Читать книгу TV Cream Toys Lite - Steve Berry - Страница 17

See also Star Bird, Speak & Spell, Armatron

Resembling nothing more than a vehicle from Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons redesigned by Clive Sinclair, Big Trak was controlled, as the presenters of Tomorrow’s World breathlessly related, by that all important ‘silicon chip’.¹ With just a few taps on the keypad, this fully programmable beast could be instructed to move and turn in different directions, fire up its ‘photon canon’ and make a couple of modish electronic noises. It was, of course, used mainly to frighten the family pet. Pretty good value for £20.

The novelty was that it was ostensibly capable of navigating a path around cumbersome household objects–assuming no-one had actually moved any of them while you were busily punching in the required sequence of movements–usually a case of trial and error. Big Trak worked best when its route avoided shag-pile carpet, inclines and anywhere outdoors. According to the manual, programming distance travelled was calculated in noncommittal units of ‘roughly 13 inches’, while the angle of rotation ‘may not be enough to make the turn you want. Or it may be too much.’ You want vagueness? MB Electronics delivered it in spades (which themselves were probably of wildly indeterminate size).

Used in conjunction with the Big Trak Transporter (yours for only another £15), Big Trak was rumoured to be able to ferry objects around the house–maximum load: ‘about one pound’.² Promised innovations that never materialised were voice synthesis and additional accessories (there was a mysterious unassigned keypad button marked ‘IN’ on the keypad for just this purpose).

Not to be outdone, Kenner Toys came up with Radarc, another twenty-first-century-esque remote-controlled tank. The gimmick with Radarc was that, instead of being programmable, it was operated by ‘muscle control’–a radio transmitter that strapped to your forearm, with buttons on the inside that made contact as you worked your hand and wrist (stop sniggering at the back!).³

However, with six chunky traction tyres, sticky labels ‘to add exciting detail’ and a camp little signature tune that played before and after every, erm, motion, Big Trak was much coveted and seldom seen–the dictionary definition of toy envy.

1 A 4-bit Texas Instruments TMS1000 microcontroller running at approximately 0.2 MHz, chip fans. That’s just 64 bytes of RAM to you.

2 A fabulously complicated and tortuous process for carrying out otherwise simple household tasks? Clearly this was a toy aimed at men.

3 There was also TOBOR, a robot from Schaper that looked like a cross between R2D2 and Darth Vader, was operated by a ‘transmitter’ that was nothing more than a tin clicker, and was utterly defeated by any carpeted surface.