Klackers, or Clackers, sometimes referred to by other brand names such as Ker-Knockers, are one of the most infamous kids toys from the 1970s. Klackers comprised two acrylic balls, often brightly coloured, on a string with a small handle in the middle. When you swung the balls up and down, they would bang against each other, making a "clacking" sound. Clackers were very similar in appearance to the Argentinian weapons called bolas. Yet no-one thought that these things could be lethal.

They were a playground craze that swept across Britain and America in the early 70s. Kids with skill, could make the Klackers balls meet at both the top and bottom of a circle. Everyone seemed to have a pair, yet parents and teachers became concerned about the safety aspects of kids smashing two hard plastic balls together at high speed. Playing with the balls could cause bruised hands and arms, and the balls would sometimes shatter into tiny sharp projectile shards. Lacerating young innocent faces. Soon schools started to  ban them from the playground.

In the United States, they were classed as a "mechanical hazard" in a 1976 count case, regarding the US government's attempt to seize a shipment of "Clackers" under the  Federal Hazardous Substances Act. Amusingly the court case was called (I really do love this title)... United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls.

Klackers has a brief resurgence in popularity in the 1990s, but soon disappeared back into the history of crazily dangerous toys of the past.

Okay so many fans may well have read about Weird Retro's recent facebook ban on their fan page for posting a link to a Captain's Blog post mentioning the facebook unmentionable... Nipples! If you didn't then the "banned" post is just below this one. Well moving on from that little blip in our fun... Let's look at some other ridiculously weird examples of Internet based censorship, and other random pieces of censorship I could dig up while having a beer and just chilling out for the evening, now the mini-weirdo is finally asleep.

In 2011, facebook (yes them again) banned a whole town. And I thought I had it bad! The town of Effin in Ireland was wiped off the map by facebook. Because facebook considered the town's name offensive, people couldn't tag their location or the 1000 or so people that lived in Effin were unable to list their home-town in their facebook account details. How ridiculous, not allowing the use of "effin", when it's the polite term for "fucking".

Do you understand the words being garbled in the well known 1963 version of Louie Louie by The Kingsmen? No? Most people don't, and that's how we like it, and what made it a classic. Some didn't like that they couldn't understand what was being sung. So much so that the FBI spent 2 years trying to decipher the track, using all the latest technology they had to had at the time in the mid-60s. They came up with nothing, but did miss drummer Lynn Easton shouting "fuck" at 0.54 secs.

There were a few all-girl bands around in the 1960s called The Ladybirds it turns out. First there were one of the first all-girl rock bands The Ladybirds from California from example, who opened for the Rolling Stones in 1965. Then there were the British vocal harmony group The Ladybirds who were to perform regularly on the British TV show The Benny Hill Show from 1968 onwards. None of these bands however performed topless. Unlike the The Ladybirds that hailed from the state of New Jersey in 1967, and... Well we'll get to that in a bit!

The band even went on tour, there are records of them appearing at the Crystal Room in New York City, Isy's Supper Club in Vancouver, the Town 'n' Country in Winnipeg and Chez Paree, Quebec in 1968. Thus leaving a vacancy at the Tipsy club in San Francisco, so promoter Davey Rosenberg hit on the idea of starting another all-female topless band covers band. The band Rosenberg formed were called The Hummingbirds, and featured famous exotic dancer Angel Cecelia Helene Walker (better known as Satan's Angel) on bass. 

Anyway, getting eventually to the point of this of blog post. It appears there actually was another all-girl topless band called The Ladybirds in the 1960s, that hailed all the way from Denmark. They formed in 1968, and toured extensively throughout Scandinavian. It's even reported that they made in to the UK, and played in Bristol in 1973. The same year that the band formed they opened for the Yardbirds at the Fjordvilla Club in Roskilde, Denmark, on September 8th 1968. Sometimes then billed on adverts as the New Yardbirds, the band would later change their name to Led Zeppelin. It is that tour of Scandinavia in 1968 that is considered to be Led Zeppelin's first ever tour as a band.  

In the early 90s Street Fighter II swept the world, eventually destined to become one of the most famous video game series in history. With the release of the arcade game in 1991 and its subsequent console release in 1992, Capcom licensed its characters for a wide range of toys and related items. Tiger Electronics made a number of badly done hand-held LCD versions of the game, but in 1993 they took the well known Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot concept and made a Street Fighter II version, featuring the characters of Gulie and Ryu, with an added electronic scoring system.

Unlike the original version of the game, where the robots just punched each other, the plastic action figures of Ryu and Guile could be controlled with both punching and kicking actions. It even had cool fighting sounds when the figures were hit in the chest, groin, or head.

Weird Retro Fact: Read about the urban myth of the character that never existed, in You Must Defeat Sheng Long To Stand A Chance.

A straight faced piece of sci-fi horror, that turns into a ridiculous snigger-fest due to the simple fact that the horror is provided by killer rabbits! Night Of The Lepus (also known as Rabbits) is a 1972 movie, based on 1964 sci-fi novel The Year Of The Angry Rabbit. With bad directing, wooden acting, and terrible special effects, the movie has become a cult classic, for its inability to make fluffy bunnies seem even the slightest bit scary.

Hordes of the carnivorous giant monster fluffy bunnies on a murderous rampage across Arizona, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake. Created by a strange serum, a injected bunny escapes and goes on a sex crazed rampage, and before long the mutant bunnies are... Well... Breeding like rabbits! Soon they are on a killing spree, as Sheriff Cody exclaims, "There's a herd of killer rabbits heading this way!" As the bunnies head towards a drive-in movie theatre. Nothing can stop them it would seem. Until... Someone has the bright idea to distract the bunnies using the head-lights of the cars in the drive-in. Of course! How else would you deal with rabbits, than with head-lights?!

The movie contains not only bad, but down-right bizarre special effects. Rarely are humans and rabbits in the same scene together, as odd camera angles were used to make the bunnies appear as giants. The rabbits were filmed in close-up stomping on miniature structures in slow motion.They had ketchup smeared on their faces, for blood. And they even used human actors dressed rabbit costumes, for some scenes.

Gayla Peevey was a child star from Ponca City, Oklahoma. She is best known for her recording,  "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" (1953), which she recorded when she was 10 years old. When this song came out, the Oklahoma City Zoo started a fundraiser to “buy a hippo for Gayla”. It worked, but she later donated it to the zoo, as it was  a bit hard to keep a hippo at home in Oklahoma.

The hippopotamus named Matilda spent 45 years at the Oklahoma City Zoo, and then sadly died at age 47 from a heart attack in 1998 while being transferred to the Walt Disney World's Disney's Animal Kingdom, in Orlando, Florida.

If the song isn't odd enough, the accompanying video here just adds to the bizarre nature of this novelty song. I first heard this song back in 2012, and used it as the theme music for the Weird Retro Christmas Countdown, of alternative Christmas movies.

Captain Kangaroo, recorded a version of the song in the 1960s. And has been covered by novelty song radio broadcaster, Dr. Demento.

Wassail refers to both the Norse/Old English salute of "you be healthy" and to the drink concoction made in the winter, dating back as far as the 1400s. The drink was passed around when a bunch of glorified beggars turned up at your door, or in your orchard chanting incantations and singing songs. Their payment, or their punishment was to be given "wassail" an ale or cider based spiced hot drink.

Sounds all lovely and Christmas like doesn't it? As you imagine their jolly rosy cheeked faces, quaffing from a Loving Cup, cheering and singing harmonious carols as the snow gently floats around them. Rather than desperate and starving peasants, turning up at their lord and masters door, squawking out a few random songs and being offered the dregs of the ale barrel maybe mixed with the rotten apple cider pressings, mixed with spices to mask the awfulness of the whole thing. Wassail, traditionally wasn't as you'd imagine, a deep rich sort of mulled wine, with pieces of orange floating on top. 

I was digging around, compiling a list for a Christmas song article I'm working on, when I came across this. A song that's been doing the rounds of the Internet for many years apparently, but I'd managed to miss so far. A ear-splittingly painful rendition of the classic hymn "O Holy Night", being utterly murdered. One of those things you listen to, and chuckle, sniggering at the bas singing. But then it builds, and gets worse, and worse, and soon it reaches torture levels of aural pain.

Many people had laid claim to having created this monstrosity. But it wasn't until 2009 that a mad called  Steve Mauldin came forward saying that he had arranged “O Holy Night” for a church group in 1989. But the song was recorded at the end of a long session, and he never expected anyone to ever hear it apart from a few close friends. That's some admission, for a song that was voted the worst Christmas song of all time by listeners of a San Francisco radio for 12 years running.

Imagine a TV Christmas special, featuring the screaming brat from E.T., Ted from (Bill & Ted) as the handsome prince, Karate Kid's Mr. Miyagi as Santa Claus, and all filmed in a German theme park in summer. That'd be the 1986 TV Christmas special Babes In Toyland then.

Rarely aired since it premiered on NBC, this weird and at times creepy TV special was soon resigned to the discount bin of video stores around the country. A take on The Wizard Of Oz, Drew Barrymore plays Lisa, a kid growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio. She has to take care of her siblings and cooks for her family, has no time for childish things like toys and fun. Until on Christmas Eve during an accident due to a blizzard, she is magically transported to Toyland full of weird and often wooden characters. 

With the help of Mr. Miyagi, sorry the ToyMaster (and it turns out Santa Claus), Lisa must save Toyland from evil Barnaby Barnacle (played by Richard Mulligan), who lives in a giant bowling ball. And in among all that you have Keanu Reeves singing, including the infamous deleted scene of him and Jill Schoelen singing a duet in prison. But we do have to suffer him singing Cin-cin-nati at the beginning of the film. Which probably caused the car crash that sent poor Drew to Toyland.

The Yule goat is a Scandinavian tradition, whose origins are believed to go back pre-Christian pagan beliefs of the Norse god Thor, who is said to have rode through the sky in a chariot drawn by two goats.  In Sweden, the Yule goat is considered as an invisible spirit that would appear some time before Christmas. The goat would be created out of straw and left secretly at a neighbour's house as a prank. The neighbour's would then have to secretly pass the goat onto another neighbour.

The Gävle Goat is a giant version of a traditional Swedish Yule Goat figure made of straw. In 1966, an advertising consultant, Stig Gavlén, came up with the idea of making the giant goat and placing it in the Castle Square of Gävle. Usually erected over two days, to celebrate the first day of Advent.