It is shocking to realise that a lot of the toys we associate with the 1970s were in fact from long before, some like Lego going back to the 1940s. But most of the toys that we associated with the stunning seventies were from the 1960s.
The Skateboard was originally made in 1964, and I was not able with my clumsy teenage ways to stay on the thing long enough to know if it was fun. To me it was a chore, but secretly I envied my friends who could just step on it and glide down a hill and move around people and parked cars with ease. Of course I laughed when they had to carry the thing back, as there was no motor for the uphill segment.
TWISTER was a great family game and still is. The mat was placed in the living room, and with your friends (and sometimes Gran), you moved to the colours you were instructed to by the game, making sure that you actually knotted yourself in trying to reach those colours. I am sure Nan cheated.
MOUSETRAP, was a game where you built up the most elaborate trap from colourful plastic pieces, it almost looked like a cartoon in it’s self. The idea was to get the Mouse (you are the Mouse) and this was done by moving along the board by throwing a Dice, not only does the mouse move but you build the trap as you go. Now once the mouse trap has worked, end of game. Was it really worth it?
OPERATION the board game with a cartoon man with his body opened up and all his organs showing. All you have to is remove parts of his anatomy with extreme care, because if you set off the buzzer you will fail. Not really a well thought out game, but amazingly it was very popular in the 70s.
We also had the James Bond toys which were still huge in the 1970s, of course we went though Sean Connery and Roger Moore, but the Bond cars were just fantastic phone, I remember having the 60s Bond car in the 1970s which actually had an ejector seat that worked.
We were still playing with our Star Trek toys and the plastic communicators, and we had Robbie the Robot and Jupiter Two from Lost In Space, that seemed to be on every Friday in the early 1970s on ITV.
Of course very popular still was the Man From UNCLE franchise, we had the pens we talked into and the UNCLE badges, and a few cars, but I also recall have some cars associated with that TV series.
We had smelly Play Doh of multi colours that we made into anything, only to find that we could not really separate those colours when we had finished with it.
For those of us into Gerry Anderson creations we had all the toys from Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlett and even the real people programme UFO.
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