Last year I was wandering around that emporium of useless Tat Hawkin's Bazaar with my Daughter and her friend. For some reason at the time the two of them had decided that everything within Hawkin's was great and cool and was needed right now "please please"
When we did manage to get out of the shop I started to drift back in my mind to days gone by when a 10 year old me living in the city of Terminal Boredom got quite obsessed with some similar tat. This similar tat could be found within the pages of Marvel and DC comics. Yes for 45 cents (it was ads from the USA) I would learn to Hypnotize people, I could go into school and hypnotise my Teachers and friends into giving me money and good grades. Or I could buy some Xray glasses and never ever have to use a Hospital Xray Dept in my life because for $1.00 I had my own, and I would charge people for my Xray service. If I bought a Money Maker I could spend the summer break just making my own money, it was going to be that simple, I would be rich. Or maybe I should send of for an 8 ft Balloon because that would have just been really handy. I have now excepted that all this old tat was really needed, we needed it because It helped us kill 6 weeks in the summer. 6 weeks spent with your friends discussing what we were going to do with Giant Balloons Hypno Coins, becoming a Kung Fu master in a few days and other such things. Things which we were never really ever going to buy. Now I just have a loft full of different needy tat, Records/Cds, old laptops/computers, Synths/Keyboards, piles of old comics and books, things that will come in handy one day because "I just might need them". I never did order nothing from these ads but after much pestering I did get a Gat Gun and spent the rest of the summer in the Garden shooting at tin cans and some old Airfix Models (I should have kept them) These ad pages came from one of my many old copies of Tomb of Dracula.
Keith, you've hurled a ton of memories my way with this one. Didn't they used to advertise some way of growing sea horses, too? Never did get a pair of X-ray Specs, mind. There was always some sort of testimonial from someone like Ike Furtwangler of Wisconsin who would swear by the power of on or other of these products. Good times,
ReplyDeleteBazooka Joe was another one. Spent way to much time chewing gum so I could get some unobtainable radio controlled hovercraft for six million Bazooka Joe wrappers + £1.
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