Category: 50s to 90s

Back in July I posted that I was looking for a copy of the Iftah Ya Simsim vinyl soundtrack (اغاني من افتح يا سمسم), and this past weekend I finally managed to get one. I actually got a lead to a copy for sale back in July and since then been in an on and off discussion with the owner about buying it as well as the price. In the end, the transaction went down like some sort of drug deal and I ended up picking up two other difficult to find LP’s from the guy (شادي الخليج ‎– السندباد and ٢٥ عامًا على الإستقلال).

There doesn’t seem to be much info about the Iftah Ya Simsim record, I know it was produced in 1979 but that’s about it. Supposedly only 100 prints were made and were given out to the staff of the show as a thank you but I haven’t been able to find any proof of that. I do know the record is really hard to come by and those who do have it don’t want to sell it. Because of the limited number of copies and the fact that the show was broadcasted around the GCC and so is very nostalgic, the demand for the record is really high. A couple of months back a friend of a friend sold his copy to a guy in Qatar for KD500. I paid half that for mine which is the average price for it for the condition my copy is in (6 or 7/10).

Even though the record is pretty expensive, it does hold its value due to the fact they’re very hard to come by. That’s why I was ok with spending so much money to aquire one because I figured if I ever got bored with it, I can just sell it to someone else. If anyone wants to get a closer look at the cover, I took some really high-resolution photos which you can check out below:

Front Cover
Back Cover
Inside Cover

Update: I’ve decided to sell this so if anyone wants it let me know.

Since my Arabic Cartoons from the 80s list did so well I wanted to put together a thorough 80s English Cartoons list. The whole weekend whenever I remembered any cartoon I wrote it down but it still feels like I’ve missed some. But the search did remind me of two very important TV channels growing up. Before satellite TV we only had access to Kuwait TV channels (KTV1 – Arabic, and KTV2 – English) but sometimes when the weather was humid we would pick up Saudi Channel 2 (English) and Dubai Channel 33 (also English).

Anyway here are some of the most memorable cartoons I used to watch in the 80s, if I’ve missed out anything let me know.

Alvin and the Chipmunks
Bionic Six
BraveStarr
Captain Planet
Care Bears
Centurions
Chip N Dale
Dangermouse
Dennis the Menace
Denver the Last Dinosaur
Dinosaucers
Duck Tales
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
G.I Joe
Gummi Bears
He-Man
Inspector Gadget
M.A.S.K
Mister T
Pole Position
Popeye And Son
Rainbow Brite
Scooby-Doo And Scrappy-Doo
She-Ra: Princess of Power
Silver Hawks
Speed Racer
Snorks
Tale Spin
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle
The Real Ghostbusters
Thunder Cats
Transformers
Voltron
Yogi Bear

I’ve been stalking the account of Super Robots, a local vintage toys collector on Instagram for about a year now, so when he decided to open a “museum”, I had to pass by and check it out. I put the word museum in quotation marks because it is and it isn’t really a museum. It’s the guy’s private toy collection displayed on shelves in a store, but none of it is for sale. So it’s a museum in the sense that there are things on display that you can’t buy, but that’s the only similarities.

I think my generation is a bit extra nostalgic compared to other generations because of the 1990 Iraqi invasion. This is just my theory but, because of the invasion, I had to leave a lot of my childhood behind when escaping Kuwait. A lot of other kids had to leave stuff behind or were maybe outside of Kuwait during the invasion and had their homes looted. Because so many of us lost the toys we had or grew up with, as we got older we started reacquiring some of our favorite ones we lost. That’s my explanation at least when friends ask me why I’m buying the most random stuff on eBay.

So I completely get toy collectors or any sort of collectors really. Super Robots is a toy collector who decided to take his toys out of storage and display them in a shop. It’s a neat idea and allows people like me interested in old toys to pass by and check them out but, the only issue is, the store is pretty tiny and STACKED. You can barely see anything because there are boxes and boxes of toys stacked up on the shelves. They’re all closed boxes as well so you’re basically checking out the packaging and not the actual toys themselves. And then you have boxes in front of boxes so you’re not even getting to see the full packaging because it’s being covered by another box. The other issue is that it’s located in the basement of Rehab Complex in one of the tight alleyways so it’s not a very inviting location. But this is a start and maybe eventually with enough interest, he could decide to move to a larger space somewhere else.

If you’re interested in passing by the store he’s open from 3PM to 9PM. Shop #183 in the basement of Rehab Complex. Also, make sure you check out his toys on his Instagram account @superrobots.

Is Netflix about to add a ton of old 80s Arabic cartoons? I hope so because they recently added one of my favorite childhood cartoons, Flona (فلونة). Currently, the only way to watch old cartoons from the 80s is on YouTube and a lot of the episodes are missing and it’s not really practical to binge-watch a series there. If Netflix is gonna start adding these cartoons then I’m suddenly going to have so much content to watch. Here are some of the Arabic cartoons I’d like to see on Netflix (please feel free to mention any Arabic cartoon I missed):

Abtal Al Mala3eb
Al Hadaf
Al Laith Al Abyad
Al Nimir Al Moukana3
Al Rajol Al Hadidi
Amira Yakout
Bell wa Sebastian
Bombo
Captain Majed
Flona
Ghawasa Al Sarka2
Grendizer
Heidi
Jazora 
Jongar
Khomasi
Kimba 
Mazinger
Moghamarat Neils
Nahoul Bashar
Raad Al Emlaq
Sanshiro
Shanakel 
Sindibad
Sinan
Sport Billy
Smurfs
Zeina

If you want to check out Flona, it’s listed in its English name on Netflix Kuwait, The Swiss Family Robinson.

The story below was sent to me by John Beresford who has been contributing to the blog with old interesting stories about life in Kuwait during the 1940s to the 1960s when he and his family used to live in Kuwait. To check out some of his previous stories click here.

In 1968 Ramzi Kayello, an artist, put on an exhibition of his paintings in the Hubara Club in Ahmadi. My parents went and later asked him to paint them a picture of ‘Old Kuwait’.

The image is pretty standard; mud houses, wooden doors with nails in, dusty streets, and the frame is very 1960s.

The interesting thing is the man in the white dishdasha. He is carrying water buckets. With no piped system water had to be bought and transported back to the home and the traditional Arab buckets, made from an entire sheep or goatskin, were too small and with the way Kuwait was developing, fewer people in the town could keep flocks. This was where new technology came in. The increase in the number of vehicles was increasing the number of worn-out tires lying around – what to do with them? Some could be hung around boats and on quay-sides to minimize the bump when coming alongside. Others could be used as buckets. It was possible to get about 3 buckets from 1 truck tire, they were strong, pretty well indestructible, waterproof and the wire in the tires stopped them flopping about and spilling. And of course, if you found an old tire lying about you could make up your buckets for free! With rope handles they were fine. So the water carrier is using water buckets made from truck tires; this was pretty standard and my parents specifically asked for this to be included in the painting.

I also include a bit that my father wrote about water in Kuwait when he arrived there, in April 1949. Later on, there were ships built to go up the Shatt al Arab, vent their ballast tanks and pick up river water for the return journey, thus making the smaller dhows redundant.

The other explanation I should give concerns about the Kuwaiti water supply. I mentioned the brackish water wells. There is no fresh water at all anywhere in the state of Kuwait. Brackish was obtained from shallow wells, close to the coastline and provided water for livestock and limited garden growth. The poorer element of the town also had to drink it; it’s not very palatable, most times when I was offered it in poorer Arab houses they added sherbet to it to make it more palatable but, really, I used to think it made it worse! In addition to about a 14% salinity it also had a quantity of magnesium salts in it: Magnesium sulfate or Epsom Salts, being the most common.

For many years fresh water was brought to Kuwait from the Shatt al Arab River, a major world river formed by the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. As this river is tidal to well above Basrah, the collecting dhows were required to go well upstream and then, while waiting for the tide to run out, collect the water from the top, less dense, layers.

Some imported water was less good than others, it depended upon the tide, time available, weather and the temperament of the dhow skipper.

The water so imported was sold by the old gallon kerosene or gasoline tin full at 2 rupees a time. This didn’t suit the company and just before I arrived gave up on relying on the dhows.

Mark Lowey, or AbuJack as he is known on Twitter has been fairly active recently scanning old photos of his from life back in Kuwait and Saudi during the 70s and 80s when he used to live here. Recently he published one of his journal entries from a spur of the moment trip he made to Kuwait with his friend Stephen back in 1979. Along with his journal entry, he has old pictures of Kuwait attached so it’s a really interesting piece to read (basically a blog post from 1979).

Check out his journal entry on his weekend excursion to Kuwait here and then make sure you follow him on twitter @molowey

I don’t remember how I first found out about the Ahmadi Desert Motoring Club (ADMC), or how I came about a picture of their car badge, but when I first saw it I knew I needed to have one. It’s such a great looking badge with the cute desert mouse and beautiful colors, I ended up spending over a year looking for one to purchase and wasn’t able to find a single one for sale, anywhere and for any price! I got in touch with random people whose parents might have been part of the club, I checked small private sllers, large auction sites, I checked with car badge collectors, and nobody either had one or wanted to sell one. Finally, back in September, one went on sale on eBay, and not just any, but one that was in pristine, 10/10 condition. It looked like it had never been installed on a car before and all the enamel was still intact and vibrant. I put a ridiculous maximum bid number since I knew I’d most likely not come across another one ever that was so clean, eventually, I ended up winning the bid for a lot less than I expected, around KD75.

Now that I had the badge I found it very frustrating that I couldn’t dig up any info on the club, there wasn’t anything online except for a single photo from an ADMC Alitalia Darts event dating back to 1964 and that was it. So I got in touch with a friend at KOC and asked him if he could check their archives for any photos or articles on the club and he struck gold.

Turns out KOC had some photos related to the motoring club but they were still negatives which hadn’t been scanned. So they dug them out of their archive and scanned them so I could share them on the blog. These images haven’t been seen by anyone for over 65 years! They also shared some articles relating to the club from the old KOC newsletter called “The Kuwaiti”. The Kuwaiti was a weekly newsletter and he flipped through the 1954 and 1955 archive of the newsletter and sent me some photos of ones relating to the club and motoring in general. Some really interesting stuff.

I’ve decided to share everything in two ways. Firstly I uploaded all the photos and articles to a Flickr album. If you prefer viewing things that way click here.

I’ve also created a PDF file of all the articles and if you prefer viewing the articles that way then click here to download the PDF

For the scanned images I have all of them embedded in high resolution below. The blog will resize them automatically to fit the width of my page, but if you save the images, you can view them in higher resolution on your phone or computer. Check those out by clicking more below.

Finally, I’d like to thank Kuwait Oil Company for digging these photos out and scanning them for me. Now people looking for info on the club will be able to find some kind of information online.

Firstly, I think the place should actually be called Cleopatra’s Records based on the Arabic but their Instagram account name is Cleopatra Recorders so we’re just gonna stick to that. Cleopatra is a music shop in Hawalli that’s been around since back in 1969. I only found out about it last week from a friend and was pretty disappointed in myself that I didn’t know the place.

The store isn’t even hidden in some back alley of Hawalli, it’s actually on the main road opposite Promenade Mall. The store doesn’t look like much from the outside, nor the inside frankly. It’s a long skinny store with shelves filled with cassettes as well as some CDs and 8-track tapes. According to the employee, the original store owner had passed away and the son had taken it over.

I ended up buying a bunch of cassettes of old Kuwaiti music at an average price of KD1.5 each. What’s great is you can listen to the music before you buy it so I was randomly picking up albums off the shelves based on haircuts and outfits, and then I’d listen to them and if I liked it I got it. If you’re looking for old Arabic cassettes this is your place. Their Instagram account is @cleopatra_recorders and here is their location on Google Maps.

Thanks Abdullah

Kuwait’s landmark ice skating rink was designed by the French architect Dominique Beau in the 70s and was considered to be the first of its kind in the Middle East when it was inaugurated in 1980. Domonique also designed the pattern of the terracotta tiles that adorned the inside and outside walls of the rink. It was custom made in France but inspired by the local Sadu weavings which he encountered during his trips to the Gulf region.

Sadly the ice skating rink was demolished earlier this year to make way for a newer one as part of Al Shaheed Park expansion plans. I couldn’t find much more information on the construction of the original ice skating rink or the architect online other than what I’ve posted here, but I’ll keep looking. For now, check out the photos of the construction in the post below.

Back when I was in high school I used to write in the entertainment section of my school’s paper, The Voice of AIS. A reader randomly found an old copy of an issue dating back to December 1995 at her parent’s house and sent me pictures of it.

It’s obviously very bizarre reading my own articles 25 years later but what’s weirder is my writing seems to have gotten worse? I’m looking at the paper credits and it says @nazmraz was the editor of the entertainment section which could explain why I sounded like a better writer back then. I should just have her edit my blog from now on.

If you want to flip through the paper I’ve uploaded all the photos and you can check it out here.

Thanks Anfal!

For some odd reason, it’s actually pretty difficult to find a picture of the original Arby’s that opened up in Kuwait back in the 80s. But a follower on twitter managed to find one taken by a US soldier back in 1991 called Keith O’Brien. According to Keith, this photo was taken right after the war. He was assigned as a driver/bodyguard of a Brigade Commander and he wanted to see Kuwait City. Up till then, they had only been in Saudi, Iraq, and Bahrain so they drove around and he took some photos of various places which you can see here.

Two of the most memorable things about this Arby’s for me was the touch screen ordering system which was super way ahead of its time, and the arcade machines in the basement.

Thanks @Alblogy

Don’t think I’ve ever posted the video above even though it’s been on YouTube since 2012, but I saw it the other day on @classic_kw_ and looks like it was shot in the early 90s. It got me thinking about all the classic cars we have in Kuwait but are falling apart because they’re just parked outside homes in the harsh environment and aren’t being driven. Sometimes I feel like rescuing cars in the same way people rescue stray animals.

Speaking of cars that aren’t being driven, there is a guy with a purple Diablo parked in Shaab that hasn’t been driven in probably a decade. If anyone knows the owner, please connect us!

Khaleej Times published a short story on an Argentinian and British couple who escaped Kuwait during the 1990 invasion. Jorge Ferrari was a photographer while his wife Rebecca was a flight attendant for Kuwait Airways. The story also has photos I hadn’t seen before so check it out here.

There are a lot of instagram accounts that sell old mobile phones but I found one that actually sells new old stock (NOS) phones. The account is called @mobiles.kw and the prices seem reasonable. I mean I asked about one phone which was the Ericsson T68i and he’s selling it new for KD40 which is actually really reasonable compared to the prices online. If you want an old phone for nostalgic reasons or maybe to play Snake on, check out his account.

So this is a bit of a bizarre coincidence. I don’t remember what I was doing but over the weekend I stumbled upon an article about Dalal, the elephant that survived a bullet wound and abuse by the Iraqi soldiers during the 1990 invasion.

Then, randomly today, a friend mine who works at the zoo messaged me so I decided to ask her if she knew how the elephant and other animals survived during the 1990 war. She told me it was because of two brothers and then sent me a link to a short film called “Aziza” that came out yesterday and is based on the story of the two brothers. You can watch the video above.

March 1991. Starved lions in their cage at the Kuwait City Zoo. Photo by Steve McCurry

Ali Mubarak Al-Hohti, was a 35-year-old sanitation department inspector, and his brother Suleiman, 30 was a motorcycle policeman. During the war they took care of the animals at the zoo and they called the elephant Aziza (not knowing her real name). The short film which I’ve embedded on top is in Arabic but there is a great article on the New York Times on the two brothers which you can read here.

March 1991. A loose hippo at the Kuwait City Zoo. Photo by Steve McCurry

Just one quick note, I haven’t watched the film yet but will being doing so later tonight. But, if like me you are worried there might be scenes of animal cruelty, I’ve been assured the film doesn’t contain any. So it’s safe to watch.

Thanks Tammy!