Taking the dog out today I happened to smell my hands after handling his new ball. Rubber! It took me straight back to when I used to love rubber novelty items I bought mail order as a kid. Jokes, novelties and tricks and all from the great Ellisdons in the sixties. God, did I adore it all.
Oddly enough the rubber items were all pretty grisly: a toy severed hand, which was a more or less just a heavy slab of reaking rubber and a soft toy rubber skull, which laughed when squeezed. Both were life-size! Its hard to describe how much fun I had with these two items and I'm pleased to say that I was re-united with a similar skull in the mid- noughties. However, the severed rubber hand has stayed away!
Did you send away to Ellisdons as a kid or did you have any rubber toys?
Not sure if I had any Ellisdons as a kid but I did have all manner of rubber toys, with my big rubber snake (with a fantastically realistic underbelly!) and my big rubber rat with whiskers and a long tail (both tail and whiskers became casualties to my real pet mouse who bit them off!) leading the way!
ReplyDeleteOn top of those I had numerous tentacled and fanged and garishly coloured rubber monsters, some of which were really nasty looking! Of course, I loved 'em!
My biggest rubber toy ever though has to have been my space hopper. It was a huge blue one, bigger than the usual orange ones. I did put a hole in it once with a dart but it was easy mended with a puncture kit.