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 😂

I had an a la carte kitchen, a big yellow teapot and a fashion wheel.

I remember those things that were like primitive virtual reality headsets . You put the pictures in and looked through the eye holes. What were they called?

Food - loved an orange findus crispy pancake and thought iced magic was the height of sophistication.

Those cheap tubs of frozen mousse that came in a stack were delicious.

Also loved a cheesy moment and to this day I miss pyramint.

View master 😎

I LOVED my a la carte kitchen. And the ad where the little girl gave her Dad a Swiss roll on top of cold beans on a plastic plate.

Gawd, yes. Computer lessons were wholly unproductive and boring because you spent most of the time just standing around the computer watching someone else press keys.

Going into Sperrings and seeing boobs on the top shelf - out and proud.

Being able to just walk out of school. And supposedly anyone could just walk in.

Legs and Co

Day of the Triffids & Threads.

View master?

My brother and I grew up watching grease
It was one of my favourite movies,until the time it popped up on TV(I hadn't seen it for years at this point)
'Its grease kids!shall we watch it?'
That led to a lot of questions I wasn't ready to answer
As a child,a lot went over my head-as an adult its very questionable
Change who you are and he will fall in love with you (and all the sex,abortions and undertones thrown in for good measure)

I have the Keyper in the pic - my DD found it and took it so it's probably missing all its accessories now.

Loved point horror books. Used to read one per day minimum 😄

I was watching videos on YouTube yesterday about the 'Satanic panic' in the 80s and there was a video of an absolute loon in the 80s saying Rainbow Brite was part of the Satanic plot to possess children with demons.

Because Rainbows = gay so obviously demonic, and she had a star on her face which was really a satanic pentagram.

It was batshit. I do love that I've had 2 reminders of Rainbow Brite in 2 days after not thinking about her for years.

Care Bears, Keypers, My Little Pony, Snuggle Bumms ....everything was so colourful! Remember being scared by my brother's Gloworm giving off an eerie green glow in the night!

VO5 Apple shampoo (green, red or yellow, dependent on whether you were greasy normal or dry) and my grandma's Opium perfume.

My Dad getting up at 5am on Aug 1st to collect his new Ford Sierra from the car dealer, putting on the furry seat covers to protect it from us kids, then pootling down to Weston Supermare at 30 mph on the B roads as you had to "run in" new cars.

Oh my god I'd forgotten Boglin. We had the big one in the cage box. If you still have one they are up on ebay for £100!

It was the bubble gum.

So many of my fave 80s are in hindsight, extremely problematic.

I had a massive crush on Steve Gutenberg in the 80s and recently rewatched Police Academy and Cocoon and in both, he was a peeper spying on undressing women. Luckily he got his comeuppance in Cocoon when the woman he was peeping on peeled her entire skin off, revealing she was an alien. Hopefully he learned his lesson 🤣

I burned part of my glo-worms face off holding it directly onto an 80s super-hot light bulb in my bedside lamp to charge it up 😃

What is fancy paper?? Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere - haven’t rtft!

I was born 87 but have older siblings so remember their toys well. Carebears, Werebears (one called Fang!) and a big plastic tree play set. A big teapot play set as well. As far as other weird stuff goes, I clearly remember my aunt settling down in an armchair with a coffee and ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair, lighting a fag and proceeding to breastfeed. MENTAL.

Sweet Valley High! I wouldn't let my kid anywhere near those books as they are politically and femininistically questionable, but how grown up I felt when Bruce Patman's hand inched towards Jessica Wakefield's bra strap.

I had maroon corduroy pedal pushers (my mum called them knickerbockers), a ruffly shirt, a tartan kilt fastened with a big safety pin, so many velvet dresses with pie frill collars, several batwing sleeve jumpers and two sparkly boob tubes, one black, one pink. Most of my shirts had shoulder pads, but my mum removed them for me.

I'm sure I remember sweets called "curse chews" which were chews with black wrappers that had curses written on them in red ("may you grow tentacles" or similar). No one else remembers them though.

And a new stationery set every Christmas and birthday, if not several. I was terrible at answering letters so most of it went unused.

Logo! One of the first things I ever remember doing on a computer. Must have been 90s tho it was secondary school for me. I remember my dad programmed a BBC computer to play happy birthday once before that too.

Yes but not much of them. I was born 71 so whilst I was sort of into Cabbage Patch Kids and Care Bears luckily I was just a little bit too old for them! My much younger half sisters though (born 83 and 89) both had all of them including the Garbage Pail Kids cards.

I remember the head teacher going along the line for school photos combing everyone's hair and fiddling with their collars and ties.

We had no water at school apart from a water fountain outside at playtime that would have huge queues on hot days.

No lunchbox police. You could have a chocolate spread sandwich, crisps a trio, a kit kat and an um bongo for lunch and no one bat an eyelid. You would probably have had a packet of crisps at playtime too.

Old tyres to play with in the playground. The smell of hot tyres in summer transports me right back.

Ah yes I had that !

I also read the Famous Five series. Tried to get my dcs onto it recently and was astonished how dated it was! Lashings of ginger beer! 😃 I tried reading it aloud to one DC as it hadn’t been well received and I only had to start reading sound to realise why. Got looked at like I hark back to prehistory!

I'm not that poster but in the 80s, I had a lot of very treasured pads of paper that had say 10 pages pink, then mint green, yellow, duck egg blue so when you flicked the pages like a flip-book it was a pretty rainbow of colours.

Then the agony of choice of which colour of my multi-coloured biro to use on which colour paper..

So many amazing memories, and makes.me realise how privileged my childhood was, as I had most of the toys and books referenced. I always think of roaming free, in and out of all of the neighbours house and coming back at dusk, playing my Famous Five cassettes at bedtime, the tv being wheeled in so we could watch Badger Girl, and I loved the Adventure Game. Had Strawberry Shortcake wallpaper, and yes, I watched American Werewolf at age 7 and wet the bed for a week!

Panini yes to World Cup Sticker albums.

In 1982 the World Cup was held in Spain (Barcelona?) and I was 10
and DB was 8. We had a young lodger who worked in marketing and PR for FIFA and she went to Spain for it and brought us back loads of merchandise including T-shirts, baseball caps, banners and before that gave us stickers and sticker albums and any other promo stuff she had. We (well DB) was very popular at school with that.

Snap. Had the coloured paper and a few care bears too. Coloured paper sometimes came with little stickers.