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:
However, with six chunky traction tyres, sticky labels ‘to add exciting detail’ and a camp little signature tune that played before and after every, erm, motion, Big Trak was much coveted and seldom seen–the dictionary definition of toy envy.
1 A 4-bit Texas Instruments TMS1000 microcontroller running at approximately 0.2 MHz, chip fans. That’s just 64 bytes of RAM to you.
2 A fabulously complicated and tortuous process for carrying out otherwise simple household tasks? Clearly this was a toy aimed at men.
3 There was also TOBOR, a robot from Schaper that looked like a cross between R2D2 and Darth Vader, was operated by a ‘transmitter’ that was nothing more than a tin clicker, and was utterly defeated by any carpeted surface.
It’s big and it’s yellow, but there’s no tea in it
Now-defunct toy manufacturer Bluebird was founded on two very solid principles. Small girls like doll’s houses. Small girls also like plastic tea sets for serving cups of invisible tea to their dollies.1 Then someone fell into a filing cabinet at the office Christmas party and came up with the bizarre idea of crossbreeding the two. Yes, this was a doll’s house, but made of yellow plastic and shaped like a huge teapot.
Why was this? No reason was ever given. The house was inhabited by small plastic peg-like people (somewhere between stunted Playmobil folk and Weebles without the wobble) with welded-together legs, all the better to slide them down the chimney or make them ride round and round in the roundabout-cum-teapot lid (the latter 20 seconds of entertainment–lots of fun for everyone’–also forming the most memorable moment of the accompanying ad). This delightful pied-à-terre was furnished throughout with a small quantity of monolithic red and blue teacup chairs and tables, with the further appointment of additional decor simply printed on cardboard walls (where it floated slightly above the floor in an unconvincing fashion).
See also Weebles, My Little Pony, ‘A La Cart Kitchen’
A rival effort came courtesy of Palitoy, whose Family Treehouse obeyed the same basic design principles and yet had the added bonus of a trunk-based elevator (which presumably attracted a better class of tenant than the average council-estate teapot). Another was Matchbox’s School Boot, adding a whiff of academia to the old ‘woman who lived in a shoe’ routine and thus robbing it of much appeal, although there was at least a variety of playground-themed accessories.2 Live-in chimneys and pumpkins caught the tail end of the trend.
Basically, Big Yellow was a doll’s house for the Duplo generation: those who required everything to be large, unbreakable and safe to chew, yet were still innocent enough to refrain from shoving the little plastic people down (or up) the cat for a change (or indeed, trying to create a teapot tropical monsoon by actually pouring boiling water on them).
1 if you were unlucky enough to be a boy and wanted one of these? No chance. You’d get boxing gloves instead and a stern talking-to from Dad.
2 Matchbox had another crack at real estate with the Mushroom Playhouse, a four-floor fungi flat, but Bluebird had already moved on. Their mobile Big Red Fun Bus continued the primary-coloured fun. Sadly, the property market collapsed before the range could be completed with the release of the adult-oriented Big Blue Hotel.
Blip…blip…blip…blip…
The Binatone TV Master was the first computer-game experience witnessed by many Cream-era households, nestling as it did in the Argos catalogue alongside the portable black and white TVs (with which it shared a parasitic relationship). Radio Rentals would even lend you one for the night. Aeons before kids sat hypnotised in front of the latest Grand Theft Auto clone, sacrificing great chunks of their lives to completing the next level, this slab of circuit-based entertainment dragged us in off the streets to watch a box-shaped pixel zigzag its way across the screen. What a choking irony, therefore, that this gatekeeper of the soon-to-be-ushered-in console era attempted to mimic a selection of sports games.
Pre-SCART cable connections, the Binatone would have you scrabbling behind the family telly to plug in the RF aerial lead. That is, if you were lucky enough–in the days before a plasma screen in every room–to be allowed to use it in the first place. Typically, you’d be pushed to squeeze in a game of Binatone tennis between dinner and the start of Nationwide (and only then if your parents didn’t want to watch the News At 5.45). Otherwise, play meant sacrificing valuable Swap Shop or TISWAS time–oh, how we wished for a week-long bout of chickenpox.
See also ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Galaxy Invader 1000
As for the games themselves, they were clunky interpretations of bat ’n’ ball favourites such as squash or, erm, football (actually more like doubles tennis)1 on the basic, easy Jet-orange model. The beige variant promised some capacity for Tin Can Alley-style shooting games with a so-called light gun’, which inevitably didn’t work unless you were holding it so close to the telly you left scratches on the screen.2 The two standard controller ‘bats’ were chunky boxes with Etch-A-Sketch-type knobs that, fantastically, could be packed away into the Binatone’s battery compartment for storage.
The TV Master was superseded almost immediately by brasher, more state-of-the-art TV games such as Mattel Intellivision and Colecovision and then, fatally, by the home computer. How very British. The Binatone logo (was it pronounced By-na-tone or Bin-a-tone?) was a lovely crown-bedecked affair that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the bass drum of a ’60s Merseybeat band. Those sporty games icons, however, were a constant reminder of the local leisure centre and the fact that they had a proper sit-down Galaxians game that you could go on when your mum was having her badminton class.
1 The lack of ‘play against the computer’ option meant that a lot of Binatone-generation kids grew up ambidextrous.