Maintaining a Weird Collection of Cabbage Patch Dolls
They looked odd, they didn’t perform any useful function, and yet grown adults would traverse continents in order to get their hands on one. This was ostensibly for their children, but the sheer desperation with which Cabbage Patch dolls would be pursued – including pitched battles in toy stores – gives a clear indication that the craze was driven as much by parents as by kids.
They were invented in 1978 by Debbie Morehead and Xavier Roberts. You might think it a bit rich to use words like “invented” when referring to a doll that contained no electrical circuits, didn’t wet itself or say “ma ma” in a robotic monotone. But their stroke of genius was to create a mass-produced toy where every one differed slightly in appearance, and came with its own adoption certificate from the Babyland General Hospital. For some reason the idea of taking guardianship over a helpless young orphan – albeit one that was made of cloth and incapable of sentient thought – proved to be remarkably appealing. Whether the desperate pursuit of the toy was fuelled by the company simply failing to keep up with demand is unclear – but, rather like the Pet Rock (see Attempting to Produce your Own Simulacrum of Commercially Available Soft Drinks) the Cabbage Patch doll ended up having a disproportionate emotional hold over its owners, and indeed those who scoured stores in the hope of finding one.
Exercising while Watching a Woman in a Leotard on Breakfast Television
It’s hard to imagine, now that we’re in an age of 24-hour rolling news and can play roulette on our TVs at 5am if we want to, that the idea of turning on the television at breakfast time on weekdays in 1980s Britain was almost viewed as immoral. TV was an entertainment source intended for evening consumption with the family, or for lifting depressed housewives out of mid-afternoon boredom. So when breakfast television was introduced in the UK in 1983, it was regarded with suspicion – rather like someone who turns up on your doorstep claiming to be your long-lost cousin, and then starts asking lots of questions about your finances.
The best remembered stars of breakfast TV were aerobics instructors. No doubt prompted by the colossal success of the launch of Jane Fonda’s workout videos the previous year, women in leotards were employed to get us working up a sweat in our front rooms. The fact that 99 percent of viewers watched them from a comfortable armchair while shovelling sugar-frosted cereals into their faces didn’t seem to matter; we were delighted by their untrammelled enthusiasm for stretching, kicking and lunging. By the 1990s, the sheer futility of attempting to get the public fit saw the practice largely abandoned, and we watched people deliver celebrity gossip or bake cakes instead, while continuing to eat sugar-frosted cereals from the comfort of the same armchair.
Thinking that the State Probably Knew Best
For 45 years following World War II, the West repeatedly restated its distaste for communism. Indeed, you could say that we were only driven through the 50s, 60s and 70s by our need to combat the communist threat. However, during this period, individual governments were combating economic problems by nationalizing industries, hiking up top rates of tax and implementing levels of state control that seem extraordinary by today’s standards. But the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK in 1979, and Ronald Reagan in the US the following year, saw neo-liberals pledge their undying faith in market forces and “rolling back the frontiers of the state”. High taxation and regulatory control of the business world were suddenly deemed horribly damaging to private enterprise, and by the middle of the decade it was unlikely that any Western politician would be elected to high office unless they were a staunch believer in the capitalist dream. Socialist parties desperately attempted to shrug off far-left influences in order to become acceptable to the electorate.
In Eastern Europe, of course, there was no electorate, because there were no meaningful elections; the level of state control extended to not giving people the opportunity to disagree – a situation that slowly grew from mild frustration to full-blooded revolution. By the end of the 1980s, decades of Marxist thought were finally abandoned as a bad job. As to whether this was the right decision, we’ll have to wait and see…
Rolling up the Sleeves of your Jacket in Order to Appear Both Sexy and Interesting
The dovetailing of smart and casual can be slightly awkward – think jeans and brogues, or dinner suits with trainers – but for some reason the stylings of Miami Vice’s Crockett and Tubbs became, as one writer put it, “the biggest fashion influence since the Nehru jacket”. Pastel suits were worn with T-shirts, shoes were worn without socks – not a look that would get you a dinner table in a posh hotel, but millions of men chose to emulate the crime-fighting duo by equipping themselves with an untailored, baggy faux- Armani linen suit and rolling up the sleeves.
It’s not clear why the exposure of ones forearms should have provoked such admiration in women (one fan of the retro look tells of how it “made men look so strong, sexy and interesting”.) Perhaps it was just the combination of the smartness of a suit with the workmanlike sleeve-push, as if you were preparing to “get the job done”. (In the case of Miami Vice, of course, this was generally the arrest and imprisonment of drug barons.) When men started attempting it using tailored suits, thus making themselves look as if they’d put on a smaller man’s clothes by mistake, the fad was already over. Thankfully, it was not succeeded by the cummerbund plus Hawaiian shorts combo.
Expressing Fury at being Ordered to Wear a Seat Belt
“You won’t catch me wearing some kind of baby harness”, you’d hear proud men boasting throughout the 1970s, as public information films and newspaper articles described the ways in which wearing a seat belt might prevent you from being projected through your car windscreen at high velocity. Certainly in the UK and USA, men could happily brush aside this advice, because advice is all that it was. But following the lead of other Western nations, it became a legal requirement to wear a seat belt in the front seats of a car – first in the UK in 1983, and then in the US, on a state-by-state basis, the following year.
The average man is incredibly defensive about his ability to operate a motor vehicle. He might speed down the motorway while burrowing in the glove compartment for a travel sweet while telling terrified passengers to stop complaining because he’s never had an accident. So the fact that the authorities were handing out unwanted advice on how not to maim and kill their passengers didn’t go down well. People would loudly protest about civil liberties; even videos showing eggs being smashed when rattling around in boxes did little to convince them. The occasional diehard still spends time unearthing data to try to prove how ineffective seat-belt wearing is, or that it’s somehow dangerous to other road users – but now we’re generally happy to clunk, click and accept it.
Collecting Ring Pulls from cans in the Hope that it would Change Someone’s Life
No one knows quite how the rumour started, or quite how the misconception took hold. But the 1980s saw the spirited collection of ring pulls, or pull tabs, from drink cans in the hope that it would somehow benefit the needy. Those suffering from kidney failure were thought to particularly benefit from the hoarding of small pieces of aluminium alloy; benevolent groups would mobilize, glug their way through thousands upon thousands of gallons of soft drinks, carefully pop the ring pull in a bag, and chuck the can away.
But the ring pull was no more valuable than the can itself. Almost worthless, in fact. Charity groups and the aluminium industry tried their best to get the word out that there was little point in collecting them, but to no avail; people got terribly upset that their million ring pulls were worth a couple of hundred dollars at best, when they’d been told it would pay for a dialysis machine. Thanks to the Internet, similar rumours have resurged of late – that a thousand of the new-style tabs (much harder to pull off, incidentally) will pay for one chemotherapy treatment session. Sadly, this is untrue. It doesn’t even cover the dental bills of the people who’ve put away an astonishing quantity of sugary drinks.
Reading Books that had Several Different Potential Endings
Sometimes stories don’t always turn out the way you want. You’re primed for a happy ending, but the heroine suddenly gets a gangrenous foot and has to have it amputated. A detective’s inability to piece together the most obvious of clues leaves a serial killer free to continue his murderous rampage through Luxembourg. But the 1980s saw a genre of books published that allowed you to affect the outcome of the story by making the big plot decisions yourself, and then turning to the relevant page to see what happened. (They were all written, somewhat disconcertingly, in the second person, so it wasn’t the character of Omok who vanquished the evil overlords of Thaak – it was you.)
The Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy series were both incredibly popular, although bringing chance and probability into a book format inevitably led to people cheating in order to get the outcome they wanted. If you turned to page 96 and discovered that you were about to be maimed by a dragon, you’d just turn back to page 50 and choose to go down the path to the magic forest on page 92 instead. By the time you were halfway through the book, the corners of the pages had been decimated for convenient bookmarking purposes. The format was much more suited to video games that didn’t give you so much of an opportunity to cheat – and as soon as microprocessors could cope, that’s exactly what happened.
Extending the Width of your Torso Several Inches by Wearing Shoulder Pads
These days we’re enlightened enough to understand that women can demonstrate superiority over men in the workplace by simply coming up with better ideas and being more efficient than them. But in the 1980s, there was a feeling that they had to compete physically by “power dressing”. They were probably right; chauvinists would have sneered if women had dared to compete while wearing something understated and feminine, so trouser suits were donned, and broad-shouldered jackets were fearsomely padded at the shoulders with foam. (The idea of wearing false beards and pointlessly tinkering with cars was postponed in case more drastic action ever needed to be taken.)
While the fashion was slimming – tapering as it did from colossal shoulders to the waist – it also reshaped the female form into a peculiar equilateral triangle. But such was the influence of programmes like Dynasty and Dallas, where female characters could only get through doors by turning sideways, that shoulder pads were adopted wholesale by high-street fashion chains. Fortunately, the need to dress powerfully ebbed away towards the end of the decade, and at some point in the 1990s shoulder pads disappeared – or, at least, shrunk to a more anatomically sympathetic size.
Applying Overwhelming Perfumes to your Wrists and Neck
There are always people who go too far in attempting to impress by allowing their own personal odor to be utterly obliterated by over-generous application of bottled perfume or deodorant. We know from bitter experience that the more you apply doesn’t necessarily make for a more positive outcome – indeed, noses wrinkle, windows are opened, and in extreme cases you’ll be escorted from the premises.
1980s perfumes such as Christian Dior’s Poison and, pre-eminently, Giorgio Beverly Hills, were notable for their brute strength, regardless of how sparingly you tried to apply them. Passers-by would be overwhelmed with salvoes of bergamot or vanilla – not so much notes, as fully-fledged symphonies. Giorgio is still described by the manufacturer as conveying “glamour, sophistication and the promise of adventure”, but the only adventure you’d have in New York City in the 1980s would be wandering around town looking for a restaurant that would seat you, the fragrance having been deemed so potent that it ruined the diner’s palate. It matched perfectly with the brashness, excess and conspicuous consumption of the day, but we’ve learned since that resisting the urge to give a potential mate an olefactory clubbing can be somewhat more seductive.
Sugary Booze and Celtic Tattoos: The Nineties
We celebrated the dawn of the final decade of the twentieth century by plunging headlong into another recession, and then desperately looking for ways of getting out of it, or at least taking our minds off it a bit. Computers began to provide a distraction; despite their growing popularity during the 1980s they were still the preserve of the geek squad, but the 1990s saw the birth of the World Wide Web and the realization that it might be of some recreational use – and subsequently some commercial use. At which point we all rushed to get online, while self-styled entrepreneurs came up with thousands of half-baked ideas for cyber-business ventures that were almost certainly doomed to failure.
The first sheep was cloned and belly buttons were pierced in their millions, while Western Europe came together in union and Yugoslavia unhappily splintered into pieces. We were amused by The Simpsons, delighted by the release of Nelson Mandela, nervous about the first Gulf War and morose over the death of Princess Diana – but not so distracted that we couldn’t indulge in some mystifying behaviour that looks unusual in hindsight…
Heading into the Countryside to take Drugs and Jump up and Down
Raving used to involve bopping to Buddy Holly while wearing an Arran sweater and sipping on a soda pop. But the emergence of acid house in the late 1980s saw it become synonymous with being out of your tree on ecstasy while entranced by earsplitting beats, along with several thousand other people who felt the same way. While the US saw the West coast rave scene flourish in colossal warehouses, the British quietly slipped out of town to avoid the inevitable interest from the police. An evening’s entertainment would consist of hanging around a phone box waiting for a call from a shifty bloke telling you to head for a particular field in Essex; then you’d drive for hours through winding lanes to find it, only to find that the police knew about it all along. A fantastically British way of enjoying oneself.
But if the police didn’t turn up, fun was had in abundance and, predictably, the authorities got the fear. Laws were brought in to enable police to stop large groups of people listening to (as the law put it): “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” This effectively killed off a movement that wasn’t keen on being properly licensed, so everyone went home and waited for the next opportunity to spontaneously gather overnight in huge crowds and take large quantities of drugs. They’re still waiting.
Nurturing an Electronic Pet
Humans can direct their caring instincts towards the unlikeliest of things. Tortoises don’t show any reciprocal love and self-centredly hoover up displays of affection (that is, provision of lettuce leaves and a cardboard box.) Pet rocks (see Attempting to Produce your Own Simulacrum of Commercially Available Soft Drinks) are even less appreciative, retaining the same rock-like demeanour whether we bother to look after them or not. The Japanese Tamagotchi, however, which became hugely popular in the mid to late 1990s, was simultaneously undeserving of affection (it was plastic) but also incredibly demanding. Designed to emit loud beeping noises when distressed, it had children rushing to its aid to either feed it, clean it or play with it, via the complex emotional interaction afforded by pressing buttons A, B or C.
Earlier models could potentially starve to “death” in a few hours if you were too busy worrying about real-life issues, so the toys began accompanying children to school, where lessons would be interrupted for urgent feeding sessions. Bandai, the manufacturer, was forced to introduce a “pause” button to allow the Tamagotchi’s life to be put on temporary hiatus – and that’s when it lost any ability to teach children about life and death. Because real pets can’t be paused, and nor do they have reset buttons that let you bring them back to life should you neglect them. Tamagotchi are still around, but most electronic “caring” has now shifted to websites like neopets.com, which are similarly addictive, but at least you don’t have to pay for them. And they don’t beep at you from under the bed.
Playing Amateur Football Wearing a Nose-bandage in Order to Improve your Performance
It’s not the taking part that counts in sport, it’s the winning – and athlet
es will go to great lengths to gain that competitive advantage over their opponents. While replacing your limbs with bionic, fuel-injected cylinders or injecting beta-blockers into your groin is not condoned by sport’s ruling bodies, no one could reasonably object to anyone wearing a sticking plaster over the bridge of the nose. Sportsmen, particularly footballers, started doing just that, and thousands of amateurs copied the look, running around local parks as if they were auditioning for a low-budget stage production about the life of Adam Ant. But what did it actually do?
Not a great deal. The theory behind it is sound enough: it slightly widens the nasal passages, allowing you to breathe through your nose more easily – which is why mouth-breathing snorers don’t disturb their partners quite as much when they wear these strips, as it helps them to keep their mouths shut. But if you need more air when you’re running around, well, you open your mouth. So nasal strips offer no benefit to footballers, squash players or cyclists, unless they discover that their jaws are wired shut and their lips superglued together. (Rare.) By 2000, the fad disappeared as people realized that it attracted hoots of derision rather than medals and trophies.
Excitedly Swapping Small Cardboard Discs
It’s the dream of any toy manufacturer to hit upon an idea that becomes hugely collectible, but is also dirt cheap to produce. Normally we’re wise to the inherent worthlessness of everyday objects, which is why plastic cups don’t change hands for hundreds of dollars on eBay, and there aren’t queues down the high street for soil. But occasionally our guard inexplicably drops – and one of those moments was when Pogs suddenly made whole nations of children go nuts for small circles of cardboard.
Pogging originated in Hawaii in the 1920s, when the cardboard caps on bottles of milk were used by those in the dairy delivery business to fill idle moments with a quick game. Stack a number of the pogs face-down into a tower; take another pog and throw it at the stack, with the aim of upturning as many pogs as possible. The ones you flipped over, you kept. Repeat until bored. When a Hawaiian teacher reintroduced the game to a maths class in 1991 (presumably to teach them how to count upturned circles of cardboard) a craze began, and was made more frenzied by the collecting and trading of pogs emblazoned with the faces of Aerosmith, or Power Rangers, or Michael Jordan. But the allure couldn’t last, and today huge collections sit in tubes in cupboards while kids blast their enemies to pieces in World Of Warcraft instead.
The Next Big Thing Page 14
