The programme makers made the decision to give the puppets regional accents. So Pig had a Black Country accent while Topov the monkey was a Cockney, Mrs P the penguin was Geordie and Octavia the ostrich had a French accent. There was a Tortoise too, but I can't recall what kind of accent he had. Anyway the central character was Hartley Hare, he had the accent of a slightly camp sexual predator! Seriously, that's the best way to describe Hartley, watch the video below, and see what I mean.

By 1981, when the game came out, enough time had passed since WWII for the game to have humourous comic value, and in no way offend anyone. Especially with the traditional British stiff-upper-lip sense of self-deprecating humour that saw us through the war years. Dad's Army, a TV situation comedy about a bumbling troop of Home Guards, was one of the most popular TV shows of the period. So the release of this game should have gone without causing any stirs of unease among the great British public. On its release in June 1981, some corners of the media tried to stir-up trouble and controversy over the game, but to little or no avail. Most people at the time saw it for what it was, a silly family board game.

This is a commercial shown on Japanese TV in the 1980s for an anti-fugal ointment for athletes foot, that eases itching. The product for the pharmaceutical company Fujisawa (フジサワ), was called (New) Piroesu (新 ピロエース). And in there wisdom the advertising creatives in attempting to sell the product to the Japanese consumer, thought that replacing a fungus riddled foot with a bunch of clawing tentacles was a good idea.You can see as the poor old down-trodden Japanese housewife is on her knees trying to appease the beast, with the ointment. The creature pulls and grabs at her, mauling the poor woman, as it tries to slip a tentacle under her skirts. It must have had Tentacle Erotica fans reaching for a tissue when it was shown on TV in the 80s.

Surely all horror movies fans love a good movie monster, but secretly I reckon that we all love a bad movie monster too.  Some are just straight out bad, but there are wonderful gems of movie monsters that are so bad that they are good, and inadvertently steal ever scene they are in, if not the whole movie because of their awesome awfulness. Here are my personal "top three" of the 1950s. (Other decades will follow!) 

#1. Gor the giant floating alien brain from The Brain from Planet Arous (1957).

#2. Ro-Man (Ro-Man Extension XJ-2) the gorilla suited robot from the moon in Robot Monster (1953).

#3. Zontar the shuffling cone shaped creature from It Conquered The World (1956).

See the top three movie monster list from the other decades... 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

Chiller was an early "light gun" based shoot-'em-up, where over a series of screens the player has to shoot and kill a bunch of innocent victims as quickly as possible, set in torture chambers, where the victims are chained up, manacled, or tied to various medieval torture devices. Blowing them away isn't how you play the game, the now classic "head shot" will only prolong their agony. The player has to find ways of setting off the torture devices, so that they bring about the death of the innocent quicker than you just simply blowing body parts off them. So Chiller was full of extreme bloody ultra violence, and 8-bit nudity. Seriously, just to reiterate, they complain about video games today?! Did these people who do spend the whole of the 80s completely blinkered? Or never went to arcades, or owned a home computer!

The album which was produced my Genesis P-Orridge and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson of the avant-garde pioneers of experimental industrial music Throbbing Gristle. While living in Hull, in the north of England, they were doing a lot of mail-art, and were sent a magazine by General Idea in Toronto called FILE (a play on LIFE magazine). In 1971 they came across a piece in the magazine by William S. Burroughs that had his home address. They wrote an irreverent, satirical and somewhat aggressive letter to him. A while later a postcard arrived from Burroughs, offering an open invite to Genesis to visit Burroughs when he was in London. Genesis hitch-hiked down to London, to see Burroughs, and from their meeting and over one-and-a-half bottles of whiskey the two became firm friends.

During many conversations and letter between the two, Genesis brought up Burroughs's "tape recorder experiments". Burroughs thought no-one would be interested in a record of the tape recorder experiments, but after 7 years he caved, and handed over box after box of reel-to-reel tapes. Hours and hours of tapes from the 50s and 60s. Genesis and Sleazy poured over the tapes, listening to each one, noting down what they were about. Most where a mash-up of cut-up snippets of conversations, Burroughs talking into the microphone, bits of music, radio noise, all kinds of sound bites. After they finished, Burroughs asked whether they wanted to catalog the rest. They agreed, and they travelled to his home in Kansas where he had a room full of boxes of tapes. They spent two weeks, going through all the tapes. 

Now they had the material, they wanted to make an album of them, choosing the best, cutting them up, stitching the pieces back together. Cherry-picking from the never heard before "tape recorder experiments". At the time, Burroughs had fallen out of favour with the literary and art community. His books were out of print, people has lost interest in the Beats and in the work of Burroughs, particularly the artistic technique of "the cut-ups". A style of art that has since gone on to be a central part of modern media, movies, music videos, commercials, all manner of pop culture owes its roots to the cut-up technique that the Dadaists pioneered in the 1920s, but Burroughs made popular in the 1950s and 1960s. If it hadn't have been for the persistence of Genesis, and the members of Throbbing Gristle's desire to immortalise the tape recorder experiments, these seminal cultural artefacts may have been have been lost forever.

Sony who produced Betamax were a bit precious about their format, whereas JVC who developed VHS were happy to licence it's reproduction pretty much to anyone interested. Plus Sony wouldn't licence their technology to the porn industry, whereas the technology of VHS was free loose and readily available to pornographers. And it came out at a time when porn was becoming a big market for home consumers.

Now there are those up-tight types that try to deny that the porn industry killed Betamax, and simply quote the fact that VHS as a format and technology was cheaper to mass produce, and with JVC's willingness to allow other manufacturers to exploit their technology, it was a simple case of commerce that killed Betamax. But that said, and knowing the massive market that pornography has among adult consumers (yes you're all a bunch of perverts), the fact that pedallers of porn preferred to release their skin flicks on VHS over Betamax has to have had a impact. Think about it. When I was a horny adolescent eyeing the top shelves of the local video store, there were racks of VHS "blue movies" up there, I hardly saw any in the tiny little Betamax section of the store that the losers hung-out in. 

Weird Retro Fact: Since the earliest days of cinema, pornography has driven the film industry and its technology. Read The Naked Screen: Sex & Nudity In Cinema (Part 1) to see how from the very inception of cinema, porn was a salacious bedfellow of the movie industry.