Mail-order pocket-money sappers

In addition to the adverts for unfamiliar and strange-sounding confectionary such as Twinkies and Reese’s Pieces, imported American comics held an additional attraction for British readers in that they provided exposure to all manner of gimmicky novelty items, normally promoted by sizeable adverts that occupied two thirds of a page yet only included microscopic illustrations of literally dozens of different products. The most fascinating of all these curios was the Smoking Monkey.

A plastic chimp that exhaled smoke of some description when one of the special mock-cigarettes was inserted into its mouth, the Smoking Monkey was seriously politically incorrect on many, many levels at once¹. It was also the source of much confusion for British youngsters, who could neither understand nor appreciate why anyone would actually want a toy baboon dragging on a pretend cigarette, nor indeed what possible use or purpose it might serve².

Other classics of the genre included: X-Ray Specs (promoted by an illustration that suggested that they gifted the wearer with the ability to see animal skeletons and women’s legs, but in fact merely produced a hazy outline around objects through suspiciously rose-tinted lenses); fart cushions (“emit a real Bronx cheer”); itching powder; a fake chewing gum packet which snapped the finger of anyone who tried to remove its contents with a spring-loaded metal paddle; unrealistic plastic ice cubes with unrealistic plastic flies embedded in them; equally unconvincing squirting buttonhole flowers; a more unconvincing still plastic chocolate digestive (which was not only unrealistic in texture and hue but also nowhere near the standard size of a biscuit); and, most unforgettably of all, the ridiculous arrow-thru-head.

Most of this stuff was in fact available in the UK, visible alongside the usual quota of glow-in-the-dark stars in the legendary “stocking fillas” catalogue and even occasionally advertised in the likes of Whizzer And Chips (using the same microscopic illustrations), but for some reason it suited everyone better to believe that they were only known to our Stateside counterparts.