I like kids TV. To be precise, very few things are better than Sabrina the Teenage Witch on a hungover Sunday. And because of this somewhat sad addiction, I got to see all of the kids' adverts for the latest wonder toys. They are depressing.
There's some pink plastic animal shaped thing that you can whisper your secrets to and it then saves them so that only you can hear them. There's a pink plastic diary that does the same thing, apparently working on voice recognition (for only £29.99. Yeah, right) There's a version of 'Kerplunk' but with monkeys. There are several games that look really cool but would take at least 3 hours to set up (anyone remember Mousetrap?) And there's the usual array of weeing, pooing dolls. But almost all have some pseudo AI element so that the kids don't have to use their imagination. Oh no, the doll will do that for you. Along with delivering the appropriate advertising messages.
Anyway, it got me thinking about the toys of my youth. There was the Weebles treehouse. As anyone of a certain age can remember, Weebles wobble but they don't fall down. (Nor, as John said did they break if you threw them against the wall in frustration) Now, aged four, I really liked Weebles. We couldn't afford brand name toys but, after endless requests, my mum saved up for ages to get me a Weebles Treehouse.
The main reason I wanted it was the lift. In the adverts, you could clearly see Weebles going up and down in the lift by magic. At no point, did you see someone winding a handle to make them go up and down. And yet, when the treehouse, paid for by my mother sweating blood (OK, her job wasn't actually that grim but she worked really hard to get it) arrived, did the lift move by magic? No. I was four. The advertisers lied.
Although I still hadn't learned my lesson when she got me a 'Girls World' (dismembered head you could smear with make-up that had 'genuinely growing hair') from a jumble sale. No, the first time I cut its hair it didn't grow back. She was robbed.
The coolest toy from my youth? Packets of Walkers crisps. You ate the contents, put the bag in the oven, inhaled noxious fumes and took the shrunken bag out of the oven to turn into a key ring. Then they changed the stuff the bags were made of so that didn't work any more.
It traumatised me far more than the sucky Weebles treehouse.
Posted by emilyd at November 05, 2002 12:42 AM