We live in an age where children have lost the use of their legs, grow to immense proportions as soon as they leave the womb and develop incredible hand-to-eye co-ordination from constant operation of hand held gaming devices, according to an un-acknowledged source children today spend almost 105% of their waking hours in front of a computer monitor or TV set, and then some of their sleeping hours too.
I am developing a theory that the increase in knife and gun crime in the UK is in direct correlation to the advent of the computer game and its ability to maim, disable and kill your opponents in a virtual world where nothing hurts and you always live to fight another day – a bit like the A Team did for the generation before.
It wasn’t like that when ah wor nobbut a lad.
In the 1960’s we had toys to hurt your friends with.
Take the Secret Sam Suitcase for instance, YouTube Video here, the toy of the year in 1965, the toy that every boy wanted that christmas. With the cold war at its height of crazy suspicion and spy movies all the rage on TV and cinema it was an obvious marketing ploy to introduce a toy that enabled small boys all over the western world to become top secret secret agents.
The Secret Sam Suitcase was a hard plastic briefcase inside of which was an automatic pistol, a real, working automatic pistol that fired life sized hard plastic bullets of the sort used to control rioting mobs in the days before the Human Rights people banned them. Upon opening of the briefcase one could also assemble a rifle with periscope sight enabling you to hide behind a wall and view your enemy beyond without revealing your location although of course any attempt to shoot the gun at that point would result in you shooting the wall, a point that was often forgotten.
The real masterpiece of the Secret Sam Suitcase was the fact that when packed away inside its suitcase you could still fire the automatic pistol from within by use of a secret button on the handle of said suitcase, and of course the hard plastic bullets could really hurt your friends, proper stinging hurt too, raise a weal they could, possibly mark them for several days.
And so we all wandered the streets, 11 year olds surreptitiously carrying black plastic suitcases everywhere we roamed, pretending it was the norm for 11 year olds to carry black plastic briefcases, the old ladies of the neighbourhood probably couldn’t believe their eyes with all of us walking the streets during the school holidays looking for all the world as if we were going to work at the bank.
The Johnny Seven rifle, YouTube Video here, was of a similar ilk but without the plastic briefcase, just an out and out automatic rifle firing the same hard plastic bullets as the Secret Sam Suitcase did, hard plastic bullets that could “have your eye out” according to our mums.
Mothers always knew of someone, a friend who lived some streets away, a friend of a friend who knew someone from another district who’s son had had an eye taken out by a hard plastic bullet of the same sort as those dangerous Johnny Seven guns, the mothers grapevine was full of stories like that, I still live in fear of chemistry sets after my mother told me of a little boy who lived in another district, a friend of a friend of hers who had had a hole blown out of his stomach big enough to put your fist in by a chemistry set experiment that went wrong – god how I wanted to have a chemistry set like that, a chemistry set that could blow holes in your stomach big enough to put your hand in, although why you’d want to put your hand inside your stomach I’m not sure, but still…
Holy Cow that Johnny Seven gun is cool!
I remember my old cap pistols. With the rolls of paper caps that always got jammed in the gun.
Good times! Really good times!!!
WHAT! You had a Secret Sam! You were posh. Coolest I managed was a James Bond Walther PPK. Not even the cap firing variety, we made our own bang bang noises.
I did have a big (plastic) shell firing canon though, that really hurt when it got ya.
Ed – I knew someone who had a Johnny Seven, he tired of carrying it around all day though – you don’t exactly have the element of surprise on your side when you’re carrying a rifle bigger than yourself around all day.
Al – We were posh times two, both me and Ned had one each, they had cameras too, real plastic cameras that took real film, we never used them though, I can only dream of what sort of photographs you could have taken from inside a suitcase.