Now it's Pokemon and pogo sticks

THE news that the toy sensation of the 1920s, the pogo stick, is threatening a comeback - in the form of a new variation called the Airgo - will surprise nobody who has recently seen the Hula Hoop, the Slinky, Clackers, the Space Hopper and, latterly, the scooter resurface.

There's a logic to toy reincarnation based on the defining characteristic of children. Not their much-vaunted imagination, but the ceaseless urge they share with many mental patients of alw ays wanting to be either in motion or setting inanimate objects in motion.

This explains the resurgence of the 1958 hula hoop, which was designed to help the American petroleum giant Phillips get rid of warehouses full of an unwanted new plastic called Marlex.

The exhausting swirly thing kids did to keep the hoop in motion kept them bizarrely happy and exhausted them in a way snakes and ladders didn't.

The Space Hopper, a Seventies craze, did the same for the Hula Hoop generation's children. The Space Hopper was a form of kiddie cocaine. Like the pogo stick, this large rubber ball with kangaroo ears looked great fun, but when you got onto it, you realised that far from being really bouncy, it was your legs that did all the work, while the ears never gave enough grip to hang on properly. The result was that the more you boinged, the more you wanted to boing. No surprise that, like better drugs, itsappeal is cross-generational.

The Slinky, that strange, industrial-looking coiled spring from 1953, which "walks" down stairs, and Clackers, which arrived from Spain in 1971 and are now irritating adults again today, equally satisfy the Pokmon generation's compulsion to expend kinetic energy uselessly.

But for every craze, there are a dozen toys less likely ever to be popular again for the very good reason that they were always rubbish. Strangely, it is these - the toys that spectacularly failed the test of time, that from the first nanosecond incited the sharp, unforgettable letdown of disappointment - that are infinitely more appealing and nostalgic.

Who, for instance, can forget the Chad Valley Give-a-Show Projector of 1962?

Almost everyone, thank fully, because it was absolutely terrible. This was the toy your better-off friend had, but you were warned away from by your parents. A battery-operated plastic film projector, it came with six loops of cartoon favourites in plastic cartridges.

The lens quality was rotten, and the jerky images it threw onto a pinned-up bed sheet were fuzzy. It was a massive hit, but the amusement lasted no more than 10 minutes. In that sense, your parents were quite right. It was a smashing toy - to play with at a friend's house.

Corgi Toys' James Bond Aston Martin theoretically gave young boys in 1965 the chance to enjoy the violence of the films their parents watched.

Problem was, it was crap. It didn't have an ejector seat, and the popup machine guns were badly moulded. It remains a travesty that it became the first official Toy of the Year.

The Rolf Harris Stylophone of the early Seventies could have won the Nobel Prize for Rubbish. The Stylophone was a small electronic organ played - one note at a time, no chords - with a "pen" on a curly white wire. Its sound quality was one level above that which could be achieved with a comb and a piece of school lavatory paper. The Stylophone was unique in becoming almost instantly an object of nostalgic affection. No sooner was it out, its cheesy box displaying a grinning Rolf, than D avid Bowie was using its reedy beeping in Space Oddity. Gone but, tragically, not forgotten - there's still a brisk trade in Stylophones on the internet.

Timing was the genius of the Rubik's Cube craze of 1980. It came out just before Christmas, and was the answer to millions of stocking- filling problems. The cube came from the then-communist state of Hungary, when Professor Erno Rubik, a designer, made the prototype to amuse children. The Cube was instantly annoying and unsatisfying. The essence of its crapness was that nobody wanted to be the kind of boffin who could solve it.

Stories nonetheless abounded of schools banning the Cube because it was distracting pupils, and of doctors reporting a new form of wrist strain blamed on persistent twisting. Other Rubik puzzles follow ed, all just as infuriating, but nothing approached the tedium and success of the original Cube.

Cabbage Patch Dolls and My Little Pony were two gaggingly cutesy 1984 crazes. Cabbage Patch's gimmick was that each came with an official "birth certificate". Its designer was a young art student, Xavier Roberts, who combined an interest in sculpture with the art of quilting. He called his dolls "little people", and sold them, complete with names from a 1937 baby book, in craft shows in the American Deep South. These originals are worth thousands today. The mass market vinyl-headed versions are not.

My Little Pony at least had a curiously psychedelic style. They were small luridly-coloured hollow plastic horses of indeterminate gender with names like Bubbles and long, nylon manes and tails. Little girls would brush them and plait their tails. Little brothers had a habit of "borrowing" My Little Ponies, which caused a flurry of concern to early-Eighties parents who didn't understand that this was (usually) so they could race them alongside their cars.

For the Nineties generation, the principal cause of crap-toy disappointment was the 1996 Buzz Lightyear.

Buzz, superhero of the film Toy Story, had an electronic voice to croak out catchphrases such as "I am Buzz Lightyear, I come in peace" and "There seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere". He had a laser beam, karate-chop action and pop-out wings.

The media provided the obligatory marketing tool in the form of a supposed Buzz Lightyear famine that hit the shops at Christmas. But Buzz still didn't quite hack it once children had seen the film. Still less so did his more easily available sidekick, a toy cowboy called Woody.

It was Woody who ironically stole the show as Christmas 1996's most purchased (as opposed to most popular) toy.

You couldn'tgive them away now.

Copyright 2001
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