THE MEANING OF VINTAGE

Recently I was talking about He-Man toys from the Eighties to a mate and he said 'they're not vintage!'

My mate is in his mid-fifties and to him vintage means the toys he grew up with: Action Man, Dinky, Corgi, Merit, Spears and the like. Certainly not He-Man.

It made me realise that the word vintage is relative and a movable feast. To anyone who played with He-Man toys as a kid and is now in their early Forties - to them He-Man will be vintage. It was the start of any toys for them. I suppose a JR21 Thunderbird 2 would be an antique! 

So, what do you think vintage means and is it to do with what we first played with?

Does it actually have any meaning?

WHEN DID YOU STOP BOTHERING WITH TOYS AT XMAS?

When did you stop bothering about toys for Christmas when you were young?

I hear youngsters now, 11 and 12 year olds, excited about a new mobile phone or tablet this Christmas. Certainly not toys.

Is that when it happened to us, 11 or 12 or younger, when we wanted more practical stuff for Christmas instead of cool spaceships and action figures?

Or have gizmos and gadgets taken the role of toys for this new generation?

What do you think readers?

IS KIDS' TV DEAD?

Kids never mention TV to me anymore.

We lived for the telly in the 60's and early 70's.

The talking point at school was always what was on the box tea-times and Saturday mornings or the latest tv-related comic or toy you got.

Thunderbirds, Banana Splits, Double Deckers, Kung Fu, TV21 and Look-in to name but a smidgeon all ruled the day. We just couldn't get enough of kids TV.

These days schoolkids talk about computer games, You Tube and snapchat. No mention of terrestrial TV at all. I wonder in this kind of climate if children's TV can survive at all?

The whole format of kids culture is changing. Their heroes are YouTubers who show videos of themselves playing Fortnite and Minecraft or any other computer game topical at the time. Modern kids watch this stuff on their consoles all day and all night. Family TV viewing appears to be dead.

I cannot think when the last time was a kid talked about a TV show.

Like the household telephone. almost universally obsolete, I fear that childrens' TV for older kids will also go the way of the dodo. Maybe TV's themselves have had it too?

How can a kids' TV producer stop this receding tide?

What's your take on this readers?

GENERATING INTEREST

Its half-term and I'm catching up on films. Just enjoying Captain America: the Winter Soldier. Besides the fabulous Helicarriers, which look amazingly like the SpaceX Nuclear Pulse, I was intrigued by a reference to the Greatest Generation.

Having not heard it before I looked it up. It was coined by Tom Brakow and describes the generation pf Americans which grew up during the Great Depression and went on to win World War II.

Comic book super soldier Captain America is supposedly part of the Greatest Generation, but as the term was only coined in 1998 this could be a reverse-anachronism! I will have to ask Bill.

Forgiving Brakow an over-zealous patriotism, for surely he meant the generation from all allied countries and not just the US, I am still fascinated by the labels given to entire sweeps of human kind.

I myself, according to Wikipedia, am part of the Baby Boomers, who apparently, consider ourselves 'special'. I'm not sure about that but do feel as though the 1960's were special and would prefer, if indeed we need a label at all, to be part of a space-age generation. But maybe this accolade belongs to the mid-to late 1950's. Dunno.

Whatever boffins might think, the events, pup culture and ethos of that decade did make me who I am today.

What do think about generations readers?