Day: December 19, 2003

There’s also this lovely image from the Monty Python Society, who invite you to welcome Jewsus into your heart this holiday season. (Something of an in-joke this year, which has done little to support our argument that we are not a cult.)

Anyway, moving right along with some links… First, from Betty Ragan, comes this absolutely incredible flash presentation of Hubble Space Telescope photographs. Betty also shares a delightful link to “Once More, With Hobbits”, which does a great job of combining Tolkien and the Buffyverse. Much more fun, I’d imagine, for people who are at least marginally familiar with the musical episode of “Buffy”. Given that the CD has been on almost perpetual spin in my CD player for a year, I’d say I probably qualify.

Next, from Ben (and also keeping with the suddenly ubiquitous Tolkien theme, comes more Flash, this time in the form of a rapping Golum. The Towers are the players, yo.

And then, of course, there’s always the old standby: the search referrers. This week’s haven’t been too interesting, although one person did wonder, “who discovered skincancer and when did it first appear?” While another was simply looking for “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” (I told you, Tolkien’s everywhere), which I share with you here.

And, finally, there’s a terrific article in the December 15, 2003, issue of The New Yorker by John Seabrook about the American toy industry and Chuck Hoberman, inventor of the Hoberman Sphere. Since it’s not currently archived online, some lengthy excerpts follow. (If you’re not in the mood for toys (who are you people?), feel free to page down some. (“Skip a bit, brother.”)):

In recent years, as the toy industry has seen its claim on play-time challenged by video games, toymakers have become intensely focussed on price; more than sixty-five per cent of American toys sell for twenty dollars of less. “I could make a doll levitate, with no strings — a miracle!”Anthony [Gentile of Abrams Gentile Entertainment] says. “But if I can’t do it for $19.95, they’re not interested.”

Toymakers have always created toys that appealed to parents. The Erector set (1913) and Monopoly (1935) were products that parents could fondly believe were preparing their children to be builders and bankers. In the years after the war, though, toymakers began to make products that appealed exclusively to kids — toys that, in many cases, parents actively disliked, which was the principal source of their appeal. Toys like Rock’em Sock’em Robots, from 1966…were the heirs to toys like Gooey Louie (1995): “Pick his nose until his brain explodes.” Dolls such as Shirley Temple (1934) and Ginny (1951) — which, in their infantile appearance, were meant to elicit a maternal response from the children who played with them, and thus to begin preparing girls for motherhood — gave way to Barbie, a doll that was not the child’s baby but her role model, the girl she longed to become.

John Brewster, a toy historian, has written of the early-twentieth-century toymakers, “They were marketing a particular social morality — one that stressed industry, probity, and individual endeavor.” Play was the work of children, and building blocks and baby dolls were the tools that children used to become adults. But by the mid-nineteen-seventies toys had stopped trying to prepare children for anything other than a perpetual childhood. As David Elkind, a professor of child development at Tufts University and the author of the classic book “The Hurried Child,” told me recently, “Many toys no longer perform a socializing function, as they used to. Toys are no different from any other consumer product — it’s all about selling something.”

This evolution in the design and marketing of toys marked the first time that children younger than twelve were explicitly targeted as consumers. They toy industry taught the makers of other kinds of consumer products that children were a potentially lucrative market, and that “aspirational age marketing” (selling the charm of feeling older) could be used to sell not only Barbie dolls but clothes, fast food, cosmetics, and electronics. Meanwhile, as fashion and trendiness became the driving concerns of the toy industry, the notion of a classic, a toy made to last, all but disappeared….For the contemporary toymaker, it is less important to invent one classic toy than it is to invent a toy that can be updated regularly with new colors, styles, models, and related products. “What retailers are impressed by is how much real estate you take up on the shelf,” Anthony Gentile told me. “You want that whole wall of pink thank you see when you get to the BarbIie section.”….

As I wandered the aisles of the vast space, I felt a sense of wonder at all the amazing things that toys can do these days (sing, dance, teach, work out), but, at the same time, I failed to find among the many thousands of gewgaws, a single item that I wanted to take home to my four-year-old son. Toys must be two, often contradictory things in order to succeed. They have to be fun to play with, but they also have to look, while sitting on the shelf of the toy store, as it they would be fun to play with (the industry refers to this as “playability”), which, in many cases, results in an emphasis on superficial, attention-grabbing attributes.

One reason so many sophisticated modern toys are less compelling than their humble forebears is the technology itself. Twenty years ago, the advent of electronics was hailed as “the greatest thing in our industry since the development of plastic,” in the words of Arnold Greenberg, the former chairman of Coleco. This year, for the first time, more than half of the toys produced by United States toymakers will have an electronic chip inside. But so far technology has resulted in a striking dearth of good toys. Although this new generation of toys as advertised as “interactive”, they’re usually less interactive than traditional toys. Mitchel Resnick, a professor of learning research at the M.I.T. Media Lab who studies technology and toys, tols me recently, “The question I ask about tech toys is, Does the technology keep the agency of play with the child, or does it shift the agency to the toy?” High-tech toys are so sophisticated that they’re almost capable of playing by themselves — children aren’t required.

[Chuck Hoberman] explained, “As an artist, my view was that one’s work is the expression of an individual speaking to a viewer who is also an individual….So my mind-set as we started the business was that marketing was a kind of abuse of statistics. The population is divided into arbitrary categories, but an individual can never be a category.”

I suppose the quotes I want to share from the current issue will just have to wait. And hey, if you thought that was too long a post, just be thankful I didn’t also try to include the Friday Five or my thoughts on the Farscape and DS9 episodes I’ve watched this week.