Popular Nostalgia

Toys & Games which bring back happy (or sad) memories. Remember when all you had was wooden blocks? You still preferred the box it came in? Tell us about it!

Before the time when everyone had a Tv in their room, on their phones, on their computers, maybe even attached to their face.. kids used to read. Kids used to read all the time. (I’m sure they still read a lot now… I’m sure they read this website ) The mothers helper, the baby sitter, [...]

The 90′s was an amazing era. You could even make your own ice cubes! Imagine that. Rather than using a freezer to make ice, or even ice lollies, you could use a snowman and his hat! I remember seeing an advert for Mr Frosty through my old black TV box. Those were the days where [...]

Mighty Max was an off-shoot of the Polly Pocket toy line and was aimed at boys. The plastic playsets are now worth a fortune to collectors as some of the pieces are so rare. The “Doom Heads” amongst other toys, sparked a trend for including a playset inside the head of a character. An animated [...]

Polly Pocket was pure nineties. The only thing I remember about them was the adverts, even though I had a toy myself. There was a little box which opened up to reveal Polly and her little house. You could take the game anywhere with you and buy bits to add to it. There’s a new [...]

Remember getting spokies in your Frosties? Remember trying to out-do your friends with the number you could fit on your bike? It used to make a racket but we loved spokies. They’re still widely available – especially the Disney ones. Some clever people used to get flashing ones or spokies that made a noise – [...]

I’m not sure precisely when, but at some stage in (I think) the 1970s, some genius came up with the incredible “Spacehopper”. What was, presumably, one small step for a man, became a giant leap for under 10s the world over, as they bounced around aimlessly for hours upon end. Spacehoppers were quite possibly the [...]

An excellent singer and perfect pin-up for teenage girls, Craig David was the poster boy for UK garage. His album sold loads and he became instantly famous for “7 days”, mainly because it was so liable to spoof versions and mockery at the method of seduction. Little goaty things and cornrows became de riguer for [...]

Those little mice and hamsters that lived in windmills and houses. I remember the little green plastic beds that had so many details, down to the mini-mattresses. You could collect all sorts of stuff for them, I even picked up some tiny minature tins of food to stock them up. Somehow, the mini animals were [...]

Supersoakers were a revolution in water gun technology. No more running back to the tap to fill up your pissy little revolver, oh no. Strap ten litres of water to your body and blast your siblings away all day long. I have a particularly vivid memory of a balmy summer afternoon near Bolton Abbey, visiting [...]

In 1993, Blue Peter did a feature on the Thunderbird’s Tracey Island because many kids at the time had the Thunderbirds toys including Thunderbirds 1,2,3,4 and 5. So Blue Peter showed us how to make our own Thunderbirds HQ using the traditional toilet roll, washing up liquid bottle and papier mache. Due to the requirement [...]

I’m quite embarassed to admit that have actually seen Power Rangers: The Movie. I’ll put this down to the young age of my cousins at the time. Back in the day I too used to watch Power Rangers, but this was the original power rangers. I thought it was pretty cool when the green Power [...]

These little plastic contraptions could be found in every household during the 1980′s and 1990′s, though they had been around for much longer. We used to look through the viewing lense to see things like the Leaning Tower of Pisa in full 3D glory. Despite being a thoroughly useless distraction in the league of kaleidoscopes, [...]

At the end of the 1980s, in 1989 to be precise, Nintendo released the Gamboy, which was to become one of the greatest selling hand-held games consoles of all time. Looking back, the monochrome colour scheme and basic games – such as Tetris – seem quite quaint and antiquated, but at the time, we were [...]

Yo-yos have always been around, though for some reason they become faddy every now and again. In my school, during the early 90s, the yo-yo fad came back hard. All of a sudden, everywhere you looked was someone “walking the dog” or doing a “cats cradle” or some other yo-yo move. There was always a [...]

The game time forgot, Top Trumps was great playground entertainment – there were so many different types of Top Trumps to get. The basic idea of Top Trumps is to collect all of the cards by “trumping” your opponents card. You take the next card out, and try to guess which of the statistics will [...]