Things from your childhood you wish you hadn't revisited

[Alex]

A few weeks back I managed to get my hands on a complete (if short) run of the 1980's horror comic Scream. It was from around the time that the Eagle comic was being published, along with 2000AD, and it shared a lot of the same writers, with even Alan Moore doing one ongoing story.

Now reading the first couple of issues was fun, as it brought back lots of memories, but as I carried on it soon became clear that it wasn't as good as I'd remembered it to be, and whilst some stories were fun enough, a lot of them really weren't. Now you might think that's just one thing about growing up, but I also recently picked up the first 50 issues of Eagle, and loved reading those...

Also: Spacehoppers - they're rubbish when you're an adult. They're too small, and you can't bounce around on them for long properly without it inevitably hurting. They really should make adult sized ones, I'd pay good money for that.

Also: Operation - Ah, this was endless hours of pretending to remove vital organs from a patient, with the risk that if you touched the sides you'd kill him! Or at least cause him some pain! Or, er, you lost your turn anyway...But when I played this a few years ago it was just a really annoying dull game, that I got bored of with really quickly...

So, is there anything from your childhood that you wish you hadn't revisited?

[Si Hunt]

"Orm and Cheep" - I remember it being so detailed and arty! But it's what-sounds-like a very senile Richard Briers talking over some cardboard backdrops and a couple of sock puppets.

"Buster" - Write to me pals! Kids comics just don't work when you're older, as you look on them with depressingly adult eyes, searching for answers to questions that just didn't exist when you were younger. Were Ivor Lott and Tony Broke shagging? Where did Chalky buy all his writing materials from, and how did he afford it? Wasn't School Belle just basically a happy-go-lucky slag? Best left in the past.

Action Figures - the current Doctor Who range was delightfully purchased because they'd have been a dream when I was 8. Then you take them home and... what next? You can't exactly sit and play with them before tea. BECAUSE NOW YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT YOURSELF. Ditto the Sticker Collection.

Old Spectrum Computer Games - wasn't it great how it didn't matter that the games were just a big red block being moved round a screen? It matters now.

"Duty Free" - hilarious eighties comedy I used to watch every week as a kid. Guess what? It's crap!

However, all is not lost as Lego, Button Moon and the Dukes of Hazzard have all held up!

Si.

[cyberchris35]

I agree on the figure situation you buy them then you want to play with them but there is either no time to play or anyone else in the house think you are silly playing with toys. I also agree with you about Lego and Button Moon.

One song I heard in my younger days is Spitting Image - The Chicken Song at the time I thought it was great but I have just heard it recently and it just sounds bad.

[cullsoft]

Similar light to action figures, but I sometimes find it annoying how these days I find that things have to have a "practicality" about them in order to be worth my while... and it's difficult to find much interest in having something because it looks nice and fancy rather than something that you actually have to "do something" with.

Though that said, I've got a couple of Resident Evil figures on my desk at work purely for decoration (or as a distraction when I want to put them into silly poses to get my mind off work for five minutes ).

Also, when I was younger I still had that sense of "practicality" anyway - I'd spend hours building Lego models or Brio train tracks, but then spend hardly any time playing with it before tearing it all apart and building something new!

[Kaybee Bailey]

Most of my favourite kids TV shows, the type of stuff that kept me gripped week on week and left wickedly unresolved cliffhangers for months/years/indefinitely don't stand up to scrutiny now. It's not that they're bad examples of kids TV, just that as an adult you watch a clip and can immediately work out what will happen. As a kid you don't do that so much, because you're happy to just follow the story. So shows I shouldn't have looked up:

Uncle Jack... four series, 1990 to 1994, was at the time the most talked about show at my school. The reason was that at points it was genuinely creepy. My particular favourite was 'Uncle Jack and the Dark Side of the Moon', which had a scary stone statue, the weather being manipulated by moving the moon, and the brilliant line "My goodness, it's the Vixen!" despite the fact that the villain was always the Vixen. Watch now and you notice they were really ramming an environmentalist message down your throat.

Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars... a good little book by Mark Haddon adapted for TV in 1994. Famous lines include "Dennis Sidebottom is a pompous wazzock!". It's kind of offbeat so it's not too bad to watch the odd clip but I know pretty much what's coming the whole time now. And it has a ten year old Reggie Yates in it...

Watt on Earth, by Pip and Jane Baker. I adored this show. It was about an alien fugitive who had the ability to transanimateobjectify. () I couldn't believe they never made a series after 1992 as I'm pretty sure that Watt was caught and in mortal peril in the last episode. Unfortunately the truth is it was formulaic... every week Watt transformed into an object to hide from the evil Jemadah, got a little detail wrong, got moved into danger when people mistook him for a real apple/teapot/sheet of paper and had to be rescued by his human friend. Sadly I think there may have been a reason it didn't return...

[Antony Cox]

Doctor Who

Watched it as a kid, left it for a while and started watching it again recently - what rubbish!

[Rob McCow]

Watt On Earth had a memorable, if rubbish theme tune.

When I was at University I re-watched an episode of the old Transformers cartoon that I loved as a kid. The story, the dialogue and the animation were all painful beyond belief. Never again!

[WhiteCrow]

I hate to say this - but Blakes 7.

As a child, it was about the greatest show I'd ever watched. Every Monday evening it was a huge ritual of getting drinks ready to sit down and watch.

You rewatch it, and the visuals are just appalling - yet at the time you thought it rivalled Star Wars. And the acting - yes Mr Darrow - just seems so incredibly stiff.

I still love Blakes 7 - but what you watch isn't quite what you remember.

[Paul Monk]

Heresy Mr Talks. HERESY!

[WhiteCrow]

Heresy Mr Talks. HERESY!

Lets face it though - Star Trek did similar stories so much better over a decade before, and hasn't dated as badly.

We should really leave Sci-Fi to the Americans.

[Andrew Curnow]

I have to admit, I agree - not all, but certainly some of B7 looks embarassingly dated now. I suppose Who does too, but I'm more forgiving of it.

BTW, I used to get Scream magazine too, Alex.

[cyberchris35]

I used to like 2000ad comic but I looked through it in the newsagent the other day and I didn't think it was upto much.

[Zombie Adric]

I found an old computer game that used to run on the very first computer I had (Windows 95). I was so excited and even searched on the internet to find out how to run it.
However I couldn't play it, couldn't even get passed the first level. I felt like such a failure that my six year old self could play it better than me.

Oh and for those who are interested it was Kings Quest.

[Alex]

I used to like 2000ad comic but I looked through it in the newsagent the other day and I didn't think it was upto much.

Yeah, 2000AD's been rubbish for a fair old time now, I flick through it in WH Smiths about once every three months, but I haven't bought it in ages. It's a shame, but I can't imagine it getting any better unless they take more risks with new writers.

As for old computer games, some still play really well I've found, and some are just a bit embarrassing, I used to love a lot of the Lucasarts graphic adventure games, but they're so slow it gets really irritating after a while.

[cullsoft]

Yeah, 2000AD's been rubbish for a fair old time now, I flick through it in WH Smiths about once every three months, but I haven't bought it in ages. It's a shame, but I can't imagine it getting any better unless they take more risks with new writers.

Following from this thought... how much of it is that the current 2000AD comics are rubbish, or the ones you remember from your childhood are rubbish?

I used to read The Dandy when I was a nipper, and having found the odd annual or bundle of comics about, I still find the odd few strips that make me smile and chuckle (and now appreciate some of the referential and satirical humour that went over my head back then). However, you pick up one of the copies they make these days and wonder what the hell happened...

[Andrew Curnow]

I used to get 2000AD avidly from 1979 (I think - the first one I got was the one with the Devil face/Johnny Alpha on the cover, with Roger Moore in Moonraker on the next issue) to about 1988 (the last regular one I got had Torquemada and a woman in fishnets on the front). I've actually sold most of those off on ebay since then, but I really think the early-mid 80s were great days for the mag. Not every story worked, no, and for every Ace Trucking Co or Meltdown Man there's probably a Blue City Blues (or whatever it was called) or a D.R. & Quinch. But stuff like Halo Jones, and many of the one-off Dredds, were and are cracking comic strips - at its best I always think of 2000AD (certainly in terms of when I was a kid) as being like the best of the Target Doctor Who books (thinking I suppose primarily of the Mac Hulke ones) in that they were aimed at a children's market, but didn't condescend or compromise or patronise or shy away from deep thoughts and less-than-cheerful places.

In the late 90s, Zel subscribed to 2000AD for me, and I got it regularly for maybe 12 months. I'd probably got too old, and perhaps just out of the habit, but it never grabbed me in the same way. It was a lot glossier, but for all that the artwork wasn't always that good - one strip in particular, Durham Red, was weirdly drawn (think of the strips in the mid-late 70s Doctor Who annuals!) and it was hard sometimes to work out what was going on! Plus the story was naff. But on the other hand, the 'new' strip of Sinister Dexter was absolutely brilliant, very like Dredd in its ability to do all sorts of story types within the basic set-up.

So, er, in conclusion - 2000AD isn't as good as it used to be, in my opinion. Splundig Vur Thrigg!

[Stuart Wallis]

In the late 90s, Zel subscribed to 2000AD for me, and I got it regularly for maybe 12 months. I'd probably got too old, and perhaps just out of the habit, but it never grabbed me in the same way. It was a lot glossier, but for all that the artwork wasn't always that good - one strip in particular, Durham Red, was weirdly drawn (think of the strips in the mid-late 70s Doctor Who annuals!) and it was hard sometimes to work out what was going on! Plus the story was naff.

I tended to have that problem after the first ten years. Those stories with a sense of humour either started taking themselves far too seriously, or else the jokes started getting less funny, or more frequently, stupid and/ or just not funny to begin with; the artwork in a number of the colour strips became wishy-washy, and in certain cases went odd, like Durham Red; and I just found one day that none of the stories were gripping my attention at all. In a number of cases, I was finding them harder to follow as well; Judge Dredd was the only strip I was bothering with, and I wasn't enjoying that any more either. Came the unhappy day that I realised that I'd gone beyond hoping for a change for the better, and was only buying it out of force of habit...

Conversely, regards the thread topic, I've enjoyed reading the old pre-1987 Dredd strips lately, though I've been thumbing through 2000AD over the last couple of years, on and off; while the artwork's improved, the stories are still the same poor quality that made me stop buying it.

[Andrew Curnow]

I'm glad I'm not alone!

I haven't revisited him so I can't tell whether he's dated, but... does anybody remember Phil Cool? For some reason I found myself thinking of his "Neil Kinnock Fudge Bar" routine on the way home!

[Si Hunt]

I caught a bit of "Diff'rent Strokes" on a freeview channel last night, which I used to watch avidly as a kid - I remember a sort of Cosby Show for our generation, with Willis and Kimberly and everyone. I also used to watch the spin-off "Benson" regularly.

But oh dear! It was all shot on videotape, which made it look incredibly cheap, the jokes wern't funny, the acting was dire and having a dwarf play a ten year old just seems WRONG now.

Si.

[Dirk Gently]

...does anybody remember Phil Cool?

Oh yes, I remember him. I have a video of his somewhere in the loft (don't tell him or he'll want it back). He used to do a very good impression of Paul Daniels.

[Stuart Wallis]

And of course,



Must dig out the Phil Cool album I bought a few years ago one of these days.

[Andrew Curnow]

Diff'rent Strokes! Yes, Si you're spot on - I caught one a couple of years ago and by gum it's dated dreadfully.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

But oh dear! It was all shot on videotape, which made it look incredibly cheap, the jokes wern't funny, the acting was dire and having a dwarf play a ten year old just seems WRONG now.

It being all shot on video tape seems an odd criticism coming from a Doctor Who fan And to be fair he was a ten year old dwarf at the time. He's only 40 now.

[Alex]

Following from this thought... how much of it is that the current 2000AD comics are rubbish, or the ones you remember from your childhood are rubbish?

Andrew pretty much sums up my feelings above, there was always the odd dodgy strip, but the good outweighed the bad. I've re-read a good few graphic novels of late, and as well as the strip's Andrew mentions, I'm a massive fan of Zenith, Bad Company and PSI Anderson, along with the more bizarre things like (the excellent) Hewligan's Haircut. Nowadays it seems to being trying too hard to be dark or wacky, and it's lost almost all of it's charm sadly.

Another tv show I wish I hadn't watched recently was The Wonder Years. I used to love it as a kid, but I caught four episodes on ITV2 about a month ago and found it so ridiculously over sentimental, and it didn't seem that funny any more either.

[Lord President]

Mine has to be 'The Tomorrow People'. I recently got my hands on a copy of this series, which I remember loving as a nipper, but it is sooooooo bad on sooooooo many levels. The acting is some of the worst you will ever see, the production qualities are non existent, and the writing (after the first couple of stories) are just lazy!