Toy Stories
From Stay Free! #13 | Text only version
The explosion of character marketing, licensing, and all-out commercialization of kid's culture is pretty damn disturbing. Children's toys, books, and other products that aren't advertisements for something else (Lion King, Little Mermaid, Batman) are becoming harder and harder to find. But I don't want to be overly simplistic and all doom-and-gloom about this. Kids are pretty creative. And while the younguns raised on Barney have quite a challenge ahead, they're not simply reactive gumps (or at least there's no proof of that). To explore the point, some friends and I wrote about goofy ways we played when we were kids.
ok so I'll go first... I grew up with two brothers and was pretty much a tomboy. Never had any interest in Barbie, Hello Kitty, or any of that. Whenever I'd get dolls for Christmas, I'd throw them in the pool to see if they'd float. Anything that came in a pink version was easy to dismiss. Like the frills on all the dresses I refused to wear, girls' toys were stupid, boring, fake. While I'd like to think I was too smart for high-concept toys--I didn't need a cash register and money to play bank teller, I just carved a hole in my bedroom window--fact is, most items were just too girly. I wanted gimmicky toys as much as any other kid, just not girly gimmicky toys.
In the rare times that we weren't watching TV, my brother Paul and I played outside with our neighbors. We made fun of Mike 'cause every time he'd run, he'd hum the Six Million Dollar Man theme. But TV messed with us, too. While I'm better off now than a lot of my peers (forever reminescing over seventies/eighties sitcoms, or, in Paul's case, subscribing to The Limbaugh Letter), one show in particular left a marked impression on me: World Wide Wrestling.
Every night from about first grade to fifth, I'd fall asleep by fantasizing about the various ways one could beat certain TV heroes up. The characters would change over the years--Robin (from Batman), Superman, one of the guys from Gunsmoke. As did the weaponry--sledgehammers, whips, elaborate futuristic machines designed to break TV heroes' bones (all without leaving a drop of blood!). But little else did. In fact, my fantasies were unfailingly repetitive and formulaic: some undefined Villain (never a character) beats Attractive Dark-Haired White Male to a pulp while I watch and, later, console. A scenario not unlike TV wrestling, which I watched religiously (up through fifth grade, my career goals were "writer" or "lady wrestler").
My favorite wrestler would also show up in my nightly episodes. Paul says it was Superstar Billy Graham but I honestly can't remember. Particular personalities weren't what got me off: it was the wrestling! Years before my mom gave me the egg/seed talk, my pre-prepubescent sexuality was awaken by watching these cartoonish hulks punch each other in the head. It was great, way better than Bugs Bunny and that other fake stuff.
At the time, I'd never connected my dreams to watching wrestling. (In fact, I didn't even think of it until just now!) While other kids shared antics of imaginary friends, talked about dreams and what not, this wasn't something I cared to think about, let alone make public. Inventing new ways to pummel Robin didn't exactly bode well for my future as a healthy, caring adult.
A couple of decades later, I've still never talked about it (not that discussing child fantasies is a popular conversation topic but you know what I mean). For a while, the scenario offended my feminist sensibilities. It's masochist, and my role in the dream is passive, needy, nurturing. (Not that nurturing, though. My role as nurturer was pretty much restricted to watching and then being like "oh, that's sad.") But considering the ways I'm unlike the spectator as an adult, that seems pretty silly: I'm not attracted to beat-up TV stars, violence in general turns my stomach, and all the hip thriller movies are too gory for me.
Those dreams have perhaps affected me in a less immediate way, however: I'm a pretty severe insomniac. Not in the too-much-caffeine-ha-ha insomnia sense but the all-nighters-can't-sleep-feel-like-crap type insomnia. Much like the wrestling fantasies that accompanied me to sleep, unfailingly repetitive, formulaic* sexual fantasies are the best tranquilizers. Whereas the old dreams were purer fantasies (I had no conscious concept of sexuality at the time), these are closer to reality. We'll let the parallels end there. Actually, I have a very elaborate theory that explains all this (you'd be amazed at the stuff you come up with after three days without sleep), but it's too Freudian (or too Vance Packardian, I'm not sure which) to go into here.
* In fact, there is a reverse effect: if the fantasies are too stimulating or inventive, the partners too compelling or complicated, it doesn't work.
• • • •
One of the many elementary schools I was shuffled through as a kid had a penchant for gathering up the entire mass of us wiggly, sweaty kids and having us sing. I remember singing at many of these assemblies, and the now unexplainable enjoyment I got from belting out songs at the top of my lungs. But I have only dim, incomplete memories of the songs themselves. I remember "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (the principal was an ex-hippie, I guess), some painfully sad song about cheating your neighbor and a tin soldier riding away, and the song that actually has some relevance to the rest of this article, "The Enigmatic Toy" song.
"The Enigmatic Toy" was fun to sing because it involved lots of sound effects, many of which could be modified to allow spitting. As a child, the song's narrator received a marvelous toy from his or her father that made some odd noise when it moved, "went whooosh when it stopped, and brrrrrrrr when it stood still." The narrator goes on to say that "I never knew just what it was, and I guess I never will" with a kind of good-natured befuddlement. I liked singing this song, and my mind often reeled at just what the hell this thing could have been. I usually came up with an image of something that would probably not have been a fun toy at all, as it was about the size of a combine and looked about as dangerous.
The song also worked on another, more personal level. I, too, had some toys that completely defied explanation, sometimes in what they were or were for, or, more often, why they were and why they were no fun. They never seemed quite as cool as the one in the song, though. Like collapsing animals. A collapsing animal is usually not a fun event. The sight of a horse or donkey losing strength in its legs and dropping heavily to the ground like a sack of gravel will make most kids burst into tears and require therapy later in life. But this very event was the subject of strange yet common toys when I was a kid, little jointed animals on plastic bases, small and cheap and often given away at birthday parties. Holding one of these in your hand, you'd push up on the bottom of the base with a finger. The tension holding the animal up would slacken, and it would collapse drunkenly onto its base. Then you'd let go, and it would pop up again. If you were clever, you'd push up on just part of the base, which would make the animal's head loll and roll about before the entire animal apparently lost consciousness. You'd end up just looking at this thing, and making noises like "oh, ugggh... I don't feel so hot... uhhh . . ." and watch the little horsie or whatever buckle and drop. It was kind of fun, in a sick, sadistic way. The most innovative use I ever saw for one was at the Chicago Museum of Science, where one was employed to lamely demonstrate the effects of anesthetic.
Weebles, those little egg-shaped figurines that wobbled yet steadfastly refused to fall down, were another confusing toy. Sure they were fun, and the ads were true--they don't ever fall down--but is that what was fun about them? I guess so. I'm more confused by my reaction to the toy than the toy itself. Their inability to fall was fun, but I can't think of any other instance where that was appealing to me. Sometimes I liked my toys to fall over. Other things, like a stack of blocks or me on a bike, I didn't. I think the fun was in the fact that much of what I did with my Weebles was try to get them to fall. Setting up more and more precarious drops, uneven surfaces, pools of liquid, finally unscrewing their counterweighted bases.
The undisputed champion of my toy box of confusion is the Lemon on the Black Plastic Tube. I have no idea how my sister and I got it, and I cannot imagine ever actively desiring such an object. But there it was, nestled between the Tonka trucks and Nerf balls: a fake lemon connected to a black plastic staff. We played with it, but without any real understanding of how or if there was a proper way. We threw it, spun it around over our heads to pretend like we were helicopters (though the casual observer may have well mistaken us for morons), and of course, we spent a good amount of time pelting each other with it. What the toy was actually for we had no clue. It was a piece of fake fruit with a handy leash. I think it made a rattling sound, but that didn't provide any indication of its use, either.
The way to use it, I found out many years later, was to hook one end of the tube around an ankle and, while swinging the lemon around in circles, jump over it. This never occurred to us. Why should it have? This was a lemon. On a tube. Do kids ever try to jump over lemons? Do kids even particularly like lemons? Fake ones? I remember being attracted to those little plastic lemons and limes full of juice at the grocery store, but I don't think I ever wanted to take one out to the parking lot and jump all around it. I would have loved to have heard the pitch for this toy in the boardroom: "What do kids love to do most? Jump. And what do kids love most? Lemons. I think you see where I'm headed, Sir."
I had another puzzling food-related toy when I was young, odd not so much because of what it was but because of my affection for it. It was a large, stuffed kosher salami. My dad was always a big fan of getting promotional crap from companies, and I think my beloved, giant foam-rubber kosher salami came from one of these conquests. I'm certain he saw an offer for a stuffed salami on the back of some Mogen David package and, as a matter of principle, sent a terse letter to the company demanding one. Once received, he must have found little use for it, and I was soon its proud owner.
I loved that salami. I'd carry it around with me everywhere and sleep with it at night. It was big and soft and had a nice soft outer casing with a zipper that allowed me to poke curiously at the foam rubber inside. I have a vivid memory of waiting eagerly for the casing to come out of the dryer one night after I learned what sticking your finger down your throat does, ready to zip it back over the bare beige cylinder of foam rubber and carry it back to bed with me. I have no idea what happened to my salami. I'd kill for one today, though I doubt that would be necessary. There's probably volumes of Freudian crap about little boys who like sleeping with salamis, but I don't want to hear any of it. My love for that salami was pure and beautiful, and I'll be damned if anyone will take that away from me.
At the exact opposite end of the cuddly spectrum is another toy I inexplicably enjoyed, my toy safe. This toy safe was a nice enough safe that it's really a semantic issue as to whether or not it was even a toy. Fuck "toy," this thing was galvanized steel, with a combination lock. If you put stuff in it, you sure as hell weren't getting it out without the proper combination. To me that sounds like a safe. But I played with it, like a toy. Why? Is a safe particularly fun? It was, strangely enough. Though when I played with it I would usually pretend that it was a house for some smaller thing, or a really drab, boxy spaceship or car. Still, it was a safe. A really plain, gray safe. Yet it was sold as a toy, marketed squarely at kids. I'm sure some jewelry or the deed to your yacht would be quite secure in it, but it was meant to hold gum, Fisher-Price people, and perhaps a diary.
Somewhere, someone at a toy company actually asked themselves what was fun for kids and then answered, "Safes! Metal safes!" How right they were. I had fun with that safe. Of course, I lost the combination fairly early on, so it became just a big metal box, or occasionally a really frustrating puzzle game with an unattainable prize of 37 cents and some Legos.
If the toy safe blurred the line between functional object and toy, it was certainly not alone. Many other objects that had real, useful functions also made terrific toys. The best example is the standard two-levered corkscrew. It has two long arms, and a large "head," for turning the corkscrew. It also makes a superb jumping-jack-like robot toy. Just pull up and down on the corkscrew part and you can make the arms fly up and down. The whole thing looks just like an energetic robot doing aerobics. It's so much fun you almost forget the certain danger of a removed eye or a core sample being extracted out of the kid by the sharp metal corkscrew. Plungers are a lot of fun, too. I remember once, as a joke, some friends of mine and I went out and bought a bunch of little plungers. We thought it would just be a goofy laugh, but we ended up playing with them the whole afternoon. You can throw them at walls and watch them stick, pull yourself along the ground with them and pretend to be a human fly, or just plop them onto the ground and try to pull them off again, enjoying the pleasing tension and the satisfying pop when one releases. They're a hell of a good time. And cheap, too. Any of those grabber arms for getting things of high shelves are great toys, too. I was just at my parents' house for Thanksgiving, and they had one that I seriously thought about sneaking out and playing with.
Sprinklers are not toys but are widely accepted as something that kids have fun with. Same with cardboard boxes. You'd think ax handles would be a lot of fun, considering all you can do with a baseball bat, but I've never gotten a chance to play with an ax handle.
• • • •
I had a Fievel Mousekawitz doll that meant a great deal to me. But when she saw it and got one just like it, it somehow tarnished the value of mine.
The American Girls Collection of overpriced, historically accurate dolls were also popular at the time, and her grandparents responded to the craze by purchasing all three. After much begging, I received the Victorian-era Samantha as a present for my tenth Christmas. But when I got the doll and found out how she was more collectable than a plaything, she kinda sat in my corner looking sad.
All the American Girls came in "real girl sizes." Unfortunately, I got into them as I was leaving the smaller girls sizes (I was in fifth grade when I got the Samantha doll) and all they made me want to do was wear my grandmother's square-dance clothes.
I also vividly remember my mom coming in to tuck me in at night and doing voices for my dolls until her husband told her it was making me stupid.
• • • •
Later, in third grade, I got in trouble for talking too much and had to sit at a table of boys (the bad kids' table). I didn't talk any less. Instead, I brought Mad Libs to class and the boys and I filled in the names of other kids in the class and made a lot of toilet jokes. After gaining their confidence, I started trying to get them to do girly things like putting stickers on their notebooks and bringing stuffed animals to class. I felt really gratified when boys outside of our table started bringing in their stuffed animals, too. I guess I was sort of a power tripper.
• • • •
Like any toy, it sooner or later got boring. That's when a space monster, played by my sister's hamster, Minnie, invaded Landau's space cruiser. Although usually a gentle creature who liked nothing better than stuffing her cheeks with green hamster food, one crewman was caught unawares when Minnie trampled him in the ship's control room. This initiated a deck-to-deck search for the beast until Landau faced Minnie down, mano a hamster. There was also a landing party mission where Landau brought the fight back to Minnie's Habitrail fortress, where he was joined by the Micronauts, Ackroyer, and Time Traveller. I recall several crewman lost, and the eventual destruction of Minnie's evil lair, but details are vague right now.
Anyway, I was reminded of all that last weekend, when I attended a double-header birthday party for my niece, 3, and nephew, 7, in Austin. Besides getting hit by the pop culture preteen tsunami that is America's next generation--the laundry basket overflowing with licensed action figures was worth the price of admission alone--I got to play piñata master for the seven-year-olds.
The piñata was a three-foot-tall green Power Ranger which the kids went after with a plastic bat. Trust me, seeing a group of kids turn on a Power Ranger with a bat was fun. As I swung the piñata around, the first graders shouted "Kill him! Kill him! Break his leg!"
The kid who finally nailed the piñata was Heather (a splendid shot to the knee that spouted rubber frogs, M&Ms, and 3 Musketeers bars). She was also first down in the scramble of screaming, shoving kids going after the candy hitting the ground.
"Yep," said one Texan dad, sipping Coors on the front steps, "never fails. First sign of blood and it turns into Lord of the Flies."
My three-year-old niece, who isn't quite attuned to the culture yet, was handed
the bat to whack her piñata, but instead ran up and gave the Power
Ranger a big hug. Awwww.