Bargain bin puzzles bestowed by aged benefactor

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 Fables¹, or a selection of to-be-coloured-in fact sheets about dinosaurs.

However, there were some stray examples that leaned decidedly more in the direction of “fun”, including adaptations of such tried and tested favourites as the iron filings/pen combination for drawing ridiculous combinations of facial hair and hats on the visage of a cheery gentleman² (and the cunning variant on same, featuring a man in profile but with his features missing from nose to chin, replaced instead with a chain that could be shaken into comical shapes). There was also a flimsy primitive precursor to Magna Doodle in which indentations were made on silvered plastic with a very hard drawing tool, and then “wiped” by running a badly-aligned plastic bar across it.

In actual fact, the sheer breadth of activities Remus provided was astonishing; jigsaws, paint-by-numbers, model aeroplanes, finger puppets, trump cards - he had the lot. Surely this Disney-esque patriarch must’ve been a reclusive genius, dishing out toys and games with vim and vigour from his tiny cottage at the edge of the magic forest? (Think about it: you never see “Uncle” Remus and Dr Snuggles together, do you?) No way could he have been a cartoon cipher for Halifax-based Mars Ltd (and that’s not even the multi-national snackfood one, although they do own the “Uncle Ben’s” brand, which is where it gets confusing). Uh-uh.

Remus Play-Kits score highly, though, because they became desirable by their scarcity. For some reason, the damn things only ever seemed to be on sale at motorway service stations and chemists, meaning that requests for one could only ever made at times when parents were in “absolutely no bloody mood” to buy toys or games.