Toys & Games

How come the Four Marys are still in the Third Form at St Elmo's? Have they really been kept down for thirty odd years....

The most popular kids of the 80s had ugly squished faces, stumpy arms and chubby little hands . . . They were The Cabbage...

Imagine that the Brothers Grimm invented a board game. Now take out the witches. Welcome to Candy Land. Eleanor Abbott was recovering from polio when...

Part of the beauty of early arcade games was the preponderance of "truth in advertising". What you read was what you got. So when...

The first cap guns were born out of economic necessity. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, several gun manufacturers found themselves with...

With a change of clothes and mask, Captain Action could alter his identity into some of the mightiest heroes on the planet. The basic 12"...

Battery-powered thing from Matchbox which launched ball-bearings onto 3 bouncy drums in succession and then onto a scoring receptacle at the other end. The ball would then...

Young boys have always been fascinated with war toys, but most were just that: toys. No matter how fancy that cap gun got, it...

Dolls were always good for lending a listening ear after a tough day at preschool, but Chatty Cathy actually talked back. Tired of having to...

The board game's inventor was a British law clerk named Anthony Pratt, who dreamt it up circa 1947 while walking his beat as a...

In 1968, the Colorform company made a bold attempt at cracking the action figure market with a set of seven bendable rubber "Outer Space...

In the early 1950s, a company called Colorforms hit the educational toy market with their eponymous products which "stick like magic". The original sets contained...

The history of coin-operated video arcade games began not with a whimper, but with several explosive bangs, rendered in simple black-and-white graphics by a...

Conkers are the hard fruit of the Horse Chestnut tree. These are collected in autumn (we used to throw sticks up the trees to...

Designed for pre-schoolers, Cootie (or Beetle as it was known in the UK, where the word "Cootie" has no meaning whatsoever) hit its mark...

As with many great British companies, the origins of Corgi lie overseas. In 1933 Philip Ullman, head of Tippco - a very successful German...

In 1885, cousins Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith took over the Peekskill Chemical Company in the US, named it Binney & Smith, and...

Originally made by the American Aerosol Company in 1965, the "fun foam soap" delighted kids with pop culture character designs such as Popeye, Spider-Man...

Creepy Crawlers were the first species to emerge from Mattel's 'Thingmaker' concept - other do-it-yourself kits would follow in the decades to come, like...

If you were tired of scratching out tic-tac-toe games on sweaty notebook paper that you passed back and forth in the middle of history...