Remembering Crazes.....

When I was a kid, from time to time there would be a 'Craze'. A toy or a new game would come along and it would instantly become, in the street or in the playground 'The Thing To Have'. They often happened around Christmas. 

It looks a bit politically incorrect these days but the Johnny 7 was a combined grenade, anti-tank rocket, armour piercing  shell, anti-bunker missile, tommy gun and automatic pistol toy gun........ I mean with one of these plastic meanies on your arm you were absolutely and totally invincible in any suburban street war game. Then there was Scalextric. The slot racing revolution. It was every boy's have to have toy. Even though the toy is still around these days looking at the pictures now the early versions look positively antique, and I guess that they actually are.

Sometimes comics would give away free toys and these would invade the school playground for a few days until they were all wornout or confiscated by grumpy teachers.

Then last week my nearly teenage daughter announced that she needed a 'Onesie' and all of a sudden a new Craze entered our lexicon. Mentioning the aforementioned article of 'clothing' at work one of my colleagues laughed and said that her properly grown up male partner would 'Love a penguin' for winter wearing (indoors).

It's good to see that 'Crazes' are still round. The only difference being that in this electronically connected world is that these crazes instantly escape from the playground or home, digitally leaping across global boundaries, delivered to your door by a courier from a website somewhere 'out there' 

They also probably require a massive garment manufacturing capacity somewhere deep in China. I guess we can really only wonder at the wry comments of the factory floor machinists as they stitch together these remarkably diverse outfits ..........