Nostalgia Trip: Top Trumps

Flying into Gatwick airport recently, and subsequently nosing around a W.H. Smith, I was reminded of the old maxim: 'Great Britain and the USA are two nations divided by a common language. And Top Trumps.'

In fact, I'm quite sure the only reason it's taken this long for me to blog about one of my favourite playground pastimes in the '70's is because the phenomenon is very alien to almost everyone on this side of the pond. Let me explain in simple terms: starting in the mid '70's, kids played a game called Top Trumps. The game consisted of (usually) 32 cards similar to normal playing cards in size. Each card would feature a photograph or illustration, and below would be listed several statistics about the subject. If it was a car, it might list the top speed, or the number of cylinders; for a soccer player, it might be the number of caps (international appearances) or his age. Players would divide out the cards and then face off with one person selecting a statistic and the others (most often it was a two player game, head to head) would compare, with the best one winning. The object was to collect all the cards. It was simple enough, and portable enough, to be played anywhere, at anytime, for a few minutes or a couple of hours.

Most of all (and I'm facetiously wondering if this is why it never caught on in the States) the cards were a form of education. After playing for a while, you could point out a Vauxhall Viva to your uncle and tell him the horsepower and engine capacity. You knew what year the Luftwaffe introduced the Bachem Natter (1945) or how many times Gordon McQueen had scored for Scotland (3, at the time the card was printed).

Initially the sets were quite predictable: cars, boats, planes, etc. Then, more interesting designs came out, such as horror cards (with stats such as "killing power") and cars of the future, and perhaps most controversially, Stars of Cricket. Collecting the packs became quite a hobby.

They died out in the '80's once Atari and Commodore has brought all the kids indoors. But then, strangely enough, the Top Trumps brand was revived 1in 1999 and since then many new packs have been issued, featuring TV shows (24, Doctor Who, Postman Pat), movies (Shrek, Lord of the Rings, X-Men), sports (soccer, for the most part) and quirky (Bratz, FHM Covergirls, Famous Marmelades, etc).

We didn't really do it at the time but it occurs to me that there was a great potential for mixing the packs up. You could have had the Death Star Vs an Austin Metro, Joe Jordan Vs Godzilla, or a Norwegian fire engine (I'm not making that up) Vs the USS Nimitz.

Naturally, there are many people who have devoted a lot more time on the net to the subject. A good starting point would be The Ultimate Reference Site. Then there's the wikipedia entry and the official Top Trumps website. You can also find complete sets in various places, such as Horror, Rally Cars (do Americans know what a 'Rally' is?), World Cup 1978, Fabulous Buggies, and I'm sure plenty more if you look around.

Here is a montage of some cards I remember from the seventies. Obviously, we didn't have cards like this.



Oh yeah, and this being the age of empowerment, there are several places you can make your own cards, such as:

Nostalgia Trip: Action Transfers

Anyone remember these things? Minutes of fun guaranteed, thanks to Action Transfers or Letraset, as I seem to remember they were also called.

You could relive the best moments from movies by carefully rubbing your transfer onto a generic background using a ballpoint pen. I remember this because it was about the only time a ballpoint pen would find it's way into my grubby little mitt.

Inevitably, the transfers would go wrong, and Obi-Wan Kenobi would get cut in half - without a lightsaber. They were permanent, so if you accidentally rubbed on a stormtrooper upside down, you had to claim that the force had thrown him against the wall or something.

It wasn't just Star Wars, either. At one time you could get rub-on transfers for anything. There's a website devoted to the subject here.

Well folks I looked for more exciting websites devoted to the subject, but I guess that's your lot.

Nostalgia Trip: Comics of the 70's (Part 1)

Here are some comics I remember from the 1970's.

"Look out for Look-In!"
I mainly remember Look -In because it was the magazine my sister got every week. It had something for everyone - pin up posters of Barry Sheene and David Essex for the girls, comic strips of Space 1999, Sapphire & Steel and The Six Million Dollar Man for the boys. Lots of TV shows. Movies. Sport. Music. A bit of everything. I remember looking at the TV listings which were quite complicated because many different regional networks showed different shows - for example, everyone raved about Tiswas but we never got to see it. There was Grampian, Thames, Anglia and our local channel, Channel TV. There are two websites devoted to the magazine - John's Look-Out [now defunct] (which has a large selection of covers and other info) and the Look-In Picture Strip Archive.

Similarly titled, but quite different, was Look And Learn. This was a comic I would read while visiting the dentist or find at a jumble sale. The magazine had quite an old-fashioned, 1950's look. There were a lot of historical stories, which I don't really remember (I wasn't much of history fan back then) but there was also The Trigan Empire, a very ambitious and fantastically illustrated comic strip. The strips I remember were drawn by Oliver Frey, who went on to produce the covers for computer magazines Crash! and Zzap64! in the mid-80's.

The rights to the magazine are now owned by Look And Learn Ltd, and they have a comprehensive website here.

Who doesn't remember Desperate Dan and his cowpies, or Korky the Cat, or even Bully Beef and Chips? Did you know that The Dandy is the world's longest running comic, and still exists today? Bet it costs more than 4p though!

Between this and The Beano, there were always chortles to be had. Now, where did the chortles go? Sometimes, I feel like I'm a frickin' pensioner, man. What do six year old boys read these days? Maybe it was a British thing. Anyone else care to comment on what they read when they were kids?

Some basic Dandy information here, and the official website is here.

I've run out of steam for now. Next week In eight years' time I'll post Part 2.