Most parents understand that Pokemon toys by this time next year may well be gathering dust in the deep, dark, forgotten recesses of children’s closets, much like last year’s Star Wars video games, or last decade’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Toy stores gamble every Christmas season on which new offerings should receive prime shelf space. But this Christmas season–and every Christmas season–a surprising number of toys taking up space in the toy stores aren’t new, computerized, high-tech, or even much hyped.
They are reliable, perennial best-sellers that probably populated the childhood toy boxes of the vast majority of Americans alive today. On Friday they will show up as museum artifacts at the Museum of Science and Industry’s temporary exhibit, “Kid Stuff: Great Toys from Our Childhood”–in fact, the most famous and successful toys of the century.
Today’s parents–and even some grandparents–almost certainly played with most of the toys in the exhibit when they were children. They include Tonka trucks, Barbie dolls, Pez candy dispensers, G.I. Joe, Mr. Potato Head, the Easy-Bake Oven and dozens of others.
“These are the toys that have withstood the test of time,” said David Hoffman, a California author whose 1996 book on classic toys, carrying the same title as the exhibit, is the basis of the exhibit.
“I selected only toys that have been around for at least 25 years and are still being sold,” he said. “A lot of these toys enjoy greater sales than they ever did.”
Most of the toys’ 1999 versions, however, are highly evolved from the days when they first appeared in the marketplace. The exhibit displays the original versions, along with the original packaging.
Seeing the toys exactly as they appeared when they emerged from Christmas wrapping 30, 40 or 50 years ago is a powerful trigger for nostalgic reverie, much like hearing a long-forgotten song or unexpectedly coming across an aroma recalling grandma’s fresh-baked cookies.
“It’s been fascinating setting this exhibit up,” said Tasmyn Scarl Front, the museum’s traveling exhibits manager. “Workers from other departments (in the museum) keep dropping by, full of their own stories about the toys, singing the jingles that the companies used to sell them on radio or television advertising.
“These are all very recognizable toys. In fact, every one of them is still on the market, which says a lot about their success and popularity.”
Commonplace and familiar as they are, the exhibited toys often have seldom-told stories behind them.
“A surprising number of these toys were developed accidentally from materials that had been invented for industrial applications,” Hoffman said.
More Top Picks Netgear Ac1200 R6230
Asked by the U.S. government during World War II to develop a synthetic rubber, General Electric chemist James Wright experimented with combining boric acid and silicone oil.
The strange, malleable lump that resulted bounced higher and stretched farther than natural rubber, and could even lift images off of a newspaper. Though it didn’t work out as a rubber substitute, fellow scientists took to playing with it for their own amusement until a couple of entrepreneurs put it in little plastic eggs and sold it as Silly Putty.
Play-Doh, the sublimely mushy, vaguely vanilla-scented modeling clay, originally was marketed as a wallpaper cleaner. The son of the Cincinnati manufacturer first got the idea of using it as a toy after hearing his schoolteacher sister-in-law complain that regular modeling clay was too firm for her nursery school pupils to manipulate with their fingers.
Several of the toys in the exhibit have histories strongly tied to Chicago. Chicagoan John Lloyd Wright, son of the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, invented Lincoln Logs. Charles Pajeau, an Evanston tombstone-maker, seeing his children amusing themselves by constructing items out of pencils and wooden thread spools, invented Tinkertoys.
In 1917, Antonio Pasin, a 16-year-old immigrant from Italy, earning his pay during the day bringing drinking water to Chicago construction workers, at night put his carpentry skills to work making wooden wagons, which he pedaled to retail stores himself.
The toy wagons became such popular items, he founded a company, eventually shifting his material of choice to steel, allowing him to emulate his American hero, Henry Ford, using an assembly line to mass-produce cheap, high-quality wagons affordable to most families. Painting the wagons red, he called the toy the “Radio Flyer,” a name that conjured up for Pasin his Italian hero, Marconi, inventor of the radio.
“Wood wagons made by hand were so expensive,” said Paul Pasin, Antonio Pasin’s grandson, “and grandpa saw in Ford’s production methods a way of making wagons that most families could afford. They sold so well, the wagons were sometimes called `The Little Ford.’ “
Pasin and his brother, Robert, still operate the Radio Flyer company on the city’s West Side, the largest wagon manufacturer in the world, capable of turning out 10,000 a day.
“One of the things I like about the exhibit,” Front said, “is that it has all sorts of painless science and history lessons in it, and it also has the potential of being inspiring. The fact that so many of the toys were developed out of such simple ideas just might spark in some kids the notion that, `Hey, I could do that.’ “
Frisbee, the sailing plastic disc, started out at Yale University, where students in the 1920s amused themselves on campus lawns by tossing around empty pie tins from the local Frisbie Baking Co. A New York chemical plant owner, hearing of the need for a cheaper crayon, looked at a wax marker he had invented to label crates and barrels in his factory, put non-toxic dyes in them and came up with Crayola Brand crayons.
The exhibit will run at the museum until January, part of its first leg of a five-year tour that will take it to 15 museums around the nation. It was developed by the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass.
Besides the toys, the exhibit has a television set playing original commercials for many of the toys, such as Slinky, the floppy, stair-walking steel coil that boasts the longest-running jingle in advertising history: It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky/for fun it’s a wonderful toy/It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky/it’s fun for a girl and a boy.”
At 1 p.m. on Dec. 20, 21, 22 and 23, the museum has invited in some of the area’s more noted chefs to bake desserts on an Easy-Bake Oven, which uses standard light bulbs as its heating element.
Hoffman found the oven used in the exhibit, with the original, unopened cake and cookie mix packages, at the Antique-Collectible Toy and Doll World Shows at the Kane County Fairground.
“I found a lot of Erector Sets there and a beautiful Whee-lo in its original box,” Hoffman said, “but the best find was the Easy-Bake Oven, in its original box, with all the mixes.
“Most of these toys are highly collectible, and some of the things, like the early Barbie dolls, can cost $5,000 or more. I picked up the Easy-Bake Oven in Chicago for $75, and I found out later that in auction, it might go for $500.”