TV Cream Toys Lite. Steve Berry

TV Cream Toys Lite - Steve  Berry


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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

      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.

       Battling Tops

      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 into a trough with a plastic slider. Or, as they put it, ‘Fight off the lightning alien attacks!’ The ‘space’ theme was provided by a piss-poor ‘galactic’ backdrop on the field of play, with a pointless concentric red ring design overlaid. They might as well have written ‘Look, it’s in space, all right? Use your bloody imagination, you ungrateful little sods!’ and been done with it. Ideal at least went the whole hog and–in the wake of Star War s mania–launched a rebranded Battling Spaceships game, which also included some extra, Monopoly-inspired round-the-board progression.

      Space Attack and Battling Spaceships shared one gameplay drawback–the frequency with which one of the spinning combatants would be knocked right out of the ring. Frequently the victorious top would be the one that found its way under the radiator, still merrily buzzing away on the lino long after the rest had limped to a standstill.

      Space Attack On the rebound

       Bermuda Triangle

      Makes people disappear

       See also Up Periscope, Computer Battleship, Chutes Away

      Further back in the mists of time, in 1974 to be exact, Charles Berlitz wrote a book called The Bermuda Triangle. Then, in 1981–by complete coincidence–Barry Manilow had a Top 20 hit of the same name. Spooky, huh? In the intervening years, MB had cashed in handsomely with this ships ‘n’ storm cloud ludo variant.

      That aside (and ignoring the very fundamental


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