From rocks to robots, how our toys changed

The children unwrap their presents, and the joy on their faces is a sight to behold as they discover they have got exactly what they wished for – a cardboard box with a pebble in it.

Believe it or not, the Pet Rock – a stone from a beach in Mexico ­– was the most popular Christmas present of 1975. Priced at £1.75 – about £14.26 at today’s prices – it wasn’t cheap for something you could find in the garden for nothing.

But in a fantastic piece of marketing by American advertising executive Gary Dahl, the Pet Rock became the must-have toy at the top of every child’s wish-list. Which probably came as a huge relief to parents, given that the second most popular toy was the rather rudimentary Pong game console, which enabled youngsters to play a tennis-like game on their television screen – and cost a rather steep £43.85, or £357.26 when adjusted for inflation.

Stella Mitchell, who runs the Land of Lost Content pop culture museum in Craven Arms, says: “Pet Rock was a gimmick, and everybody wanted one because their friends had got them. It was very clever.”

And it was certainly lucrative. Dahl was said to have paid less than a penny for each stone, and the venture quickly turned him into a millionaire.

Technology trading website Music Magpie has compiled a list of the most popular Christmas toys and games over the past 50 years – and shows how being a parent these days is much more expensive than it was back in the 70s.

Buying the five most popular toys of 1971 would have cost parents a total of £12.75, or £191.48 when adjusted for inflation. By contrast, the top five presents of 2019 will set parents back a cool £1,465.98.

In 1971, for example, the must-have toy was the £2.25 space hopper.

“The space hopper was interesting as it was the first toy that did not really look like anything else,” says Stella.

“A teddy bear, for example looked like a bear, but a space hopper looked like nothing else. There was also a lot of interest in space following the moon landing of 1969, although what it had got to do with space I never worked out.”

But while the space hopper might not have been terribly expensive to buy, the purchase price did not include the damage to ornaments caused by exuberant rampaging around the living room.

The most popular toy of 1970 was the foam Nerf ball, which at £1.25 also seemed rather expensive for a bit of foam, but a TV advertising campaign featuring The Monkees ensured they had plenty of street cred.

The Sindy doll, at £3.99, was the second most popular toy of the year, while bragging rights would go to the child with the talking Viewmaster, priced at £4.62, or nearly £70 at today’s prices. The large plastic goggles, which allowed children to watch animated films, were the height of technology back in the early 70s, although what happened to them once the novelty had worn off is another matter.

Other popular toys over the past five decades include:

Hungry Hippos (1978)

Beautiful in its simplicity, Hungry Hungry Hippos was a back-to-basics, fun-for-all-the-family festive option, after more expensive gifts like the Atari games console and eight-track cassette player found success in preceding years. Players operated mechanical hippos to catch flying marbles.

Rubik’s Cube (1980)

Invented by Hungarian sculptor Prof Erno Rubik in 1974, the square puzzles became a huge craze in the early 1980s.

Originally an experiment by the professor to test out the structural rigidity of a form made entirely of moving parts, the Cube is thought to be the world’s best-selling toy. There were even televised competitions where players battled it out to see who could complete the puzzle in the quickest time. The current world record for solving a standard cube stands at 3.47 seconds, set by Yusheng Du from China.

Optimus Prime (1984)

Two decades before Michael Bay’s smash n’ bash Transformers movies pushed Autobots and Decepticons back into the public consciousness, Optimus Prime was topping the Christmas charts with a successful toy line and an animated TV series.

The flagship Optimus figurine cost £16.87 (around £50 today) and could mechanically transform from truck to robot and back again.

PlayStation (1995)

The early 1990s saw a mini-renaissance for conventional toys – Barbie, Action Man, Play-Doh and the Cabbage Patch Kids all managed to cut through the tide of tech – but in 1995 the Sony PlayStation ushered in a new era of video game dominance.

The system wrecked the festive market. A September release in North America yielded 800,000 sales by the year’s end. Nine years later, it became the first console to shift more than 100 million units.

Furbies (1998)

Hot on the heels of Tamagotchi, these lovable electric pets provided a brief but noteworthy respite from the video game onslaught in 1998.