Hey to all Retro Junk fans, hope your all good, it's BritKid here with my first article.
Since this is a piece coming from a British Kids perspective and this is a American site, some of the references, you guys may not have heard of. I will try and keep it as international as I can so every one can enjoy.

This article is a simple day in the life of, when I was a young nipper. It's based around the perfect day of my 8 yr old self back in 1989.
It seems to me that when I look back on my youth the days were longer and much sunnier than they are now! Not that we get that much sun in the U.K. anyway, but there defiantly seemed to be many more sun stickers on the weather mans map.

Micheal Fish the ever present weather man of my youth.
You gotta love his moustache and crazy jumpers!


Anyhow, I would wake up at around 7am with the sun shining through my window. Jump down from my bunk bed with the, ever present He Man duvet and pillow set, thrown to one side and head straight down stairs for breakfast and a good dose of early morning kids TV.
I would start for the first half hour or so with Wacaday. This was a show that every kid watched. It contained wacky features, games and songs. It was presented by the hyperactive and colorful Timmy Mallet. The most famous feature of the show was the game 'mallets mallet'. This was a game which two contestants would sit opposite each other on pink and yellow stools. They would then be given a word by Timmy to start the match and each contestant would have to link there word to the last one. For instance if Timmy said 'Cow' the first person would say 'Milk' the second person would say 'bottle' and on it would go linking words that match until someone got a wrong word. This would then result in Timmy hitting the kid, who got the wrong word, on the head with his trademark pink and yellow foam mallet. The program left air in 1992 and since then Timmy mallet has become a cult figure on the university circuit doing shows for all the 'big kids', now at university, who grew up with this British kids institution.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZGPOPV2tjY
Heres a You Tube link to Wacaday and the genius that is Timmy Mallett.

The next few hours would consist of a steady stream of my favorite cartoons of the time He Man of course, Dogtanian, Bananaman and Thunder cats.

Dogtanian and the three Muskehounds was a cartoon version of the classic story, D'Artagnan and The Three Musketeers.The story follows a young Dogtanian who travels to Paris in the 17th Century in order to become one of the King Louis XIII of France's musketeers.He quickly befriends three musketeers (Porthos, Athos and Aramis) and falls in love with Juliette, a maid-in-waiting for Queen Anne of Austria.

Bananaman was a cartoon about a boy named Eric. Eric was no ordinary boy though, because when he ate a banana he transformed into Bananaman! His main occupation then is to stop general Blight and his goons from getting up to all sorts of nasty and no good deeds.

This animated fun would all be washed down with a good few bowls of coco pops, those little cocoa puff balls sure did turn the milk chocolaty!



At about 9am, full to the brim with chocolate milk almost coming out of my ears!, I would head back up stairs and load up the ZX Spectrum. This was a British 8-bit personal home computer, similar to the commodore 64 in the USA. It was a couple of years later probably around 1992 that I got my first Sega Mega drive (Genesis u.s.a.), so this bad boy of gaming got me through my early years. The games came in cassette form and took about 5 to 10 min's to load depending on the size of the game. When you were 8yrs old this felt like hours! Sitting there listening to the crazy blips and bleeps of the game loading, if you listened to it for to long I swear it would send you loopy. I've heard that loading sound, is now, used in interrogation practices by special forces units the world over! Stick a ZX Spectrum on load and the enemy will be singing like canaries after 20mins!

My favorite game to play on the Spectrum was Match day 2. A football (soccer) sim. Where you moved stick like players around the pitch to score the ultimate goal and win the FA cup with made-up teams like Ocean Blues and Cosmos. The game was pretty difficult, but because of this when you did score against a strong defense, the feeling of achievement was immense! My dad and I used to play 2 player mode with each other against the computer and came up with a strategy that we called the American Football tactic. You could barge players out of the way in the game, so my dad would run with out the ball before me playing a bit like a blocker and knock players out of the way. I would then run behind him, with the ball and as the opposition was being barged left right and center by my dad , I would have a free run on goal and usually, blast my shot wide and miss the goal!, I told you it was difficult to score on the dam game.

Match Day 2. So many hours spent on this retro classic. My dad and I would talk when playing this game, about how amazing it would be in the future to play a football game with our favourite teams and real life players on them. This back in 1989, seemed like a futuristic dream. Only six years later though, that dream would take it's first steps to becoming a reality with EA Sports Fifa soccer 95 on the Mega Drive.

This gaming session would last a few hours, and I had still probably scored only a couple of goals! Hey, they were worth it though. Because of the brightness of the florescent green pitch and yellow and white players, a two hour stint on this was all you could take before you would be crippled with a headache worse than any ice cream head freeze you could think of!
At 11am I would go round and call for one of my friends who lived on my estate. Usually my mate Neil Sharp would be up and ready for some sort of adventure. We would get on our bikes and ride to the local shop where we would spend a good while looking at all the new comics they had in. The Beano and Dandy, were and are, to institutions of the British comic industry. They had lots of great characters 'Dennis the menace' 'The Bash Street kids' and 'Billy whizz' to name just a few, and had big colorful art and nice short comic strip stories, Being 8 we had a lot to cram into our days so couldn't sit around reading long drawn out adventures.

By the time we had read through a few comics, the shop owner would be giving that look that meant, 'if your not going to buy something, get out my shop, this isn't a library!
Sensing his displeasure we would hop back on our bikes after purchasing a couple of pack of 'Nik Naks' 10p crisps.

These crisps were like crack to a kid! I could eat so many packs of these in a day it was silly. The taste just burst into your mouth as soon as the nobbly little stick would touch your tongue! Heaven.

We would then head back to home for a quick rest on the front garden while we enjoyed our 'Nik Naks', and chatted about this mornings 'He Man' episode and why was it that every time He Man would catch Skeletor he would just let him go!? Why not just kill him!
We would then head back in doors for lunch, Ready for the afternoon and the rest of our perfect day.

To be Continued.....