Whilst the foreign car factories were laying off staff in favour of this toy’s older brothers, kids across the land were celebrating their new-found ability to move objects around the kitchen table by a mere complicated sequence of instructions input into the Armatron’s console. Of course, anything slightly more delicate than the plastic blocks included in the box (an egg, say) would break under pressure between the rubberised jaws, so any notions of performing David Banner-style laboratory experiments were soon similarly shattered.