Weird shit from an 80s childhood

[CandidFruit]

Reading through the retro sweets thread reminded me of some other random stuff from growing up in the early 80s.

Who else remembers the garbage pail kids? (I mean, Cabbage patch kids was bad enough!)
Now that is some seriously weird shit!

Mind you, I bet anything if you have the full set, you’ll probably be able to pay off your mortgage 😂

Glow worms, flower fairies, Strawberry shortcake, Rainbow bright, My little pony, Care bears

Button moon, Willow and the wisp, chocobloc (?) Let’s pretend, Finger mouse, Bagpuss

Knots landing, Magnum, Take the high road, Dynasty & Dallas, The wonder years (90’s maybe?) Midnight caller, Bergerac

And they always had to sort out the 'tracking' on the VHS player. 📼

Did you ever play Tea Shop on that computer?

It was the best day ever, when I was a kid.

I used to send Garbage Pail Kids stickers out to my pen pal (remember those?) in Australia, as they were banned there! Or so she told me anyway. Great cache for her showing them off in school 🤣

I still get nervous and mentally breathe in and cross my fingers if I'm anywhere near a pylon too And you couldn't pay me enough to go near a sparkler, much less light one or pick one up.

I had that exact same poster too! And one with a woman on the platform of a London bus with a bloke in the road kissing her (or maybe they were the other way round), and a cafe based one. I thought they were the height of sophistication in my black, red and grey bedroom 😂

I also had both a Girl's World and a fashion wheel, which is ironic as I have no fashion sense as an adult, and a Mr Frosty (it was crap) and loads of Sindys and Sindy stuff but never the big house, just the cardboard room dividers.

I haven't read the rest of the thread as I was brought up short by this poster so apologies if anyone has already mentioned this, but did anyone else have a Lundby dolls house?

I remember the Werebear toys (sorry can't remember who mentioned!) I had one with fangs and used to pretend it was my dog. We also seemed to spend a lot of time on claw machines and in arcades. I remember going home with my dungaree pockets weighed down with the big 10p pieces and black fingers from the coin dirt.

Also had a Ghostbusters T shirt I was very proud of. I remember sneaking down at 3am to watch Dirty Dancing when I stayed at a friends house and being a bit confused as to what all the fuss was about. I remember dad letting my friend and I hire all sorts of videos we were too young for (not sure how the video shop let us - we would be visibly choosing them then handing them over to dad to rent!) I remember Critters, Exorcist, Poltergeist (on that, anyone remember the BBC doing a show on a family where they had pipes banging? Scared me shitless!), Aliens, Gremlins...

Flex shampoo. The AIDS advert with the tombstone. Slam door trains and train seats that had the little silver lidded ashtrays in the arm rest and the smoking carriage near the guard.

That squeezy chocolate glaze was called Ice Magic. It came in a sort of cone-shaped bottle and different flavours - I can remember plain chocolate, mint, orange and was there a toffee one?

The squeezy chocolate glaze for ice cream that hardened when it hit the cold

Ice Magic.

Yes - still have my Boglin, complete with cardboard "cage" in the garage!

Also remember Melody Madness, like a jukebox electronic thing that lit up and you have to remember the sequences and play the tunes. Brilliant.
"Girls World" styling head.
Had the whole set of Garbage Pail Kids cards. Can't remember what I did with them.

Garbage Pail Kids (les Crados in French) were banned in my catholic school, so obviously there was a massive illegal trade going on at recess 😂
Absolutely loved them, but I always loved dirty, body horror stuff, so it all makes sense, it may have started with that and the weird Manimal opening sequence

Good God, only this week I have, for the first time ever at the age of 46, attempted to deep-fry something. And felt anxious while doing so AND had a soaked tea-towel at the ready to throw over the ensuing flames.

Because chip-fan fire adverts were absolutely terrifying in the 80s.

My 68 year old Mum took the piss and reminded me she successfully fried hundreds of portions of chips in a chip-pan in the 80s without burning the house down.

Though this is the same woman who switches off the fairy lights on her Christmas tree if she pops to the local shop for 10 minutes because of all the decades-ago TV public adverts of flaming Xmas tree fires caused by shitty old fairy lights 😄

Weebles “weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!”

lunaandlily
tiny little notebooks eg in the shape of hearts or with pictures of cats/horses/dogs etc on the sheets, or bigger sheets of paper that smelt nice or had pretty colours, had pretty edging etc. Collected it and traded with friends!! (born 1980)

Aged about 8, I got given the "Rupert and the Frog Song" VHS video. Which was fine. But... after that ended, there were two further videos appended to the cassette, also written by Paul and Linda McCartney.

The first was a song called "Seaside Woman" which was also... fine... although it might raise a few eyebrows today as Paul sings in a fake Jamaican patios with lyrics about the happiness of being a poor, black, shack-dwelling woman who lives in a costal slum.

The second was a song called "The Oriental Nightfish" which was written by Linda McCartney and had an animated video by Ian Emes. This thing BLEW MY CHILDHOOD MIND. It was so weird, and the animation so sexually suggestive. I genuinely had nightmares about it. I've recently discovered there is a support group on Facebook called "Oriental Nightfish ruined my childhood". I mean the title is slightly tongue-in-cheek, my childhood wasn't ruined but it was affected!!

I have several Aunts, the youngest being only 10 years older than me.

So when I was late primary-schooled aged in the late 80s, she was late teens/early 20s and I absolutely worshipped her and she had the black, grey and red bedroom in my Nans house!

Black cheap MDF furniture from Argos i think, grey wallpaper with an 80s jazzy pattern and she had a massive decal of red lipstick lips on one of her walls with "ooh la la" underneath as if it had been written in red lipstick. Grey and red jazzy duvet cover and i seem to remember duvets were quite new. Or they were to my family. And she worked in Athena so had alllllll the posters. I thought her bedroom was just IT!

Mr Frosty was one of the few things I wanted in the 80s but didn't get. I bought it in adulthood and it was indeed, shite.

Snap! We have photos in Snowdonia somewhere, same pose!
Wet and miserable was the holiday theme. Cagouled up, but we're all wearing shorts because it was 'summer' and therefore shorts are what you wear.
When I look through the old photo albums, it's like we've been photoshopped around various uk holiday destinations in the same soggy outfits, with the same miserable faces at varying stages of growth.
Always taken just before we returned to our soggy tent to sit on collapsing camping stools (finger crushing bastards!) and watch the rain...
Quickly followed by hurrying to get everything off the ground because a torrent of muddy rain water was running in 😂

Does anyone remember a craze for invisible dog collars which lasted one brief summer and I think it got started by featuring on That's Life or something? It was a cheap dog collar attached to a lead which had wire going through it. So you could hold it in such a way that it looked like you were taking the invisible dog for a walk. There were loads of knock off versions being sold in the shops in my small seaside town that year.

It was about that time that there was also a craze of Katherine Hamnet style 'I shot JR' t-shirts.

My Dad was a huuuuge video fan in the 80, I think he thought he was before his time, getting on board at the start and sneering at betamax lol and it was a weekly treat on a Friday night to go to the video shop before having a chippy tea.

My brother and I were allowed to pick a kids VHS each and my Dad would get 1 or 2 films for him and my Mum to watch.

I begged him to let me watch Dirty Dancing as it was the movie everyone was talking about in the playground and he did, but watched it first and then watched it with me and fast forwarded through all the bits he thought were unsuitable for my young eyes 👀

Though he didn't seem to bother checking out a lot of other movies first as defo remember seeing things I shouldn't have. But that was very possibly because my brother and I would sneak around, putting films on when my parents were busy doing something else or having a Sunday afternoon chill.

I'm just remembering HOW boring Sunday afternoons were because Dad would go to the pub for a couple of hours as was traditional for many men in that era lol then come home, lovely Sunday roast then Mum and Dad would want a nap or just tell us kids to give them a rest and amuse ourselves in the house for a bit. And it was probably only an hour or so but felt like eons!

And then when I reached adulthood I realised how absolutely fantastic and precious chill Sunday afternoons are 😃

Oh yes pixie boots and Laura Ashley wallpaper in your bedroom. That often happened as a birthday present ( can’t imagine my dcs agreeing to that!) My best friend and I had this - harebell in pink and another design that was a sort of tiny leaf in pink on white and mixed with white on pink! My friends older sister got the latter in navy. So 80’s!

A boy at my school actually WAS a minipop!

Anyone remember The Kids of Degrassi street? Followed by the much more grownup and edgy Degrassi Junior High? That covered some quite controversial issues if I remember. Bit like the US version of Grange Hill.

Wasn’t allowed them as we had Fisher price who didn’t wobble. My friend had the weebles camper van which I coveted.

Yes. Very tiny little notebooks you could only fit a few words on a page.

And often had pictures on (birthday cards did too) of little girls in old-fashioned Holly-Hobby type dresses and floppy hats so you couldn't see their face.

That seemed to be very common in the 80s.

The Lundby ones were quite fancy weren’t they? And the people were quite realistic ( the mum had boob bumps?)

Adding Trumpton to button moon