Fun and Games

I found it ! I found it!
Thanks BBC! I always liked you the best!
A while ago, I saw a brief picture montage on the telly, and one small image caught my eye, of a circular object with 4 different colour square panels.
‘Oh!’ I said ‘that reminds me of that thing, that game, the music sound thingy, with the beeps and flashing lights’ (yes, articulation is my strong point, thanks) ‘I used to play that!’ ‘what was it called again?’
So I racked my brains for about a week, tried key word searches on line (round lights flashing game musical), checked out sites for popular 70’s toys, no luck – so I gave up. Today I saw a promotion up on the BBC website for a 'nostaligia toys' article, and I remembered my earlier dilemma, and lo! there it was :)

Long before the 60’s LSD concept of the ‘doors of perception’ ever entered into my little world of popular culture knowledge, I considered the memory and imagination part of my brain like a series of doors. In fact, one of my visualisation techniques to get to sleep (I’ve had trouble nodding off since forever up until moving to Paris) when I was about 12 (apart from the bed spaceship capsule one) was to imagine a series of doors, and that I would open one and behind it would be a certain scene that I would enter, maybe I was an odd child, I don’t know.

Anyway, back to the subject (and this IS all leading somewhere, sort of), is that some of the memory doors, well, they stay closed for a long time. They get all cobwebby, and some grass starts growing at the front, and then one day, you’ll have a memory trigger and it’s like this disused line bursts into action, sparks cracking and the door opens and a whole bunch of memories come tumbling out, like an overstuffed closet. The last time his happen was when a friend of mine sent me a link to some dialogue from a children’s program 'Rainbow'

- full of hilarious sexual innuendo (though some further research on this – turns out it was a parody outtake done by the actors and never actually aired, but soooo funny to watch if you are familiar with the series – outside of the UK or NZ I doubt you would have seen it though). But suddenly I remember the opening titles music the voices, the character, and suddenly I’m saying hi to the 7 year old girl that was once me. And laughing like crazy at the hilariously bawdy dialogue.

Anyway, the toy was called SIMON.
As in Simon says.
Well of COURSE! Duh!