CSotD: Educational Toys
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Edison Lee takes on a nearly impossible challenge: Coming up with a toy that is more ridiculous and tasteless than what's already out there.
I'm so old. (How old are you?)
I'm so old that I can remember when Children's Television Workshop was about education. Well, I guess it still is.
Behold Elmo's Cell Phone, doing for real children what Edison Lee only threatens to do to them.
The "learning" part comes in figuring out how to crawl around while holding the thing in your hand and staring down at it.
That's really when being a biped comes in handy: While you're waiting to develop walking skills, it's best you just sit back and endlessly, compulsively change channels with your toy remote while staring passively at the box you are pretending is a TV.
Of course, the satire in the strip is not so much based on "What if?" — though I love a doll that comes with an unlimited data plan — as on "Look at the world we've given them!"
It's perfectly logical that toys reflect the world. I saw a toy cash register the other day and wondered how many kids have ever even seen a real push-down-the-numbered-keys cash register?
If you want to play "store," you need a scanner, and they make those, too.
Here's the benefit for parents, by the way: You can shut off the lights and say "Uh-oh! Power failure!" and then the kids have to lock up the play store, because everybody knows you can't sell anything when the electricity is off. You can then send them outside.
But most parents won't send the kids outside anymore than they will shut off the Disney Channel and make the kids watch "Cosmos."
When my eldest was very small, his best friend was a same-age kid next door, whose very limited vocabulary included the phrase "Go-go K-Mart!"
"Go-go Neiman-Marcus" would not have been an improvement, and "Go-go Co-op" certainly wasn't on the menu.
Good dog, Sophie!
Dog Eat Doug shows why every kid needs a pet to protect him.
I like the implication of selling a doll that comes with a working cell phone and an unlimited data plan, because it feeds into the Teddy Ruxpin issue that Sophie resolves so well: Expensive, highly technical toys that aren't any goddam fun.
Granted, technical toys that only do one thing aren't as expensive as they used to be, but the price is kind of irrelevant, because whatever you spend on them is a waste of money.
My little sisters got a Chatty Cathy doll back when those were cutting edge, but the problem was, once you got tired of those one-sided unresponsive conversations, she wasn't a particularly good doll.
Tiny Tears wasn't as technically advanced, and most mothers generally didn't favor having the doll pee all over the house, but, when she wasn't urinating or crying, Tiny Tears was a perfectly good baby doll.
My sisters also had a doll called "Little Miss Echo," which really was a lot of fun, much of it unintended by either the manufacturer or by our parents and certainly not by our little sisters.
Like Chatty Cathy, Little Miss Echo was a stiff one-trick pony, but her one trick was that embedded in her chest was a loop recorder on which you could record about 15 seconds of sound. Now, my sisters could record messages for her to say, like "I love you, mommy" and "Let's play house!"
And then my brother and I would sneak Little Miss Echo out of their room and record, in our best monster voices, "I'm going to cut off your head!" and replace her. The best part was that it could be a couple of days before the bomb went off.
I suspect the Chucky franchise was invented by someone whose little sister had a Little Miss Echo doll.
Okay, this one is even scarier
Love the puffy shirt and Ken pants, though …
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