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Ask mother to get Shreddies ‘Skin Diver’ packets (He really dives!)

“Ask mother to get Shreddies ‘Skin Diver’ packets” is an almost Dadaist instruction, or like something a schizophrenic person’s head voice might say, even in the context of the early “pester power” advertisement above. Try saying “Ask mother to get Shreddies ‘Skin Diver’ packets” a hundred times. “Mother, get Skin Diver packets.” I’m sorry boy, but […]

“We can certainly approve of and understand the player with the flute”

Eagle‘s slightly suspect enthusiasm for all things Eastern Bloc and totalitarian (holidays in Leningrad, etc.) emerges yet again, this time in an article about North Korean postage stamps that somehow takes in “gosh, how exciting” and “silly foreigners” at the same time. The two subheaders being “Stringed instruments” and “Ironing board” demonstrates this duality quite […]

HALLO, THERE!

Am I the only person disturbed by the way this robot barges in with HALLO, THERE! and then proceeds to answer “interesting” questions about things like Walschaerts’ valve gears, questions that no normal person would ever ask? Maybe it’s just because I’ve actually met humans who do exactly the same thing, and who don’t have […]

Spring-heeled Jack and spring-heel ‘Jacks’

People nowadays complain a lot about health and safety regulations, but really… would you want your child or anyone who was near to your child taking “larger-than-life” steps in these? Nothing could be further from the space age and from being “like an astronaut on the moon” than two industrial springs welded to the bottom of crude (and probably razor-sharp) metal plates, held on with what look very like cat collars if the illustration is at all accurate.

Cook me Amadeus

Another strange and excessively complicated competition from Eagle, dated (top right) 2 July 1960. The Modern Cooking Promotional Committee (i.e. a consortium of British cooker manufacturers) went to the very limits of creative and lateral thinking when they came up with this competition that requires adolescent boys to identify nine cookers. Thrilling. I never met […]

A wonderful holiday in Moscow and Leningrad

I think it’s a safe assumption that both then and now, relatively few children have a burning ambition to go on holiday in Russia. The only person who immediately comes to mind as voluntarily having a holiday in the USSR in the early 1960s is Lee Harvey Oswald, and we all know how that turned out.