.1
However, we come not to damn the game but to praise its Cream-era maker. Before Paul Heaton and his mates were a twinkle in a skiffle-humming Hull milkman’s eye, the name ‘House Martin’ was already a stamp of quality thanks to the Hackney-based games factory. Specialising in no-nonsense, phlegmatic renderings of popular post-war games, House Martin unashamedly embossed every box with the legend ‘Made in England’. No wonder they went under.
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.
Whore next door1
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.
Gyroscopic gladiators
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 СКАЧАТЬ