Flunking Toys 101

The last time we were in a thrift shop together, Tim picked up an Etch-A-Sketch.
I didn’t question his purchase — after all, I’ve come home from thrift shops with far less sane things than that. I figured that Tim was trying to fulfill some primal, artistic need to create a great work of art during those all too repetitive commercials on the NFL channel, so I didn’t say anything.

We brought the Etch-A-Sketch home, threw it in Tim’s closet, and promptly forgot all about it until the other day, when one of the news networks broadcast its coverage of the 2008 Toy Fair, which was held last month in New York.

Designed as a showcase for presenting the hottest new toy trends to the nation’s retailers, the Toy Fair showroom is a cross between a carnival side show and a live television infomercial.

Watching this year’s coverage, I experienced a horrific moment when I heard this sales pitch from one of the Toy Fair presenters:
“Here’s what promises to be the biggest seller in our product line this year — our nostalgia package!”

He proudly pointed to a boxed set containing a Slinky, an Etch-A-Sketch, and a plastic egg full of Silly Putty — all toys I played with as a child.

When they start labeling your childhood accoutrements with the “nostalgia” word, you know that, at least in the eyes of the world, you’re just a few short steps away from senility.

The sight of those playthings of my past stirred up some vague feelings of failure from somewhere deep in my soul. Suddenly, I was able to identify them.

“Oh my gosh,” I told Tim. “I just realized — when I was a kid, I flunked in Toys.”

Those three toys represented my biggest failures in kid-dom. Try as I might, I couldn’t get any of them to work the way they were supposed to. It’s not just that they fell short of the glamorous heights they achieved on their commercials, thanks to all the trick photography and special effects. No, they just didn’t WORK.

For instance, we must have gone through two or three hundred Slinkys during the brief years of our childhood. But, in spite of daily attempts that probably ultimately damaged our young psyches, my brother and I could never get that darned Slinky to go down the stairs.

Even before we got the basement stairs carpeted, our Slinky balked at the top step and went on Slinky strike. My brother would lean over to rattle its metal guts, but all we got was that snippy “Hissss…hisss….hissss” that seemed to be mocking our efforts. “Why don’t you slide down those stairs yourself?” Slinky seemed to be saying. “C’mon, I dares ya!”

After a few weeks of this, one of us would finally give it a quick kick down the stairs, where Slinky would give out one final death rattle and get inexplicably, irretrievably twisted into a bulky metal knot.

We must not have been doing it right.

The other thing we never got right was Silly Putty. We loved the stuff — no, we never enjoyed it as a mid-afternoon snack like a lot of kids of our era did, but we loved to roll it in a ball and bounce it on the concrete stairs that Slinky wouldn’t climb down.

As you may recall, the most glamorous thing about Silly Putty was its ability to reproduce the color print off of the Sunday comics.

You just flattened it into a pancake, pressed it onto Charlie Brown and Snoopy or Beetle Bailey, lifted it up after a couple of minutes and, voila! There would be the colorful cartoon image, meticulously transferred to your slab of Silly Putty. It was just like owning your own Xerox machine.

My brother and I could never get that comic strip image to appear on our Silly Putty. We spent some of the formative years of our childhood hammering that stuff down with our little fists onto the newsprint as hard as we could, but we just couldn’t get it to work.

After a while, my brother would roll the Silly Putty in a ball and start throwing it at me, where it would hit the garbage can and, like Slinky, die an undignified death, mixed with remnants from last night’s sloppy joes.

But my bête noir, my Waterloo in our world of wayward playthings, was Etch-A-Sketch.

A few nights ago, while playing Jeopardy on PlayStation, I was attempting to write an amusing, if somewhat coarse, phony identity for myself using the buttons on the controller. After watching my futile attempts for about 10 minutes, Tim said, “You never had an Etch-A-Sketch when you were a kid, did you?”

Didn’t I just! I must have had at least 20 of them, because they would always seem to get lost in our house, or else that silver-grey powdery stuff would start smearing all over the board, signaling that another Etch-A-Sketch had bit the dust.

My frustration with Etch-A-Sketch stemmed from the fact that I could never draw curves on the thing. To tell the truth, the only thing I could draw on an Etch-A-Sketch was straight lines.

Squares were difficult, because you had those corners to dovetail.
Since they didn’t give you instructions with your Etch-A-Sketch back then — I suppose someone at the company thought it would be about as silly as putting instructions on a shampoo bottle — we kids were left to our own devices when it came to figuring out how to produce great works of art.

Even today, when I see that some 14 year old has reproduced an Etch-A-Sketch likeness of “The Last Supper” or a portrait of Elvis in Las Vegas, I’m torn between thinking that the kid is a genius, or feeling that this is one kid with way, way too much time on his hands.

When you’re a kid and toys don’t work the way you expect them to — or if you just don’t like them — you’ll soon come up with other uses for them. For some reason, we got downright hostile toward our “Simon” toy, and gave it to our dog Toby to play with — along with several of my more obnoxious Barbie dolls.

As for that horrible Spirograph thing — does anybody remember those, you always got one every Christmas, and the ink would run out within the first five minutes? — we would toss those out as soon as we decently could, because there was no other earthly use for them.

But because we loved Slinky, Etch-A-Sketch and Silly Putty, we kept trying, and kept buying them. We thought they were cool toys. Skill-wise, we just flunked them, that’s all.

In the meantime, I’ve dug out Tim’s thrift shop Etch-A-Sketch, and I’m still trying. At least, my box corners dovetail now, and I’m getting great at drawing squares.