I was watching an episode of Are You Being Served and the staff has to switch departments, sending everyone’s favourite staff from the Men’s and Lady’s Departments to the Toy Department.
Anyway they are showing Wibbley Wobbleys (Is that how you spell it??). Is this a weeble? Here’s the link (Starts at 9:32)
Did they change the name for the show or is a Weeble called something different in the UK?
When I was a kid, even though they were called Weebles, the ad for it always said “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down,” and some of my friends, who weren’t too bright, because of that jingle insisted on calling them “weeblewobbles.”
Well, as your link points out, Weeble is a trademark. I am pretty sure the concept (and actuality) of wobbly toys has existed a lot longer than this particular brand, and many other manufacturers make them, or have made them.* It is appropriate to use more generic term, although, no doubt, this particular one was chosen for its humor/double entendre value.
Also, as it is a BBC show, and the BBC has long had strong rules about avoiding advertising (including product placement), there may have been a deliberate effort to avoid the brand name for this reason.
*Actually, I had a wobbly toy as a small boy that was called (had written on it) "Magic Marxie," because it was made by the Marx toy company. (Also because it promoted proletarian revolution.)a. those are not weebles - weebles had paper faces under a hard plastic shell, not sculpted features like these things
b. the playground set is almost identical (wrong colors, thicker playground furniture, though) to a weebles set I owned 29 years ago. just like this one.
Actually, those are Weebles. The ones made and sold in the UK by Airfix in the 1970s were different to the US ones, but they were still marketed as Weebles. Check out the link.
True. They’ve eased up a bit in the last decade or so, but when the programme in question was made, they were incredibly strict and careful about it. The craft tutorials on the children’s show Blue Peter used to obscure all the brand names on various cereal boxes and other recycled materials with carefully painted rectangles, or coloured tape.
Yeah, Fablon self-adhesive vinyl eventually changed it’s tag-line to “The Sticky-back Plastic” in reference to what it was called on Blue Peter.
Wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey.
Ah! it all comes flooding back - they were so careful to use generic descriptive terms for all the materials, even when describing specifically unique product packaging.