"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
As a child I found myself playing with toys of a more adult nature. Meaning that, as a toddler, I played with LEGOS that were rated at a higher age level that I was. Get your head out of the gutter. My brother had toys that he ultimately had torn down and re-engineered to work faster or do different things. And, in any situation, the packaging for a toy sometimes provided more entertainment than the prize inside.
Most of the time, I played with toys that were previously bought for one of my siblings and did not have a lot of toys bought specifically for me. Probably the first "new" toys I ever received were Kenner Star Wars action figures. Of course, had I been any kind of collecting genius, I would have never opened those cardboard backed, plastic sarcophagi allowing my retirement millions to be sealed in for freshness. When buying a car, they say that it depreciates by about 20% as soon as you drive it off the lot. In the case of Star Wars action figures, it’s similar in that the first thing that happens when you open the packaging is that you lose the little plastic weapons. The next thing that disappears is any removable clothes, such as capes. There’s your 20% right there. Yes, looking back, I think I would have asked for two of every action figure I was bought. One for me and one for the vault.
As I grew older, the toys I had as a young child had sustained my need for escapism from the everyday doldrums of basic cable. However, somewhere just before the middle of the 80's there was a significant change in toy designs starting around the age of eight. Soon, I went from playing with toys rated at a higher age than myself to being jealous of the ones I had missed out on as a kid. By 1983, I had already outgrown my Spider-Man Big Wheel and had moved on to a black Huffy with the bread loaf ribbed seat cushion and a new mode of transportation had arrived for the under seven crowd, the Power Wheel. Think of it, a motorized miniature car that held up to two passengers and required no exertion of energy. I was flabbergasted. How could technology betray me like this? For the last two years I was relying on manual operation of these pedal based devices that in my mind were not built with gender in mind. I mean come on, you give boys, the design that has the metal bar running between their legs while the girl version has none. Have you ever slipped off your pedals and fallen onto that bar? All this time I could have been speeding along at the speed of 2.5 mph down to my best friend’s house. He only lived a quarter mile away. I could have been there in just under ten minutes. Of course, I would have needed a fresh battery for the return trip as it was uphill the whole way. Seeing as how we had to be home before the street lights came on, I’d have to plan on leaving in advance of dusk, but still, why do people take the bus to work? It takes longer to get there but they don’t have to do any of the work.
While most people will tell you they were born too late, sometimes I wonder if I had been born too early. As I got older, the toys became more advanced and kids really were spoiled by the technological wonders as were parents. As a parent, I am not really dreading the time when I will have to read my child a bedtime story in order to get her to sleep. As an actor and general performer, I will probably take great pride in doing different voices and who knows, I may just spice up the story a little. Maybe Goldilocks is addicted to smack and is crashing out during a B&E at the Three Bears house much like Robert Downey Jr. did back in the day. Either way, I would relish in the undertaking. However, growing up, I had to read my own books and how cool would it have been to have been young enough to enjoy Teddy Ruxpin. I was rather jealous of the demographic that he was aimed at and thought it would have been a neat marketing move to have Teddy read other literary works like the ones I was forced to read in school. Just think he collective works of Shakespeare or Tolstoy, read aloud by a talking bear, but only in the voice of James Earl Jones or Patrick Stewart. I don’t think I could stand to hear Hamlet being done by a cartoon bear voice. You can’t capture the angst and melancholy nature of the Great Dane that way. Again, a plethora of batteries would be needed in the case of that idea.
Well into my young adult years kids’ toys continued to advance, making me wish more and more to be a kid again. My friends and I burned late afternoon oil simulating war games behind my house on the grounds of our elementary school. I was nearly old enough to drive and here I was crouched down in a set of bushes with a fake gun looking out for another kid. I’d pop up, unsuspecting, yelling “Bang” or making some other fake gun sound as I shook my hand violently in his direction. After the slow motion carnage subsided I declared in the most whiny of voices, “You’re dead! I got you!” Yes, war is hell, but we relied on the honor system. If you could prove that you shot your friend, usually based on a surprise attack, they had to sit out until the next round. The more physically fit and adventurous kids would climb up onto the roof of the school and hunker down among the discarded tennis balls and kick balls and the few wayward Frisbees and play sniper. They say you never hear the bullet that gets you and in this case, you never felt or saw it, either. Yet, for all our imagination and creativity, there was new toys hitting the market like Lazer Tag and Photon that offered high tech warfare with better accountability. Once I followed around a group of outsiders that staged a battle on our school grounds using Lazer Tag. I kept close to them like a war correspondence reporter watching intently as they stalked their prey. I was so jealous. The next year we decided to upgrade our arsenal to make it more interesting. We didn’t get any new-fangled toys to aid out campaigns. We started using bottle rockets, firecrackers, and roman candles. We still miss poor Jason.
I’m kidding about that last part.
As I graduated from high school and moved onto higher learning, it was time to put away childish things. That was until my dorm roommates came home from the grocery store with a set of suction cup dart guns they found in the bargain bin. We reverted to children and formed our own gang, 8 KROW. We were wannabe gangstas hunting each other down with our plastic gats. The dorm was riddled with saliva stained dart marks along most of the smooth surfaces. We chased one another from our hideout, down the outer hallways, to a neighboring dorm room full of girls. Our blood feud spilled into their bedrooms as innocent coeds were caught in the crossfire. Granted, had this occurred later than 1993, and perhaps not at a location as secluded as the college I was attending at the time, there might have been some campus security involvement and we would have been arrested for carrying guns, albeit a fake green one with orange rubber bullets that stick to walls. Still, we would have seen it as 5-0 trying to get at us and would have probably launched an assault of darts at him in the process. This had to be a sociological phenomenon. Here I was getting older, hurtling headlong into adulthood and I’m chasing around other people like a little kid, giggling all the way.
Now, almost midway into my thirties, I have neither the body nor the free time to endure such frivolous escapades with children’s toys. I spend most of my time lamenting over sticking batteries into my daughter’s ear piercing and annoyingly repetitive gadgets for the three and up crowd. She follows my wife around while she vacuums, Mommy with her Oreck and baby with her little dirt devil toy vac with a detachable hand vac. There is a stockpile on the back porch of unopened toys waiting to get into the rotation. Yet, while I don’t have the time to run off with my dwindling pack of friends to engage in a fake battle or gang initiation, I do find the time to have the occasional tea party and often, you’ll find me doing the lion’s share of the coloring when we are in a restaurant and I’m keeping the little one placated until her noodles arrive. My regression into childhood is now complete. And in a few years I will be reading Green Eggs and Ham to her and doing the role of Sam in some exaggerated and silly voice. Although, I might crash out and falling asleep before she does, I don’t want to keep her in suspense as to how the story ends. If only there was some kind of toy that could do the job for me…..hmmm. I wonder how Anthony Hopkins feels about doing a vocal recording of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish?
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