Читать книгу TV Cream Toys Lite - Steve Berry - Страница 36

Yet another thing the Yanks did bigger and better than us. For the Cream-era child, hardly a week would pass without kids’ telly showing yet another colour-saturated videotape of record-breaking domino topplers in a Milwaukee aircraft hangar. Thereon, jaundiced-looking Spielberg-alikes would spend days setting up elaborate domino displays under hot sodium lamps (usually suffering a cataclysmic setback when a stray grasshopper knocked over a 10,000-tile Flags of All Nations set-piece overnight). America, Holland, China…you name it, everyone had a crack at the record books.

Just not the UK. What hope of government funding for a would-be domino athlete, eh? You’d just about scrape together enough cash for one wooden, slidey-top box of those Bakelite buggers. The carefully positioned mosaics and pixellated patterns (albeit created by teams of Stateside nerds) may have lent the domino an exotic air it never would’ve acquired from years as an old man’s knock-on-the-table game in murky brown pubs. Plus, with only the living room to experiment in, future British domino topplers would be lucky to get together a run of ten, never mind an entire course of dominoes sliding down chutes, setting off rocket launchers and swinging across mini-ravines.

Confidently stepping into this gap in the market came Action GT and its Domino Rally sets (mark 1, mark 2 and, perhaps inevitably, mark 3), featuring masses of brightly coloured tiles¹ plus all kinds of gimmicks, stunts and tricks for them to perform (loop-the-loops, elevators, steps, slides and ‘sunbursts’). Domino Rally also had one extra-special ace up its sleeve: most of the dominoes were fastened along flat, perfectly spaced lengths, so resetting them was a quick flip of the wrist away.

See also Cascade, Mousetrap, Guess Who?

However, the unique selling point of domino toppling (not much more than ‘set them up, knock them down’ as the box blurb reiterated) started to feel a little like too much effort after a while and, as the young player him/herself tumbled inexorably towards adolescence, the plastic set took up final residence in the loft.² Nowadays, if you hear someone say they fancy dominoes, you’re more than likely expected to get the pizzas in.

1 The technical term is apparently not tiles but ‘stones’, which makes them sound very rock ’n’ roll, doesn’t it? Hence, we suppose, why Eric Clapton chose the pseudonym Derek and the Dominos to record Layla. And, erm…well, there’s also Fats.

2 You can, however, book now for the annual Domino Day in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. They need 80 volunteer domino-setters. But beware–according to their website, ‘It is hard work, often on hands and knees, and requires an enormous amount of concentration.