Yer commoner garden Chemistry Set box lid always featured 12-year-old boy with brown hair in the pudding-bowl style, wearing a white lab coat and oversized safety goggles, peering intently at a few cubic centimetres of vaguely blue compound in a test tube. The over-serious look in his eyes said it all: “Why won’t this explode?” ... more>>>

200 in one! 150 in one! The not very catchy 65 in one! And 50 in one! The oscillator-obsessed cousin to the generic chemistry set, Electronic Project (a product from the on-its-sleeve-for-nerdiness named Science Fair) was a big box full of circuits, cables and dials that boasted anything from 50 to 200 possible projects for you to build, depending on how much cash mum and dad were willing to shell out. ... more>>>

For sheer too-excited-to-eat-breakfast thrills, you couldn’t beat tumbling down the stairs of a birthday morning to find a bloody big, rattly box of Technic LEGO waiting for you. Just pray it wasn’t a school day. The hours would just fly by as you knelt, elbow deep in the most advanced children’s construction set ever, replete with working piston engines, pneumatic hoists, chunky, steerable rubber wheels and – if you were lucky - a working motor. By evening, you’d be driving around a custom dune buggy fork lift truck some seven feet in length. Or so it seemed. ... more>>>

“Ask the robot questions,” said the box. “He always gives the right answer.” We must say, we were intrigued from the start. The robot in question was under two inches high, made of solid metal, and stood in a strange “knees bent” posture that made him look to be in desperate need of a toilet. ... more>>>

The official story peddled about this toy’s genesis is that four Japanese engineers were trying to solve the problem of creating a dustless chalkboard. Oh yeah? It’s called a pen and paper, lads. Or is that just too simple for you? Such a story is obviously an elaborate smokescreen for Tyco’s real motivation, which can be neatly summed up in the phrase “let’s get one up on those Etch-A-Sketch bastards”. ... more>>>

It’s a small wonder that Meccano isn’t massively popular with today’s generation of excessively pierced kids. What better way of expressing your “individuality” than to bolt primary-coloured flanged trunnions and angle girders to your face? We’ve seen no-less elaborate metalwork in student union refectories the length and breadth of Britain. Plus, with Meccano there’s the added advantage of being able to create a scale model of Big Ben when you get bored. ... more>>>

There can’t be many executive toys that were thought up by TV continuity announcers. Whither Paul “first on Four” Coia’s eight-ball decision maker, for example? Or Colin “Granadaland” Weston’s magnetic art sculptures? They don’t exist, of course, and quite rightly so because the notion of someone designing a desk-bound plaything whilst cueing up some witty introduction spiel for that night’s episode of Z Cars is, frankly, ridiculous. ... more>>>

Concealed inside a thin card wallet bearing the illustrative image of the professorial titular “uncle”, these budget-priced kits generally strove to adhere to the notorious adage about “making learning fun”, more often than not involving 3D plasticine pictures from Aesop’s Fables, or a selection of to-be-coloured-in fact sheets about dinosaurs. ... more>>>

Winner of the award for “Largest Disparity Between Portrayal In Advertising Materials And Reality”, it is with some pleasure we see these fishy fraudsters continue to be sold to this very day. Yet, who has ever owned a family? Far from the apparent hierarchical society of tiny grinning mermen and mermaids presented in illustrated form on the packaging, Sea Monkeys were, in fact, tiny - and we mean microscopic - crustaceans of the Artemia Salina family. Yet we were, as youngsters, encouraged to believe that they inhabited a mysterious world of sunken treasures, kings and queens, castles and adventure, in a brazen example of spin that should have surely invited the full punitive powers of the Advertising Standards Authority. (Actually, an episode of That’s Life was devoted to an expose!) ... more>>>

In the mid-’70s, arcade giant Atari came up with a novel idea for a cabinet-based game - four flashing lights illuminated in a set order, which the player had to copy by pressing the appropriate buttons. Unsurprisingly, it sank without trace, perhaps not helped by Atari’s chosen title for this meisterwerk -“Touch Me”. A couple of years later, Milton Bradley happened upon the idea and churned out a round, tabletop version of the concept, gave it the (relatively) more macho name Simon, and cleaned up in the Christmas of ‘78. ... more>>>