Monday 17 February 2014

The Next Big Thing

Talking of the film business - following the success of The Lego Movie (soon to spin off into an all-Lego episode of The Simpsons), the time is surely ripe for Bayko: The Movie.
 For those of us who spent a formative portion of our early years assembling red, white and green 30s-style houses from bits of bakelite, Bayko will always occupy a special niche in our memory and affections. Me, I never seemed to have enough pieces, and was often frustrated by the tendency of those upright rods to curve out of shape - but when Bayko went well, there was nothing like it. The only trouble was that, having once built your little masterpiece, sitting on its green base, there was nothing for it but to break it up and start again, playing whatever variations on the theme you could muster (and there weren't many when you had as few pieces as me)... It was the Danish interloper Lego, principally, that put paid to Bayko, which was never the same after the company was sold to Meccano. The colour scheme was changed - grey bases, yellow doors and windows, green roofs. And the roofs, instead of being satisfyingly chunky one-piece items, now had to be slotted together. No wonder Bayko didn't last much longer.
  So here's the outline: a middle-aged man wakes up one morning to find himself living in a computer-generated Bayko world (original colour scheme) and, er... well... Okay - over to you, Hollywood creatives. Make it happen.

4 comments:

  1. Would Hollywood manage to recreate the characteristic Bayko smell, I wonder?

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  2. Ah yes - I remember it well Arthur - the smell of bakelite I guess. The prince of plastics...

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  3. Thought you might be interested that my 10 year old stepson, whose father was Nick Bayco, has a starter set of Bayko. Nick's father was the composer who wrote 'Elizabethan masque', a wedding march and a lot of incidental music, subsequently used in Mr Magoo and, more recently in Spongebob Squarepants.

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  4. Gosh.... I was only thinking about this the other day and couldn't actually remember the name of the stuff.

    I was given a set somewhere around 1972, I suppose. It was seond-hand and seemed a bit old-fashioned, even then.

    .What a nostalgia rush!

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