Lurid squidgy rag-doll and all her friends

Like the Care Bears, My Little Pony, and many many more, this overpriced doll and her garish companions were more like a worrying cult-in-the-making than a toy, born of an obsession with pretty colours and rainbows and cutesy names and everyone being bloody happy all the bloody time.

According to the mimsy flimsy back-story, Rainbow Brite lived in Rainbowland in a rainbow-shaped house (available separately), rode a rainbow-maned pony, and had duties primarily to do with excavation. Apparently, it was vitally important to mine the colour caves for colour crystals that could be turned into star sprinkles which could, in turn, return the various colours of the light spectrum to Earth. To help her, Brite had seven individually coloured friends, one for each colour of the… oh, you get the picture by now… including Red Butler (can you see what they did there?) and Patty O’Green (we can hear the cod Oirish accent still, begorrah). Each doll also came with a “Sprite”, which was sadly not a free can of fizzy pop but in fact a sort of over-engineered pet gonk (Ms Brite’s was called Twink).

In the obligatory cheapo cartoon tie-in, she would fight the dismal forces of Murky and Lurky and bring happy colours to the world. In the real world, however, her nasty squishy consistency and scratchy glittery texture made her a doll that even the soppiest of softies would find it hard to love. She lacked the homespun patchwork cosiness of Holly Hobbie, the novelty air-freshener stinkiness of Strawberry Shortcake, and even the leftfield Angela Rippon involvement of Victoria Plum.

She was, basically, just too darn dull. And it didn’t take the most imaginative of brothers to start dreaming up alternative variations on her surname, either.