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Beyond the valley of Spangles and white dog poo

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Most of us here remember times when life was more simple and being a child meant wearing goalposts instead of jumpers and playing out on our bikes until the town’s factory hooter went and then our mams would shout us in for us tea, which was liver and onions with a bowl of prunes for afftahs.

You get my drift. Anyway, I am desperately trying to dress this post up as something different to the Peter Kay-type routines about the old days. In fact, I suspect the Peter Kay routine itself is probably 25 years old now (eeeh…them were the days, eh).

I was mainly brought up in Woking so God knows why I get all northern when I talk about 50+ years ago. I blame the Pythons.

So let’s discuss things that we haven’t heard about already. I want to talk about transfers. Transfers were bought from a newsagent or petrol station and typically involved a cardboard landscape – a non-descript desert-type environment. Let’s say there’s a dinosaur theme – you’d have a sheet of TRexes, Stegasauruses and Triceratopses and many more besides – and you would rub the images with a coin and t-daa! There it is! Roar! And so on.

Many of these were themed to cash in on whatever was big at the time. Star Wars, Jaws, Alien, Grease, Kramer vs Kramer…not just films, pretty much anything. You could create your own battle featuring Darth Vader balancing a droid on the end of his light sabre, or putting Jabba the Hutt’s head on Princess Leia’s body. You could introduce transfers from other packs…how about Ipswich goalkeeper Laurie Sivell confronting Moses at the parting of the Red Sea? Absolutely!

I was talking about these to my young family yesterday and they had even less to say than usual. It’s not a thing – they don’t know what I’m on about. But YOU do, don’t you?

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Comments

  1. I do remember them, and how you had to apply exactly the right amount of even pressure to make the whole thing come off in one piece. Even if you did the results were underwhelming. There were transfer tattoos as well. They had to be wetted before the clear backing was applied to the skin before being peeled off, invariable taking half the intended design with it.

  2. Transfer tattoos were my thing. I had arms covered in inky art like (a very skinny) Popeye. Until bathtime, when they all washed off.

    Can’t stand tats now that I’m A Middle Clarse.

  4. Produced by Waddingtons in Leeds, luckily as schoolkids some of us had access to the site where they dumped unwanted sheets of the transfers which we’d sell at school cheap which boosted pocket money.

  6. Early feedback suggests that they weren’t great. I don’t agree entirely with that, hours of fun could be had. However, I admit that having spaffed up my pocket money on them I may have made the best of it rather than admit I’d wasted my money.

    • Yes those are the very ones. Although the dinosaur ones aren’t chronologically accurate. If you asked a T-Rex to “travel” in time to either humans or Stegosauruses – it would be quicker for them to choose humans. We are much easier to chomp but pretty soon afterwards we’d be blamming it to pieces with our firearms. There’s a moral in there somewhere.

  9. I confess that since I was an actual grownup in the 70s these passed me by, although I do remember tat transfers from my own childhood. By the time my kids were old enough to take an interest Panini ruled the roost.

  12. Panini Football Stickers.
    Got, Got, Need.
    The joy of opening a new packet and finding a shiny foil club badge and Kenny Dalglish.
    Thr going rate for swaps on those? 3 to 5 stickers in return.

    • Too old when they became stickers, but I remember the previous Soccer Stars sets where you had to physically paste the cards into a book. The cards came with a hard, flat pink stick of bubble gum which I always threw away.

  15. Jeez, yes. I remember I used to love those Action Transfers. This is the first time I’ve thought of them in well over 40 years.

    I have memories of comics at that time having some fantastic giveaways. Fantastic meaning superbly odd. I recall building a series of cheap polystyrene gliders in the shapes of toothpaste tubes etc. it strikes me looking back these surreal ideas were either influenced or straight ahead bought in from the US comic scene, which was wacky as f in the ‘70’s.

    I’ll try and dig up a few examples of what I half remember.

      • The annoying thing about those ads was that they wouldn’t accept orders from outside the US.

        To this day I dread lying on the beach as I remain totally defenseless should some burly bully arrive, kick sand in my face and take my girl

  19. Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum, with the extremely poor cartoon strip joke thingy in the wrapper.

    I remember in junior school there was an intense but short-lived craze for Top Trumps cards, mostly featuring cars and their varied specifications. As I had very little interest in being a proto-Clarkson, I was very much out of that loop.

  20. My sister and I used to get free gifts in our packets of breakfast cereal – mainly Shreddies, but also Coco Pops and Frosties if we were lucky. Mainly those transfer figures worth the backdrop the back of the cardboard packet, but also sometimes Tom and Jerry plastic gloves puppets. My dad made us eat the packet down to the last crumbs before we could extract the free gift. There was no emptying out the cereal into a large mixing bowl as soon as it was back from the supermarket!

  24. I’m almost certain Peter Kay etc has covered this, but another feature of 70s culture was the “flasher”. Comedy sketch shows of the time would have a shifty man dressed in a long brown overcoat who would leap in front of hapless females (preferably nuns) and dramatically open up his coat. How we laughed!

    When you get a bit older, you find out that people exposing themselves to strangers in the community are not at all amusing. Yet rumours of a local “flasher” would promote laughter and intrigue. Every now and then you might hear that someone well-known has been caught flashing. It seemed to be described that way to make it sort of palatable. Something we kind-of understand but I am sure it was a catch-all descriptor for some very damaged people.

  25. If we are talking about sweets, my favourites that are no longer avalable AFAIK :

    Tootie Frooties (Skittles come very close)
    Tootie Minties
    Toffos (multiple flavour version)

  26. My hamper has arrived! (Rummage) Curly Wurly, Texan Bar, Yorkie, Space Dust, 10 cigarettes from a machine on the high street, rabies, a Green Goddess, a dog that says “sausages”, a cash handling system which involves a capsule inserted into a tube which whizzes upstairs. They really put a lot of thought into these.

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