Speaker 1: This holiday season discovered the true meaning of Christmas in
Speaker 1: all of us. I'm not really into the holidays, sorry.
Speaker 1: Jack Warmby thought he had it all, a big city job,
Speaker 1: a beautiful wife, and a phone that worked in his car,
Speaker 1: but his life was missing one thing. I am sent
Speaker 1: to Tallows here to administer ful Christmas. I'd bring hot
Speaker 1: chain forged in life. It's burning my skin. It's the
Speaker 1: story of one man, one Bronze age automaton, and a
Speaker 1: whole lot of Christmas year. Welcome to Invention, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome to Invention. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're
Speaker 1: back with part three of our exploration of invented toys.
Speaker 1: In the previous episodes, we talked about stuff like the frisbee,
Speaker 1: the Jack in the Box, the slinky, the hula hoop.
Speaker 1: What else do we do? Oh? We did jigsaw puzzles.
Speaker 1: We did uh uh yeah, Jack in the Box? Uh
Speaker 1: number let's um, we can't remember what we talked about
Speaker 1: on here? Yeah, who hoop, frisbee? Uh, A number of
Speaker 1: different toys. I mean, really, you just gotta go back
Speaker 1: in the bag and started digging around to see what
Speaker 1: we discussed. But today I wanted to start off by
Speaker 1: talking about one of the most basic toys you could
Speaker 1: possibly have. You know, when I was a kid, I
Speaker 1: had lots of favorite toys. I remember being very partial
Speaker 1: to some branded Jurassic Park action figures, and actually I
Speaker 1: had the car, you know, like the car that the
Speaker 1: t Rex steps on. So there's like a Sam Neil
Speaker 1: action figure. Oh yeah, totally sammyl action figure. He's got
Speaker 1: the hat on and he One of the funny things
Speaker 1: about the Jurassic Park action figures is that they would
Speaker 1: come with weapons that they did not possess at all
Speaker 1: in the film. So they've got like an Ellie Sattler
Speaker 1: action figure Laura Dern's likeness, with like a grappling hook gun,
Speaker 1: like I don't remember the scene in the movie where
Speaker 1: she had that. Well, this was sort of this was
Speaker 1: the late nineties, um, and I was you're you're a
Speaker 1: little younger than me, so I was. I wasn't at
Speaker 1: at action figure age at this point anymore. So maybe
Speaker 1: I was beyond it, but still still going, well, I
Speaker 1: don't know, that's a that's a whole another discussion, because
Speaker 1: ultimately my take is you can get action figures anytime
Speaker 1: you want during your life, because all they are ultimately
Speaker 1: their their deities. They're they're little icons that inspire you
Speaker 1: and you can you can play with them or just
Speaker 1: be inspired by them at any point in your life.
Speaker 1: But um, at that point in my life, they weren't
Speaker 1: really on my radar. But now I'm excited by the
Speaker 1: idea of having a Jeff Goldblum action figure. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: weapon did Jeff Goldblum have? I think maybe he had
Speaker 1: he had like a gun that shot a net or something.
Speaker 1: How would he have that? Maybe it was shooting like
Speaker 1: a like a graph for like mapping the grids of
Speaker 1: his is parabolas and all that when he's doing his calculations.
Speaker 1: There is that that theme and action figures, especially where
Speaker 1: it's like it's not enough that you have the likeness
Speaker 1: of a person or a creature or an entity to
Speaker 1: the it's not enough that you can then engage in imagination,
Speaker 1: play with it, and and even and even pose it.
Speaker 1: I like having a posable figure. I grew up in that,
Speaker 1: you know, the air of g I. Joe's and it
Speaker 1: was nice to have all those those joints move. But
Speaker 1: but then there's this level of like, Nope, it needs
Speaker 1: some sort of gun. It needs something to have a gun.
Speaker 1: It's got to have some sort of not only something
Speaker 1: looks like a gun, a functional projectile implement that can
Speaker 1: fire the grappling hook or the net at another action figure.
Speaker 1: And I think it's largely about so you can have
Speaker 1: the action moment in the commercial where one figure does
Speaker 1: something to knock over another. Yes, that that's totally it.
Speaker 1: I think it may also be driven on the supply
Speaker 1: side sometimes, like, oh, we figured out how to make
Speaker 1: this little shooter thing, what action figure can we pair
Speaker 1: that with? Yes? Uh? And and we'll come back to
Speaker 1: this discussion of action figures and and movie and TV
Speaker 1: properties towards the end of the episode. Right, But I
Speaker 1: want to go way simpler than that. So this has
Speaker 1: no guns, no moving parts, no likenesses of Sam Neil
Speaker 1: or Laura Dern. I had lots of favorite toys, But
Speaker 1: what did I get the most sustained enjoyment out of
Speaker 1: I think it's got to be blocks, right, Like I
Speaker 1: spent more time with building blocks than any other kind
Speaker 1: of toy. Because of course blocks can be anything. So
Speaker 1: there's like an infinite amount of play that you can
Speaker 1: do with them, though I still remember the pain of
Speaker 1: trying to build with blocks in a room completely covered
Speaker 1: in soft carpet. That wayalizes death, you know, like you
Speaker 1: build a tower, but then you smite its ruin on
Speaker 1: the carpeted stair because it's just unstable. It's true, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I also have a lot of fond memories of
Speaker 1: playing with this one set of standard wooden blocks. Well
Speaker 1: most of them were standing, but you also had some
Speaker 1: specialty pieces. I was especially pleased with these these double
Speaker 1: arches that you could use that you'd be used to
Speaker 1: make a bridge, or you could put them together to
Speaker 1: make like a circular entrance in something. And I think
Speaker 1: a lot of my imagination play with them was based
Speaker 1: on Raiders of the Lost Dark, those scenes where Indiana
Speaker 1: Jones and others are going into these you know, ridiculously
Speaker 1: unrealistic tim spaces, these uh you know, anti chambers and
Speaker 1: uh and so forth, and you know, I just had
Speaker 1: to reconstruct those and send some g I Joes down there.
Speaker 1: I think blocks are very interesting as toys because building
Speaker 1: with blocks is a kind of play that combines the
Speaker 1: ultimate in freedom and the ultimate in constraint, right, it
Speaker 1: has like no established goals rules, no winning conditions unless
Speaker 1: it's not really a game, and yet it has extremely
Speaker 1: tight and non negotiable constraints based in physics and materials.
Speaker 1: And so it's a very different kind of play than
Speaker 1: a lot of the imagination play that you would do
Speaker 1: where you know, you might have action figures there, where uh,
Speaker 1: you know, your action figure play is just not very
Speaker 1: limited by physics. Usually a lot of it's just like
Speaker 1: happening in the imagination with the action figure as a prop.
Speaker 1: A different thing is going on with the blocks, Like
Speaker 1: you're trying to stack them on top of each other.
Speaker 1: You're trying to get them to behave to like stand
Speaker 1: up in a certain way. You know. Yeah, absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you have like this this basic physical enterprise at
Speaker 1: the heart of your your play, no matter how much
Speaker 1: imagination you then put on top of that. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: asking the question when toy blocks were invented, obviously we
Speaker 1: don't know that. It seems that people have been using
Speaker 1: various kinds of homemade toy building materials for centuries, maybe
Speaker 1: even thousands of years, but we just frankly don't know
Speaker 1: when it began. Um So I was reading a great
Speaker 1: article in the history of blocks as tools for learning
Speaker 1: and as toys by an author named Karen Hewitt, who
Speaker 1: is a scholar of education. Um she's a toy designer
Speaker 1: and she has curated museum exhibitions on the history of
Speaker 1: educational toys. This article was called Locks as a Tool
Speaker 1: for Learning Historical and Contemporary Perspective, published in the journal
Speaker 1: Young Children in two thousand one and so um Here
Speaker 1: it begins by observing that building based play among children
Speaker 1: probably predates dedicated block toys, because you can even watch
Speaker 1: children today improvised with building based play using natural materials
Speaker 1: like rocks and sticks, or constructor or like constructed or
Speaker 1: artificial materials often discarded by adults, you know, like construction,
Speaker 1: scrap containers, boxes. I remember getting so much enjoyment out
Speaker 1: of empty boxes when I was young. Oh yeah, empty
Speaker 1: boxes are are loads of fun. And on top of that,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, the the children of builders will
Speaker 1: inevitably not only play with the debris leftover from building,
Speaker 1: but they will imitate the building activity that they see
Speaker 1: in the parents. Sure so, yeah, just watching the way
Speaker 1: kids pick up things that are not specifically intended as
Speaker 1: toy filding materials and then turn them into toy building materials.
Speaker 1: That makes it pretty clear that construction play probably long
Speaker 1: predates having dedicated toy blocks. I mean, even you can
Speaker 1: think about sand castles. How long have people been making
Speaker 1: sand castles where you know, Neolithic people's making sand castles
Speaker 1: as possible? Absolutely, yeah, I mean the sand castle is
Speaker 1: just playing in the sand, digging in the sand. There's
Speaker 1: just something irresistible about it. Yeah. So I think it's
Speaker 1: clear that building blocks are not a toy that invents
Speaker 1: a fundamentally new kind of play the way say a
Speaker 1: slinky or a jack in the box would. There's no
Speaker 1: way to play with a slinky before the slinky existed.
Speaker 1: There's no way to play with the jack in box
Speaker 1: jack in the box before that existed. But you could
Speaker 1: basically have blocks in nature, you know, rock sticks, all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. Rather, I think toy blocks offer
Speaker 1: a clean, safe, and convenient way of facilitating the kind
Speaker 1: of construction play that children pick up naturally without any prompting,
Speaker 1: whenever random materials are available. Though I do have a
Speaker 1: question about this, and I couldn't find an answer to this.
Speaker 1: Does Homo sapiens have a building instinct that would manifest
Speaker 1: even without any exposure to a culture of construction and
Speaker 1: artificial structures. Or do children need to see artificial structures
Speaker 1: and witness adults building things in order to get the
Speaker 1: urge to build as play. Yeah, that's that's a tough
Speaker 1: one to I mean, almost an impossible one to investigate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like studying on language children. You have to you
Speaker 1: have to. It would require, you know, an act of
Speaker 1: extreme deprivation in order to study what it would be like.
Speaker 1: It's like to deny a child access to like blocks
Speaker 1: or the idea of plocks, to the idea of play.
Speaker 1: You know. That's says something that's very difficult, if not impossible,
Speaker 1: to study. I'm not suggesting we try it, No, absolutely
Speaker 1: not so. Hewitt points out that thinkers have long connected
Speaker 1: children's orientation towards construction based play with learning and the
Speaker 1: needs of a developing brain. She mentions Plato comminists uh
Speaker 1: Pestelozzi and Jehan Pierg and apparently this even came up
Speaker 1: with the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke in s and
Speaker 1: a treatise called Some Thoughts concerning Education, John Locke wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: the chief art is to make all that children have
Speaker 1: to do sport and play too. Learning anything they should
Speaker 1: be taught might be made as much a recreation to
Speaker 1: their play as their play is to their learning. So specifically,
Speaker 1: Lock here points to children's play with what we now
Speaker 1: know today as alphabet blocks. They existed at the time too,
Speaker 1: that they didn't I don't think they were being like
Speaker 1: mass manufactured at the time. They weren't like you know,
Speaker 1: big toy companies putting these out. But some kids just
Speaker 1: had blocks they were playing with that had letters inscribed
Speaker 1: on them. This reminds me of the origins of the
Speaker 1: jigsaw puzzle, or more specifically, the the dissected map that
Speaker 1: we discussed in the last EPISOD. So it's something that
Speaker 1: began as not even a mass reduced toy, but like
Speaker 1: an educational aid. Yes, and this would have been not
Speaker 1: always as fully accepted and intuitive as it is just today.
Speaker 1: Like so, Locks actually trying to make a case for
Speaker 1: using a child's natural tendency towards play as a means
Speaker 1: of education. Like you know, he's saying, if the child
Speaker 1: automatically wants to play with alphabet blocks, it is no chore,
Speaker 1: and thus the child better learns the alphabet and to
Speaker 1: put this in context, a lot of the prevailing sentiment
Speaker 1: about childhood education in late seventeenth century England would have
Speaker 1: focused on like hard work and discipline through threats of punishment,
Speaker 1: and uh a Lock instead emphasized that children could learn
Speaker 1: through play and enjoyment, and he Witt suggests that this
Speaker 1: view contributed to a sort of reevaluation of toys, with
Speaker 1: more adults coming to see them, uh, To see toys
Speaker 1: less as like sinful icons of idleness and more as
Speaker 1: tools for informing and exercising and developing mind, something that's
Speaker 1: actually a social good and useful. I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: the same would apply to Laura Dern's grappling hook guns,
Speaker 1: but I think you could definitely make the case with
Speaker 1: building blocks. Uh So. Hewitt writes that in the mid
Speaker 1: to late nineteenth centuries, some manufacturers in Europe in the
Speaker 1: US actually then began to mass produce building block toys.
Speaker 1: Uh And this could often be kind of a side
Speaker 1: business of something like. Imagine you've got a woodworking company
Speaker 1: and you're cutting wood for you know, whatever it is
Speaker 1: that you're mainly selling. You tend to have a lot
Speaker 1: of small scraps of wood left over. Could you actually
Speaker 1: turn those for a profit? Could you shape them into
Speaker 1: building blocks and make money off of what would otherwise
Speaker 1: be a waste product? And hew ittt writes that since
Speaker 1: the mid nineteenth century, there have been three main avenues
Speaker 1: linking learning and play with respect to toy blocks. So
Speaker 1: the first one is what we're already talking about. It's
Speaker 1: building itself. It's learning about basic physics and material properties
Speaker 1: with hands on building experience. Uh. This is, of course
Speaker 1: one of the most important parts of education. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: gets under emphasized when we think about education because it's
Speaker 1: not a technical subject you really learn in school. It's
Speaker 1: something that children just have to learn intuitively with hands
Speaker 1: on experience in the world. Absolutely, it just allows for
Speaker 1: further experimentation with the natural properties of reality. Sure. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then okay, So the second thing is surfaces of
Speaker 1: blocks as a place to represent symbols like letters, numbers, words.
Speaker 1: Of course, we already talked about the example of alphabet
Speaker 1: blocks and thus using the blocks as a way of
Speaker 1: learning how to manipulate those symbols. Like Hewitt says that
Speaker 1: this pairing of abstract symbols with blocks really exploded in
Speaker 1: the mid eighteen hundreds, and it it seems like a
Speaker 1: very relevant type of learning today, Like allowing the child
Speaker 1: to physically move symbols around in real space. This sort
Speaker 1: of is a is a physical model of the way
Speaker 1: we metaphorically move symbols around in mental space to manipulate them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and basically and engaging. Are you know, are the visual
Speaker 1: processes of our brain as well? Um? Yeah? Yeah, these
Speaker 1: these are still tremendously helpful. You see them sometimes to
Speaker 1: aid in uh, acquisition of foreign languages, etcetera. I was wondering,
Speaker 1: did you ever when you were a kid us like
Speaker 1: those um sort of balancing scale games with physical objects
Speaker 1: to learn algebra, Like, so you're trying to balance two
Speaker 1: sides of an equation in math? That no, No, I
Speaker 1: feel like my math education was very based in just
Speaker 1: wrote memorization of things, uh, you know, memorizing tables, uh,
Speaker 1: learning tricks and so I really with with a second
Speaker 1: grader who's going through like modern math education, it's been
Speaker 1: very interesting to see just this seemingly drastic different approach
Speaker 1: to learning how numbers work and uh and how quantities
Speaker 1: compared to each other. It's a at times it's difficult
Speaker 1: for me to even help him with it. Because I
Speaker 1: feel like our our math educations are so different. But
Speaker 1: but the way they're teaching him, I think is far
Speaker 1: superior to what I had. Oh, you're not going to
Speaker 1: be one of those adults complaining that kids aren't learning
Speaker 1: stuff the same way you learned it. No, No, I'm
Speaker 1: thank goodness they're learning in a different way because the
Speaker 1: way I learned it, I feel like did not give
Speaker 1: me a true appreciation for mathematics. Yeah, I feel much
Speaker 1: the same way. But I think that's such a funny
Speaker 1: impulse people have, Isn't it Like it's they're they're not
Speaker 1: learning it the way I did. The way I did
Speaker 1: has got to be superior. Somehow they're not learning it
Speaker 1: poorly like I did. I will not stand for it. No.
Speaker 1: I want my kid to be able to actually think
Speaker 1: about numbers in ways that have eluded me my whole life. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then there's one third main way that Hewitt mentions
Speaker 1: that blocks have been linked with learning, and that's the
Speaker 1: transmission of cultural heritage through blocks. An example here would
Speaker 1: be quote building a model of an important architectural structure,
Speaker 1: and through this, pro says learning architectural styles. In fact,
Speaker 1: an example, I was just thinking of was the original
Speaker 1: Lincoln logs. You know, these were created by Frank Lloyd
Speaker 1: Wright's son. I can't remember his first name, but one
Speaker 1: of the sons of Frank Lloyd right, uh yeah. He
Speaker 1: got a Lincoln log business going. And one of the
Speaker 1: original things that you were supposed to do with Lincoln logs,
Speaker 1: like you got these instructions on how to build Abraham
Speaker 1: Lincoln's log cabin. Yeah, Lincoln logs. Okay. I'll acknowledge that
Speaker 1: Lincoln logs do succeed as an educational toy, in in
Speaker 1: the educating you in the basic way that a log
Speaker 1: cabin is constructed, but that's pretty much. Yet I always
Speaker 1: found them to be a very boring toy. Like you
Speaker 1: played with them once and you're like, oh, yeah, that's okay,
Speaker 1: that's all I can do with this. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: build something out of a block that allows me to
Speaker 1: engage my mind a bit more. I was reading an
Speaker 1: old New York Times article in about blocks by the
Speaker 1: Canadian American architect and you pen professor v Told rib Chinsky,
Speaker 1: and his comment about Lincoln logs was it was something like, well,
Speaker 1: at least they smelled good. Yeah, I mean they were wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't hate Lincoln logs, but I just
Speaker 1: they never really resonated with me. But they certainly survived
Speaker 1: due to that. And I think the first episode we
Speaker 1: did on toys, we talked about this idea that toys
Speaker 1: have a twenty year cycle that you you and you
Speaker 1: have a certain toy as a child, and then twenty
Speaker 1: years later, you know, give or take. If you have
Speaker 1: children or their children in your life at all, you're
Speaker 1: likely to give that toy anew if it's still on
Speaker 1: the market, still available. And Lincoln logs are exactly like that.
Speaker 1: My my son received Lincoln logs from members of the
Speaker 1: family just because of that nostalgia. And how do they smell?
Speaker 1: I smell fine, and you can still build a little
Speaker 1: cabin out of it and then set him aside to
Speaker 1: go do something more fun. But of course, another thing
Speaker 1: points out is that there are plenty of cases of
Speaker 1: blurring of the lines between these categories, right because, uh,
Speaker 1: for example, a thing that was I think very common
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century was like you have a set
Speaker 1: of blocks that you sold as a as a set
Speaker 1: that would represent elements of Bible stories. And this combines
Speaker 1: using the blocks themselves as a representation space for symbols
Speaker 1: or referring to things somewhere else, but then also transmitting
Speaker 1: cultural heritage through the Bible story aspect. I don't think
Speaker 1: I've ever seen these. Would it have been essentially it
Speaker 1: wasn't sequential art, right, it wasn't. I think there was
Speaker 1: some sequential art like that, like Bible story sequential art.
Speaker 1: And I think it was also like, you know, build
Speaker 1: build Noah's Arc or something. Well, that sounds like a
Speaker 1: good fit. Noah's Ark is the the most child friendly
Speaker 1: portion of pretty much the whole Bible. So do they
Speaker 1: have blocks of all the other people on the earth
Speaker 1: getting drowned to death? No, No, we just focus on
Speaker 1: the animals. It's the main thing. Uh. So she goes
Speaker 1: into the history of a lot of individual block manufacturers
Speaker 1: and their businesses. I decided I'm not going to go
Speaker 1: into all that here to touch on a couple more
Speaker 1: broad issues. Uh though, it is actually interesting and this
Speaker 1: paper is worth looking up and giving a read if
Speaker 1: you want to go deeper on just like what some
Speaker 1: of these manufacturers were doing individually. But um uh. Hewitt
Speaker 1: points out that despite the attempts to use blocks for education,
Speaker 1: in numbers and letters and so forth. Children most often
Speaker 1: play with blocks in terms of pure form like that.
Speaker 1: When you actually watch the way children and engage with blocks,
Speaker 1: most of the time they ignore the symbolic representations, they
Speaker 1: ignore the letters on the alphabet blocks, and instead they
Speaker 1: use them to build. They build little towers and little cities.
Speaker 1: Usually the form and the physical base of construction play
Speaker 1: seems more relevant to the child's mind than the abstract
Speaker 1: content does. I don't know how that squares with your experience,
Speaker 1: but yeah I would, I would say, so, yeah, it
Speaker 1: does with mine. Yeah, Like if I had the Bible blocks,
Speaker 1: I think I would just be trying to build like
Speaker 1: an Indiana Jones temple out of them. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that was my experience with with alphabet blocks as a kid.
Speaker 1: I would use them to a certain extent to build with,
Speaker 1: but they didn't They didn't provide as much flexibility in
Speaker 1: terms of what you ultimately built compared to an actual
Speaker 1: block set that had varying sizes. There's only something you
Speaker 1: can do with identical cubes. Likewise, remember we were gifted
Speaker 1: a very nice set of wooden alphabet blocks and character
Speaker 1: blocks of when my son came into our life because uh,
Speaker 1: they were they would have Mandarin characters on them, which
Speaker 1: was very cool, and you know, you get kind of
Speaker 1: excited about Ah, he has the learning tool that that
Speaker 1: are that that is, that is this block set. But
Speaker 1: then you know, ultimately the kids not that interested in
Speaker 1: them and just wants to do uh, you know, age
Speaker 1: appropriate things with them, which I guess he was like
Speaker 1: like one one and a half at that point, and
Speaker 1: you know, he just wants to knock them over or
Speaker 1: throw them. Uh, he doesn't want to actually build and
Speaker 1: much less think about the characters all that much. Oh
Speaker 1: but that's actually interesting because another thing he talks about.
Speaker 1: She makes a point about the importance of the tearing
Speaker 1: down own aspect of block play. She says, this is
Speaker 1: a crucial element that's under emphasized in some of the
Speaker 1: you know, pedagogical theory, or maybe underappreciated by even some parents. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a section where she says, quote the destructive or
Speaker 1: deconstructive activity characteristic of block play, an integral part of
Speaker 1: this activity makes some adults uncomfortable. However, as in all learning,
Speaker 1: we cannot understand until we take apart, examine, and rebuild. Um.
Speaker 1: So you know, She's making a point that a lot
Speaker 1: of parents might look at their child's tendency to want
Speaker 1: to like knock over a tower of blocks and smash
Speaker 1: it and everything, and you say, oh, no, is my
Speaker 1: child some kind of you know, little King Kong and
Speaker 1: little Godzilla? Are they just pure destructive impulse? But she's suggesting, no, this,
Speaker 1: this is also an important part of learning. It's not
Speaker 1: something to be afraid of. No, yeah, not at all,
Speaker 1: but I mean it can it can be frustrating. I've
Speaker 1: been frustrated with it when when when my son was
Speaker 1: was much younger, you know, because you want you want
Speaker 1: to engage with him, you want to play with them,
Speaker 1: you want to play blocks with with your your child.
Speaker 1: But in doing that you're like, let's build something together,
Speaker 1: and then the kid maybe is not that didn't much
Speaker 1: into building or is not very good at it, but
Speaker 1: then wants to destroy it at every level of construction.
Speaker 1: Or sometimes you encounter it to where you have different
Speaker 1: age groups and children and so you have like the
Speaker 1: kid who's old enough to really want to build stuff,
Speaker 1: be it with blocks or sand castle or what have you,
Speaker 1: but the younger kid just wants to godzilla the heck
Speaker 1: out of that sand city. U. Um. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: just have to realize that that is that I mean,
Speaker 1: that's kind of how they learn. They're at a dissection
Speaker 1: stage of architecture. Sure, like both phases are important. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all about destroying new buildings, ironstruts into new button.
Speaker 1: You know. One last thing that was in this paper
Speaker 1: that I just point out because it's funny, is that
Speaker 1: there's a part where she talks again. This was published
Speaker 1: in two thousand one, and she talks about the sort
Speaker 1: of recent development of digital construction environments, which are like
Speaker 1: computer aims that are marketed as an alternative to physical blocks.
Speaker 1: And the way she writes about it, it seems like
Speaker 1: she's a little bit skeptical that these would, you know,
Speaker 1: replace physical blocks, because you know, if you're two thousand one,
Speaker 1: you're thinking, what kids want to play with their hands?
Speaker 1: Why would you have digital three D blocks? But then
Speaker 1: I was thinking, like, wait a minute, Minecraft, Yeah there
Speaker 1: are plenty of examples of it. Um, But I too
Speaker 1: am skeptical because yeah, there's something about the physical act
Speaker 1: of the building, and even if you have great physics
Speaker 1: in a virtual setting, which many of these games do, uh,
Speaker 1: there's nothing like having the actual block. Oh sure, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta have the physical objects there. Especially for younger kids,
Speaker 1: I think maybe it's once you get older that you
Speaker 1: can like abstract that level of play out to a
Speaker 1: you know, an imagined space or to come back to
Speaker 1: the jack in the box. Let's not discount the alarming
Speaker 1: noise of a an epic wooden block tower falling onto
Speaker 1: the kitchen floor that I think that's also an important
Speaker 1: part of the experience. Another disadvantage of playing on carpeted floor, right, So,
Speaker 1: so it's harder to build because the floor is less stable,
Speaker 1: but also when it finally falls over, you don't even
Speaker 1: get the clatter. Yeah, you don't scare everybody in the
Speaker 1: house and the dog and the cat boat horrible. This
Speaker 1: is my p s A for this episode. Find a
Speaker 1: place with solid, hard floors for your children to play
Speaker 1: with blocks. Don't make them play on carpet. All right,
Speaker 1: it's time to take a quick break, but we'll be
Speaker 1: right back with more invention about toys. Hey, everybody. Audible
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Speaker 1: dot com slash invention or text invention to five hundred
Speaker 1: five hundred Again, that's audible dot Com slash Invention or
Speaker 1: text Invention to five zero zero dash five zero zero.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. So we just talked about traditional blocks,
Speaker 1: wooden blocks, a little bit of uh, you know, log
Speaker 1: cabin action in there, some alphabet blocks as well. But
Speaker 1: I think we all know that there is sort of
Speaker 1: a final form of blocks in principle, you know, like
Speaker 1: how the Power Rangers continually morph up into bigger and
Speaker 1: better robots. The ultimate robot that they could achieve, I
Speaker 1: think would have to be the Lego. Absolutely Legos. These
Speaker 1: were a huge part of my childhood growing up in
Speaker 1: the eighties and nineties. These interlocking plastic bricks and the
Speaker 1: various building accessories that come with them allow you to
Speaker 1: construct everything from castles to helicopters to spaceships. And I
Speaker 1: would generally build what the instructions told me to, you know,
Speaker 1: I'd follow the instructions once, then i'd throw the directions
Speaker 1: away and then I would just free build whatever I wanted,
Speaker 1: usually more castles, helicopters, and spaceships, but you know, of
Speaker 1: my my own design. For instance, I remember watching the
Speaker 1: helicopter film Blue Thunder, and what was almost certainly, you know,
Speaker 1: far too young an age for an R rated action film,
Speaker 1: and I became a cessed with the two choppers in
Speaker 1: the film as a police attack chopper piloted by Roy
Speaker 1: Scheider from Jaws. Yeah, and then the huge five hundred
Speaker 1: schopper piloted by Evil test pilot Malcolm McDowell. Of of course,
Speaker 1: you know Caligula and a clockwork orange fan. How have
Speaker 1: I never seen this? And then oh, I should also
Speaker 1: point out that Daniel Stern also had a role playing
Speaker 1: a voyeuristic creep. Of course, of course what he man?
Speaker 1: He was really getting typecast as creeps in the like
Speaker 1: late eighties period. Yeah, I guess this would have been earlier.
Speaker 1: And so like, how did he bust out of creep
Speaker 1: phase and become the narrator of the Wonder Years? Well
Speaker 1: maybe like a site unseen casting because he has a
Speaker 1: great creep look and plays a fantastic creep. I mean, why,
Speaker 1: you know, why try and get away from what works?
Speaker 1: And Daniel Stern is is a natural You just it's
Speaker 1: that that the six pack life that he's living. Okay,
Speaker 1: But so this movie got you building lego helicopters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and going back to our our destructive aspect of play.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite things to do was to was
Speaker 1: to build the two Blue Thunder helicopters and have them
Speaker 1: dual and then uh, you know, they didn't have one
Speaker 1: of them crash. And that's the great thing about a
Speaker 1: Lego constructed vehicles. When it crashes, it breaks into pieces.
Speaker 1: You have this believable you know, destruction, and then you
Speaker 1: can perhaps have a little pilot have to put that
Speaker 1: chopper back together so that he can get back in
Speaker 1: the sky and defeat Malcolm McDowell once and for all. Wow. Again,
Speaker 1: destruction an important part of play. Yeah, Like going back
Speaker 1: to blocks real quick. I remember one thing that I
Speaker 1: would do a lot with my wooden blocks. Would build
Speaker 1: a wall, and then I had a battery power g
Speaker 1: I Joe tank that would just would just basically just
Speaker 1: move forward on these cool tracks and just have that
Speaker 1: drive into the wall and see see if I could
Speaker 1: build a wall strong enough to keep the tank from
Speaker 1: plowing through it, and then also figure out how to
Speaker 1: make the tank approach the wall so as to bust through.
Speaker 1: I think I did something almost exactly like this with
Speaker 1: the with the controlled car. Yeah, trying to build something
Speaker 1: that it like couldn't get through. Yeah. Yeah, So, um,
Speaker 1: you know, say what you know about war toys and
Speaker 1: we'll have something to say about that. In a minute,
Speaker 1: like a nice remote control remote control or just powered
Speaker 1: tank toy or vehicle toy. It's great to send it
Speaker 1: at a wall of blocks. So, uh, legos. Fast forward
Speaker 1: twenty years via the twenty year rule we've been talking about,
Speaker 1: and I have introduced my own sign to the joy
Speaker 1: of legos, and he's into them big time. He's he's
Speaker 1: more obsessed with instructions than I was, but he does
Speaker 1: some freconstruction as well. He likes to make creatures out
Speaker 1: of them, and most recently he made a falcore from
Speaker 1: the Never Ending Story. Yeah. He also loves the Harry
Speaker 1: Potter kits, especially the ones that have creatures in them. Um.
Speaker 1: Also some of the Lego dinosaur kits he really digs. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and I should also drive home that's stepping on
Speaker 1: legos is still absolutely no fun but and but an
Speaker 1: important part of the experience. So we've got to have
Speaker 1: the backstory of the Lego. Right, where does this wonderful,
Speaker 1: delightful toy come from? Well, it ties in nicely with
Speaker 1: the history of building blocks themselves, because of course you
Speaker 1: cannot have Lego building blocks without all the all the
Speaker 1: forms that came before, especially just basic wooden blocks. And
Speaker 1: it does begin in a carpenter shop with pretty much
Speaker 1: the same scenario we're talking about earlier, where a carpenter
Speaker 1: might construct toys out of uh, you know, leftover materials, etcetera,
Speaker 1: and uh. In this particular master carpenter and joyner was
Speaker 1: a man by the name of Ole Kirk Christensen who
Speaker 1: worked in the village of bill And, Denmark. So he
Speaker 1: opened a shop in nineteen thirty two, selling mostly household
Speaker 1: wooden goods like ladders and things, but he also sold
Speaker 1: some toys on the side, but the toys became increasingly
Speaker 1: important to his business. In nineteen thirty four, the company
Speaker 1: ends up adopting the name Lego from the Danish leg gaunt,
Speaker 1: which means play well and by accident it also a
Speaker 1: lego also means I put together in Latin nicely. And
Speaker 1: then in nine five they marketed a wooden duck toy.
Speaker 1: They had a construction game that sort of thing, uh,
Speaker 1: and they just kept continually building on this. In nineteen
Speaker 1: forty six the company bought a plastic injection molding machine,
Speaker 1: and by ninety nine the company was putting out two
Speaker 1: hundred different plastic and wooden toys mostly I understand you know,
Speaker 1: for sell in Denmark, and one of the toys that
Speaker 1: they put out were automatic binding bricks. These were interlocking
Speaker 1: bricks made out of plastic and if you look at
Speaker 1: pictures off them, there pictures of them available on the
Speaker 1: in the history section of Legos website, you'll see that
Speaker 1: they mostly resemble Lego the Lego blocks of today, with
Speaker 1: some you know, some noticeable differences, but the basic design
Speaker 1: is there, the little cylindrical bits on the top that
Speaker 1: allow them to interlock. You know, it's funny, I would
Speaker 1: think with Legos that they must actually have some pretty
Speaker 1: tight design parameters to to fit as well as they do.
Speaker 1: You know, they don't have like parts that like lock
Speaker 1: in place with any moving mechanisms, right, so they just
Speaker 1: have to lock in place by pure rigid shape alone.
Speaker 1: And this involves like them being just like the pegs
Speaker 1: on the top fitting into the things on the bottom
Speaker 1: just well enough that they stay together, but you know,
Speaker 1: not so tightly that it's tough to put them together
Speaker 1: or tough to put them pull them apart. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they they have to they have to work, and they
Speaker 1: apparently worked pretty hard experimenting with them over the years
Speaker 1: to to really get the fit. Uh, you know, tight
Speaker 1: and dependable. Uh. They were experimenting with the plastic and
Speaker 1: the plastic construction. They were not the first interlocking block
Speaker 1: or brick, however, the key predecessor to all this would
Speaker 1: have been Uh. I was reading that the Kitty Craft
Speaker 1: self locking building brick, which was invented by Hillary Fisher
Speaker 1: Page You Live nineteen o four through n seven. But
Speaker 1: the automatic binding bricks of Lego were the immediate predecessor
Speaker 1: to the like blocks we know today. They were only
Speaker 1: sold in Denmark at first, and then in ninety three
Speaker 1: they got a new name, Lego Merston or Lego Bricks,
Speaker 1: and they steadily extended from their hitting the US and
Speaker 1: Canada in sixty one, they go from a regional toy
Speaker 1: to an international success. Now, one thing I was thinking
Speaker 1: about regarding Lego and my own history of playing with
Speaker 1: Lego Blue Thunder toys choppers blowing each other out of
Speaker 1: the sky. Obviously, there was never an actual Blue Thunder
Speaker 1: movie tie in Lego kit. I know, it's hard to
Speaker 1: imagine a time when there were not a million Lego
Speaker 1: movie tie ends on the shelf, But I started thinking
Speaker 1: about it and I was like, oh, you know, um,
Speaker 1: I don't know that I ever saw saying apache helicopter
Speaker 1: Lego or any kind of a military helicopter Lego or
Speaker 1: a tank or or you know, anything of that matter.
Speaker 1: I mean, you'll see some science fiction, um, you know,
Speaker 1: battle type stuff, some fantasy stuff, and to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: medieval weapon read with the castles, But you don't really
Speaker 1: see any war toys, despite the fact that there would
Speaker 1: there would clearly be a market for that. Sure if
Speaker 1: you if say Lego were to put out Lego models
Speaker 1: of say, you know, stealth fighter, stealth bomber, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, the the osprey whatever the military aircraft happens
Speaker 1: to be their neat planes, that would make neat kits, right,
Speaker 1: It seems like a no brainer. So I was looking
Speaker 1: into this and uh a little bit more, and I
Speaker 1: ran across an excerpt from a two thousand ten progress
Speaker 1: report that really drives home some of the key decision
Speaker 1: making that goes on here. And I do think this
Speaker 1: does get into the idea of destructive play, constructive play, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Lego post these kind of reports, uh every year, addressing
Speaker 1: a variety of topics that you might expect a major
Speaker 1: toy manufactured to tackle, including social and environmental issues on
Speaker 1: top of you know, more business level stuff. And this
Speaker 1: particular progress report spelled out their key philosophy on weapons
Speaker 1: in war in their toys, and so I just want
Speaker 1: to read this again. This is coming directly from Lego,
Speaker 1: So just bear in mind you're hearing like corporate messaging here,
Speaker 1: but I think it does reveal a lot quote. A
Speaker 1: large number of Lego Mini figures use weapons and are
Speaker 1: assumably regularly being charged by each other's weapons as part
Speaker 1: of children's role play. In the Lego Group, we acknowledge
Speaker 1: that conflict in play is especially prevalent among four to
Speaker 1: nine year old boys. An inner drive and a need
Speaker 1: to experiment with their own aggressive feelings in order to
Speaker 1: learn about other people's aggressions exists in most children. This
Speaker 1: in turn enables them to handle and recognize conflict in
Speaker 1: nonplay scenarios. As such, the Lego Group sees conflict play
Speaker 1: as perfectly acceptable in an integral part of children's development.
Speaker 1: We also acknowledge children's well proven ability to tell play
Speaker 1: from reality. However, to make sure to maintain the right
Speaker 1: balance between play and conflict, we have adhered to a
Speaker 1: set of unwritten rules for several years. In two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: we have formalized these rules in a guideline for the
Speaker 1: use of conflict and weapons and Lego products. The basic
Speaker 1: aim is to avoid realistic weapons and military equipment that
Speaker 1: children may recognize from hot spots around the world, and
Speaker 1: to refrain from showing violent or frightening situations when communicating
Speaker 1: about Lego products. At the same time, the purpose is
Speaker 1: for the Lego brand not to be associated with issues
Speaker 1: that glorify conflicts and unethical or harmful behavior. So the
Speaker 1: idea is that they are comfortable with allowing conflict conflict play,
Speaker 1: including you know, uh, weapons and stuff in say historical
Speaker 1: settings or fantasy settings or sci fi settings, but not
Speaker 1: having like guns that you would recognize on you know,
Speaker 1: being used in violence and armed conflict today. Correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I looked around at some of the more recent
Speaker 1: reports to see if they, uh they had a more
Speaker 1: recent voicing of this philosophy, and I was now not
Speaker 1: able to come across it. It might exist out there.
Speaker 1: Lego has a puts out a lot of communication, but
Speaker 1: but it seems to be this, this seems to be
Speaker 1: the standard they're still operating by. UH. And and I
Speaker 1: think that's I acknowledge that this this makes sense for
Speaker 1: a especially for an international uh company. You know that
Speaker 1: that doesn't That doesn't say just situated in the United States,
Speaker 1: for instance, say for instance, Lego put out a predator
Speaker 1: drone kit, that would be that would be awful because
Speaker 1: the context would be different and obviously in different parts
Speaker 1: of the world. Uh and and uh and and arguably
Speaker 1: like this, this particular kit, if it were to exist,
Speaker 1: would bring a lot of ethical baggage with it that
Speaker 1: you wouldn't necessarily want to inflict upon a child who
Speaker 1: just wants to engage in the kind of play we're
Speaker 1: discussing here. Yeah, this has got me thinking. I think conflict,
Speaker 1: conflict play and violence and play could be something we
Speaker 1: come back to and do an episode on and stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind, because it's something that again it's
Speaker 1: kind of like with the destructive play with blocks, you know,
Speaker 1: like knocking down towers and stuff. It's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that I can totally understand why parents would look
Speaker 1: at it and say like, this can't be healthy something,
Speaker 1: something's wrong here. And yet you know, obviously millions of
Speaker 1: people around the world grow up playing at games in
Speaker 1: which the children pretend to kill each other and you know,
Speaker 1: use toy guns and all that kind of stuff, And
Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily translate to you know, real aggressive or
Speaker 1: violent behavior in adults. Maybe in some cases it does,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't appear to UH to necessarily lead to
Speaker 1: that conclusion. So I wonder what the actual research says
Speaker 1: about that. Yeah, it would be fun to do a
Speaker 1: deeper dive in it, because on another level, what children
Speaker 1: are doing in imagination plays, they're making up stories, telling
Speaker 1: stories and retelling stories. For instance, if you're if you're
Speaker 1: playing with UH that there is a particular lego kit
Speaker 1: that is a small one and it's just about one
Speaker 1: of the showdowns between Harry Potter and Voldemort, which is
Speaker 1: a battle which is a fight between a a murderous
Speaker 1: villain and UH in the hero of the tale, which
Speaker 1: of course is central to That's the kind of conflict
Speaker 1: you have in so many men, so many legends, so
Speaker 1: many important stories, and so you know, conflict played to
Speaker 1: a certain extent is about embracing this aspect of our
Speaker 1: our narratives. Yeah, it seems to me impossible that you
Speaker 1: could like remove a child's desire to explore themes of
Speaker 1: conflict in their play and in their imagination. I guess
Speaker 1: the question is just like what types of physical toys
Speaker 1: and models Actually, I don't know what drive development in
Speaker 1: unhealthy directions, and I don't know if we actually have
Speaker 1: any answers about that, Like, uh, I mean a whole
Speaker 1: other issue. Of course, it's gun toy guns, you know,
Speaker 1: and toy guns when I was a kid, Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I have some very realistic looking like you would just
Speaker 1: have a water gun that just looks like a straight
Speaker 1: up oozy black and everything, you know, and not not
Speaker 1: brightly colored so that it's obvious. And nowadays, like we've
Speaker 1: we've you know, for a few different reasons, we've we've
Speaker 1: not let our son play with with toy guns. But
Speaker 1: then on the other hand, he's into Harry Potter. He
Speaker 1: has the wands, and so he'll go over to play
Speaker 1: with a friend and they're just shooting straight um death curses.
Speaker 1: That just a gun. Yeah, it's like they're treating kind
Speaker 1: of like a gun. And there they are flinging um
Speaker 1: forbidden curry what are they called the I don't know anyway,
Speaker 1: the bad curses you're not supposed to use, the death curses,
Speaker 1: the Crucio curses. Yeah, we were right, yeah, like we were.
Speaker 1: In fact, he was dressed as is Harry Potter. When
Speaker 1: we were trick or treating, we went past a house
Speaker 1: and he was like, Oh, we should go to that one.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, I don't think that one's open. They
Speaker 1: don't have the lights on, they don't have any candy.
Speaker 1: And he he just points his wand to the house and
Speaker 1: says uh in Cyndio very coldly. I was like, like, man, man,
Speaker 1: that's that's cold, all right. But back to Legos. Another
Speaker 1: interesting angle that I came across regarding Legos has to
Speaker 1: do with what these blocks are constructed out off, and
Speaker 1: of course they are made out of plastic. I was
Speaker 1: reading a two thou eighteen New York Times article by
Speaker 1: Stanley read titled Lego wants to completely remake its toy
Speaker 1: bricks with out anyone noticing Now that title gives pretty
Speaker 1: much everything away. There's no mystery what that article is about,
Speaker 1: but the main point is that Lego wants to eliminate
Speaker 1: its dependence on petroleum based plastics and build its toys
Speaker 1: entirely from plant based or recycled materials by and this
Speaker 1: is quite a challenge because the Lego block, which hopefully
Speaker 1: everyone listening has some familiarity with it, like, these are
Speaker 1: durable blocks, they stand the test of time. I'm able
Speaker 1: to use blocks from my childhood and build things with
Speaker 1: my my son using new blocks. And you can't really
Speaker 1: tell the difference unless it's you know, unless a block
Speaker 1: has been chewed on by a dog or something. They
Speaker 1: held up really well. They hold their color. Uh, They're
Speaker 1: able to dependently in interlock with each other. They can
Speaker 1: be stepped on, they can go through the wash, you
Speaker 1: name it. But at the end of the day, they
Speaker 1: are plastic products that are made from petroleum, and so
Speaker 1: Lego has been eyeing plant fibers, recycled bottle uh. And
Speaker 1: they want to they want to get away from that
Speaker 1: petroleum based origin. Namely, they want to get away from
Speaker 1: a BS plastic which they've depended on. This is the
Speaker 1: kind of plastic you find in computer keys and in
Speaker 1: many mobile phone cases. It's tough, it's slightly elastic, and
Speaker 1: it has a polished surface so it looks nice. Read
Speaker 1: Read points out in this article that at the time
Speaker 1: of its publication, Lego had already experimented with something like
Speaker 1: two hundred different alternatives to a BS plastic, and at
Speaker 1: that point nothing had really worked. So so a particular
Speaker 1: solution might be too brittle, it might break, and if
Speaker 1: it broke, in some cases it might break into sharpened pieces,
Speaker 1: which is no good for a children's toy. In other cases,
Speaker 1: it might be aesthetic, the colors wouldn't look right, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So the quest continues at Lego, apparently to find a
Speaker 1: proper a BS plastic substitute, something that is more sustainable,
Speaker 1: that is less dependent on petroleum. But it is another
Speaker 1: interesting thing to think about when it comes to toy
Speaker 1: it's the toys that we make, the toys that we
Speaker 1: have as part of our childhood and then recreate again
Speaker 1: and share with children in our lives. Is that they
Speaker 1: know they are made out of materials. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we've talked a lot about older toys that are made
Speaker 1: out of wood and so forth, but so many of
Speaker 1: our toys in the modern age are made out of plastic.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean whatever kind of like large scale
Speaker 1: or maybe environmental downsides you might point to. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's clear why plastic is so dominant in the market.
Speaker 1: I mean, has undeniable material benefits for especially the kinds
Speaker 1: of uses you want in a children's toy. It's easy
Speaker 1: to form and two different shapes and mass produced like that.
Speaker 1: It's relatively safe. Yeah, it it makes it really has
Speaker 1: made lego possible. Like you go back to that woodworker's origin.
Speaker 1: Uh it was it was not really possible to make
Speaker 1: an interlocking brick that works as well as a as
Speaker 1: a plastic brick with with wooden materials. Oh man, trying
Speaker 1: to imagine wooden legos. I wonder if somebody's out there
Speaker 1: doing that. That's like somebody's uh, you know, passion craft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, I guess I could be
Speaker 1: completely wrong here, but I'm guessing you could make some
Speaker 1: form of metal lego. But that also doesn't sounds like
Speaker 1: a great idea. Man, you think stepping on the plastic
Speaker 1: One's wait, you step on the the steel the steel lego.
Speaker 1: All right, we're gonna move on to another toy here.
Speaker 1: This next one is not going to be as as
Speaker 1: much of an in depth discussion, but I decided to
Speaker 1: look into the origin of a toy that I don't
Speaker 1: know if anyone feels anybody feels particularly strongly about in
Speaker 1: a like a positive manner. But I'm talking about the
Speaker 1: symbol banging monkey. That mechanical it is. If the jack
Speaker 1: in the box is a toy, then the symbol banging
Speaker 1: monkey is. I think of it as a prop in
Speaker 1: a horror film. Yeah, it's mainly what it does these days,
Speaker 1: so I'm sure everyone's familiar with it. It is a chimpanzee,
Speaker 1: generally in a setting or squatting position. It is wearing
Speaker 1: some sort of baby clothing. Generally it has a pair
Speaker 1: of symbols which it crashes together over and over again. Mechanically.
Speaker 1: Sometimes there's you know, there's movement to the eyes into them,
Speaker 1: like the teeth, and its eyes generally have this kind
Speaker 1: of like red rimmed appearance to them that makes it
Speaker 1: look like it is completely insane. It has the devil
Speaker 1: inside it. Yes, yes, as I was looking into this,
Speaker 1: like where did this come from? And uh, basically it
Speaker 1: seems to go back to the idea of organ grinders.
Speaker 1: But you would have something, you know, somebody a street
Speaker 1: musician essentially, with a performing monkey that may be dressed
Speaker 1: in small clothing, you know, doll clothing or children's clothing,
Speaker 1: maybe brandishing some sort of an instrument it's all about
Speaker 1: amusing people and getting them to give you some money, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, for the amusement. And then this would be
Speaker 1: the mechanical version of it. And I've seen it traced
Speaker 1: back to the musical Jolly Chimp created by the Japanese
Speaker 1: company uh Dashian c K and then I teen fifties,
Speaker 1: but then with additional versions popping up in Japan as
Speaker 1: well and making their way to the US and other markets,
Speaker 1: again with a number of different names, but generally revolving
Speaker 1: around the fact that you have a clashing mechanical noise
Speaker 1: and the likeness of a chimp. And indeed, especially with
Speaker 1: those reddened eyes, they often provoke a sense of uneasiness. Uh.
Speaker 1: They summoned both the spirit of the be steal chimp
Speaker 1: and uh the idea of just mindless uh, you know,
Speaker 1: automated behavior. There's not a lot of variations. The chimp
Speaker 1: is not a music box, It is not playing a song.
Speaker 1: It is just clashing symbols and uh. And it has
Speaker 1: shown up in a number of different horror properties. The
Speaker 1: best example is probably this short story by Stephen King
Speaker 1: titled The Monkey. I remember this one. Yeah. The basic
Speaker 1: idea here is that there's this cursed toy symbol monkey,
Speaker 1: and every time it clashes its symbols, somebody dies. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember this. Uh it was? Does the climax involved
Speaker 1: of somebody like trying to go out on a lake
Speaker 1: to throw it in the bottom or trying to get
Speaker 1: away from it, but without without raising the suspicions of
Speaker 1: the monkey? Um this This story again came out in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty. It was published in a magazine called Gallery,
Speaker 1: which I believe was some sort of fine art magazine. Okay,
Speaker 1: now I'm kidding is a skin magazine. But most of us,
Speaker 1: probably most of us probably know it from a revised
Speaker 1: version that was featured in nineteen eighty five Skeleton Crew,
Speaker 1: which was one of Stephen King's great short story collections
Speaker 1: of the day. Another source that some some people maybe
Speaker 1: remember remembering the story from a nineteen eighty four film
Speaker 1: titled The Devil's Gift, which tells the exact thing that
Speaker 1: pretty much exactly the same story as the King short story,
Speaker 1: but without any attribution to Stephen King. And most of
Speaker 1: us know it from the MST three k Rift. Merlin
Speaker 1: Shop of Mystical Wonders features an edited down cut of
Speaker 1: this film that like it ends up like turn people
Speaker 1: on fire and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: terrible but also good and also creepy. There's something about
Speaker 1: this monkey that is legitimately creepy. And I should also
Speaker 1: point out Stephen King's Skeleton Crew first edition and many
Speaker 1: editions that came out afterwards. That collection had the symbol
Speaker 1: banging monkey on the cover. And that's how I've got
Speaker 1: on the symbol banging monkey. I mean, maybe not a
Speaker 1: deep story. Maybe somewhere out there in the world we
Speaker 1: have listeners who know a deeper tale of the monkey.
Speaker 1: And uh, perhaps we'll even dare to share it with us,
Speaker 1: providing that the dark, simple, clinging monkeys will allow you
Speaker 1: to without smiting you with their satanic power. All right,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're going to take another break, but
Speaker 1: when we come back, we will discuss paper doll theaters
Speaker 1: and some cartoon transformations. Alright, we're back. Okay, it seems
Speaker 1: like we're doing paper dolls now. Yeah. I wasn't really
Speaker 1: expecting to talk about paper dolls because I don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of nostalgia for them. Um, like some some toys,
Speaker 1: you know, they tend to have sort of gendered marketing,
Speaker 1: and I don't think I was. I was ever, Like,
Speaker 1: they were never really marketed for me or purchased for
Speaker 1: me when I was a child. Oh, I should have
Speaker 1: brought up that earlier. There's actually one one mentioned in
Speaker 1: Hewitt's paper about blocks, how that there's some egregiously gendered
Speaker 1: marketing in the history of of blocks, you know, like
Speaker 1: advertising blocks as for the boy constructor you know, which
Speaker 1: is just like obviously girls like playing with blocks too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think gender targeting on toys tends to
Speaker 1: be a bit dumb, but especially with with blocks, if
Speaker 1: there was ever a truly gender neutral toy. Blocks are
Speaker 1: real because it's not like physics is you know, it's
Speaker 1: only Yeah, it's like it's it's part of the human experience.
Speaker 1: So don't you know when a girl makes a tower
Speaker 1: of things, it just can't fall over. Yeah, it's that's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: So with paper dolls, I don't have a lot of
Speaker 1: I remember my sisters had them, and I think I
Speaker 1: would check them out from time to time, and they
Speaker 1: were neat, you know, especially when you get into costume
Speaker 1: changes on them. But I found an interesting rite up
Speaker 1: on paper doll theaters in particular, and so that's mainly
Speaker 1: what I want to talk about here. But but paper
Speaker 1: dolls in and of themselves selves can be pretty cool.
Speaker 1: And also if you expand that a little bit and
Speaker 1: think also of things made out of cardboard, cardboard, cutouts,
Speaker 1: folded paper that is used to create some sort of
Speaker 1: likeness of a creature or a being. But of course
Speaker 1: for to have these different types of toys, you have
Speaker 1: have to have paper first. Now, if paper itself has
Speaker 1: been with us for a long time since at least
Speaker 1: the second century BC in China, spreading more broadly through
Speaker 1: the Middle East in Europe in the thirteenth century, and
Speaker 1: we'll have to come back and do a full invention
Speaker 1: episode just on paper itself because it has a fascinating
Speaker 1: history totally. But but of course it proved extremely important
Speaker 1: for the conveyance of written language. It also was something
Speaker 1: of a value treated as such. For instance, in Western
Speaker 1: traditions we see see it in the value of books,
Speaker 1: in the reuse of parchment. Oh yeah, that's one thing
Speaker 1: that people often don't understand when dealing with like archaeology today.
Speaker 1: It's like, why do we have all these old documents
Speaker 1: where people would like write something on top of something
Speaker 1: else that it doesn't make any sense, But it does
Speaker 1: if you consider that writing media, the stuff you'd be
Speaker 1: writing on was like expensive and hard to come by.
Speaker 1: I mean, we live in a day of very disposable paper,
Speaker 1: a day when, for instance, my son can come in
Speaker 1: and just he can just go up to the printer,
Speaker 1: grab a stack of blank sheets and just start drawing dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: You know, the time was when that would be completely unacceptable.
Speaker 1: Paper is not a plaything. Paper. In some cases, paper
Speaker 1: was sacred. I mean paper was used uh in in
Speaker 1: various you know, rituals and ceremonies. We see that in
Speaker 1: Eastern examples especially, and there was there was something sacred
Speaker 1: about It was a place where you you put the
Speaker 1: written word, for example. Uh. And then of course in
Speaker 1: the East we see origami arising, you know, an art
Speaker 1: form that is about creating three dimensional entities humanoid or
Speaker 1: animal or otherwise out of paper, and these date back
Speaker 1: to around eight hundred C. We also see traditions of
Speaker 1: paper puppetry in Asia, which also resonates with the sacred,
Speaker 1: because puppetry at heart is a kind of magic to
Speaker 1: imbue created likenesses with the animation of life. And then
Speaker 1: then then to use these animations to tell stories. And
Speaker 1: so we come back to the idea of European paper dolls,
Speaker 1: which seemed to have popped up in the seventeenth, eighteenth
Speaker 1: and nineteenth century, becoming basically widely more available and popular
Speaker 1: as paper itself became more affordable, because that's the key fit.
Speaker 1: For there to be, you know, toys made out of paper,
Speaker 1: and then for there to be widespread toys met out
Speaker 1: of paper, you've got to get the price point down. Sure.
Speaker 1: So I was reading an article by Amelia soft for
Speaker 1: j Store Daily titled paper Theaters the home entertainment of Yesteryear,
Speaker 1: and it discussed, uh, you know, another detail of paper
Speaker 1: doll history that I think I was largely unaware of.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure I'd seen some reprinted paper theaters at
Speaker 1: Atlanta's own Center for Puppetry Arts, but I didn't really
Speaker 1: appreciate what I was looking at and realized that this
Speaker 1: is essentially an entire puppetry art form that was very
Speaker 1: popular at one point. So basically during the eight hundreds,
Speaker 1: live theater was that was you know, was was all
Speaker 1: the rage. It was extremely popular in Europe, especially in England.
Speaker 1: It was the TV of the nineteenth century. If you
Speaker 1: wanted if you wanted to see a story, if you
Speaker 1: wanted to watch your stories, you needed to go watch
Speaker 1: someone present them to you on a stage. But you
Speaker 1: have to leave the house. True. Uh, and we'll get
Speaker 1: to a way around that. But but performance was huge
Speaker 1: soft rights. Uh that that theater goers at the time
Speaker 1: rebelled against Covent Garden Theater over high ticket prices by
Speaker 1: ringing bells during the show to disturb the actors, and
Speaker 1: by bringing live pigs to the theater. Which fabulous. This
Speaker 1: this gives me some ideas I think that we can
Speaker 1: all use in dealing with, say, the likes of Ticketmaster
Speaker 1: and so forth. Okay, you don't like those high prices,
Speaker 1: you don't like those scalpers coming in. Everybody, bring a
Speaker 1: bring a live pig and some bells to the next concert. Uh.
Speaker 1: So you also have people attending unlicensed and illegal theaters
Speaker 1: that were called blood tubs to feed their need for
Speaker 1: live performance. People could not get enough of it. Wait
Speaker 1: why were they called blood tubs? We have any idea?
Speaker 1: I think they were just considered um potentially dangerous and
Speaker 1: or violent. I mean, imagine going to an unlicensed venue
Speaker 1: for I'm thinking like like a hard rock concert, punker metal,
Speaker 1: you know, and some of the complications that could ensue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those punk house shows can get kind of rough. But
Speaker 1: then there was the home version, often for children, paper theaters,
Speaker 1: and you could at the time you could buy them
Speaker 1: colored or uncolored for a manner of sense, and then
Speaker 1: you could they would you everything you needed for a
Speaker 1: for a stand up miniature performance. You'd have a stage,
Speaker 1: a set character, striking dramatic poses. You know, you you
Speaker 1: have to cut them out, uh, and then stand them up.
Speaker 1: And of course it would also come with the script,
Speaker 1: often times edited so that the child you know, could
Speaker 1: handle it. If there was something, you know, body in there,
Speaker 1: it would be removed. Amazing. So like instead of going
Speaker 1: to the store and like buying a DVD, you could
Speaker 1: you'd buy a set to do a paper puppet play
Speaker 1: that comes with a script that tells you what to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which which is amazing. Especially again, think of a time
Speaker 1: when you didn't have DVDs, you didn't have vhs, you
Speaker 1: weren't able to just catch the movie again on television later. Uh,
Speaker 1: this might be the way to to re experience it
Speaker 1: right in a way. It's very much like the like
Speaker 1: a novelization of a film, uh, except more physical and
Speaker 1: requiring your direct interaction to put on the performance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so they were very popular, and according to saw It,
Speaker 1: they likely lead to imagination play as well, much like
Speaker 1: legos in this regard, I'd wager, you know, run it one,
Speaker 1: run it through once, maybe with the script, and then
Speaker 1: maybe you do a sequel to Uh. I don't know
Speaker 1: much to do about nothing, much to do about nothing
Speaker 1: to the revenge right first first his tragedy and then
Speaker 1: his comedy. Yeah. Uh, now the price by the way, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, manner of sense. It's actually referenced in the
Speaker 1: title of a Robert Louis Stevenson essay about their appeal,
Speaker 1: where he's kind of, you know, waxing nostalgic about his
Speaker 1: his love of these when he was a Child's called
Speaker 1: penny Plane twopence colored because the the plane version of
Speaker 1: everything was cheaper, and if you got it already colored in,
Speaker 1: you'd have to pay a little bit more, Okay, Uh Stevenson,
Speaker 1: I was looking at this original piece. I looked it up.
Speaker 1: It's available online if you just do a search for
Speaker 1: that title. And Robert Louis Stevenson. He writes about the
Speaker 1: joy of coloring the pages himself. Uh that sometimes he
Speaker 1: would get the colored version for the extracent, but it
Speaker 1: would just it would feel wrong. He would feel like
Speaker 1: he was cheating. Uh. And he would you know, he'd
Speaker 1: stage your performance with the paper of figures. But then
Speaker 1: he would end up studying the contents of the script
Speaker 1: booklet a lot obsessively and uh and and his parents
Speaker 1: would not necessarily understand, like why he wasn't playing with
Speaker 1: it anymore. And He's like, Oh, it's like a big
Speaker 1: meal that I've consumed. I've already consumed that I can't
Speaker 1: I can't do it again. Mom and dad. You don't
Speaker 1: understand the level of energy I'm putting into this, uh,
Speaker 1: this paper theater. Uh. Soft also points out that Gotha's
Speaker 1: son August would put on shows in a paper theater
Speaker 1: and the quote the family cat always served as one
Speaker 1: of the performers. Oh like getting in there and swatting
Speaker 1: at the puppet. They would love that, so Soft concludes. Quote.
Speaker 1: The magic of the paper theater was not that it
Speaker 1: allowed children to replicate a beloved play in their home.
Speaker 1: It was that it provided them with the raw materials,
Speaker 1: either to copy or create to follow, or some vert
Speaker 1: as they saw fit. So it gave children a full
Speaker 1: cast and setting of physical representations for imagination play. And
Speaker 1: in some cases, I imagine you know, it made you know,
Speaker 1: such an array possible given that some children, um, you know,
Speaker 1: many children even would not have had access to, say
Speaker 1: a toy story for sue cast off material characters. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't have like a toy chest of animals and people
Speaker 1: representations thereof with which to do this kind of imagination play.
Speaker 1: But one of these sets for a mere penny, you
Speaker 1: would have good guys and bad guys in a setting
Speaker 1: everything you need in the script, I mean the script
Speaker 1: that seems like a huge part of it. I mean
Speaker 1: I think about how actually this is seeming so weird
Speaker 1: to me, But at the same time, I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: that's sort of what I did with my action figures,
Speaker 1: Like you know, when I played with like Jurassic Park
Speaker 1: action figures or whatever, I could like have them sort
Speaker 1: of put on a play. Yeah. Another thing that I
Speaker 1: read was that people like Igmar Bergman and Orson Wells
Speaker 1: would use toy theaters to stage things out uh in
Speaker 1: miniature for actual for actual performances or productions. So you
Speaker 1: know this in and of itself too. It's just a
Speaker 1: useful exercise to be able to create in miniature what
Speaker 1: you may one day create in real life as a
Speaker 1: as an actual theatrical production or a cinematic production. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these were. These were super popular for for quite a while. Now,
Speaker 1: among other things, television helped to decrease the appeal of
Speaker 1: these paper theaters and toy theaters in general. But they
Speaker 1: live on to this day. Uh, sometimes in a nostalgic
Speaker 1: form and old toy kind of form. But then you
Speaker 1: also see them utilized as a as a true craft
Speaker 1: by some individuals, or even as a performance already, even
Speaker 1: as a way of performing through a type of puppetry.
Speaker 1: I feel like I want to get one of these things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I again, I have seen them for sale, or I've
Speaker 1: seen updated versions of them for sale, let's say the
Speaker 1: Center for Punctry Arts. So next time I go, I
Speaker 1: have to check it out. Maybe they make a Jurassic
Speaker 1: Park paper puppets set. It would be great, actually, you know,
Speaker 1: because just think of it, instead of buying all these
Speaker 1: big pieces of plastic or building amount of legos or
Speaker 1: what have you, and then building things for the dinosaurs
Speaker 1: to knock down out of bricks and blocks, what have you.
Speaker 1: In paper form, you could have everything. You could have
Speaker 1: all the major dinosaurs, all the major players. You can
Speaker 1: even have a who's the lawyer in the first Jurassic Park?
Speaker 1: Gennaro or what the actor's name? Well, I don't know
Speaker 1: about either one. You can have that guy and you
Speaker 1: could even rip him in half. He even comes into
Speaker 1: two pieces. That's right. Yeah, very easy to dismember paper puppets.
Speaker 1: You know what I'd do? What's that flip script? Then
Speaker 1: you have dinosaurs make a park with humans, and then
Speaker 1: the humans get loose. There you go, See, this is
Speaker 1: exactly it like. It allows you to to make all
Speaker 1: the changes, all the alterations that you you might be
Speaker 1: inspired to to to create. Now, Robert, you promised me
Speaker 1: that we would end up talking about some kind of
Speaker 1: cartoon transformation. What's the deal here? All right? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: have one final thing that you have to talk about here,
Speaker 1: and it's something that I never thought that I would
Speaker 1: I would really come up on the show. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna list several
Speaker 1: different Japanese cartoon characters made that were indeed each of
Speaker 1: them made into some sort of toy, and I want
Speaker 1: you to figure out what they have in common. You
Speaker 1: have mum Rabbi Ever Living from ThunderCats. You remember Mama
Speaker 1: I actually never watched, okay, So mom Raw is like
Speaker 1: an old decrepit mummy like kind of a cat person mummy. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then at a certain point in the show, he's
Speaker 1: gonna have to battle, so he has to transform into
Speaker 1: mum Rabi Ever Living, which is this big, like supermuscular
Speaker 1: cat creature with like sort of Fulsa Doom esque Egyptian
Speaker 1: inspired garb. It's like in Stephen Summers Mummy movies when
Speaker 1: the skeleton critter turns into Arnold Oslou. Yeah, very similar.
Speaker 1: I imagine they might have even been inspired by Mamra.
Speaker 1: Another example Monstar Silverhawks. This was a villain and it
Speaker 1: was a sci fi sort of counterpart to ThunderCats. Then,
Speaker 1: of course we had Vultron. I definitely remember Vultron, and
Speaker 1: then you had Sailor Moon aware of it, but I
Speaker 1: never watched it, Okay, So what do they all have
Speaker 1: in common? Well, I know the answer because I can
Speaker 1: see your notes, but I haven't I don't know if
Speaker 1: I would have gotten it otherwise. Clearly now that I
Speaker 1: know the answer, it's that they all have like a
Speaker 1: scene where they go like power up and then they
Speaker 1: transform into their their higher form. That's right, Yeah, lengthy
Speaker 1: transformation scenes. Um. And again I was not familiar with
Speaker 1: all these properties. I don't think I've ever watched sailor
Speaker 1: Moon and probably you know that gets into gendered marketing,
Speaker 1: I'm sure. But I was a big ThunderCats and Vultron
Speaker 1: fan growing up. I would catch silver Hawks when it
Speaker 1: was on. I always found it like a little weird.
Speaker 1: It was it was, it was didn't have the true
Speaker 1: magic of ThunderCats. But these were fun shows. And yes,
Speaker 1: the transformation scenes were awesome, and they sometimes would would
Speaker 1: use like a full trans in sformation. Sometimes they would
Speaker 1: use a shorter version of its seemingly depending on how
Speaker 1: much you know, how much they had to pad out
Speaker 1: the episode, because because that really seems to seem to
Speaker 1: have been key here, right, because it's a great way
Speaker 1: to pad out an animated series, especially when you consider
Speaker 1: a show like ThunderCats, which went four seasons one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty episodes. Uh, silver Hawks only went one season
Speaker 1: and it still has sixty five episodes, so they're really
Speaker 1: turning these puppies out. Yeah, but you film a transformation scene,
Speaker 1: you can basically just use the same one every time, right,
Speaker 1: you can bank Like generally most of these were looking
Speaker 1: at You're talking twenty seconds, which you know, maybe doesn't
Speaker 1: seem about a lot when you but when you get
Speaker 1: into the cost of animation, etcetera. Uh, it makes a difference.
Speaker 1: It's a it's called the bank method apparently. Uh. By
Speaker 1: the way, Sailor Moon five seasons, two hundred episodes. Wow.
Speaker 1: So yes, on one hand, you can look at and say, well,
Speaker 1: this is a good way to to to fill up
Speaker 1: an episode. Just have have twenty seconds or so that
Speaker 1: you can depend on, not counting the intro and the
Speaker 1: outro to the episode. Would you're already going to be
Speaker 1: pretty stationary. I was looking at j Store Daily again
Speaker 1: and I ran across a post titled selling toys with
Speaker 1: the Sailor Moon transformation sequence. And this was very insightful
Speaker 1: and made me think about this in a new way.
Speaker 1: This was by Jacqueline Manski in October of twenty nine,
Speaker 1: and it was largely a look at the work of
Speaker 1: Comiko Sito in the Journal of Asian Studies the the
Speaker 1: So this all points out that the transformation scenes like
Speaker 1: the ones we've discussed, but more specifically like the one
Speaker 1: in Sailor Moon are are more than we might imagine
Speaker 1: they are. So in Sailor Moon, we have a normal
Speaker 1: Japanese school girl girl and she transforms into the pretty
Speaker 1: Guardians Sailor Moon, the Pretty Guardians. Yes. Uh, And apparently
Speaker 1: this was like a standard part of magical girl animation
Speaker 1: prior to Sailor Moon. And one presumes that, you know,
Speaker 1: it connects to the transformations in the ThunderCats and Vultron
Speaker 1: shows again just sort of like a differently gendered version
Speaker 1: of the same thing. It dates back at least to
Speaker 1: the N two animated series Minky Momo, which was a
Speaker 1: magical princess show that featured a standard twenty three second
Speaker 1: transformation scene. By the time Sailor Moon comes around, though,
Speaker 1: they get that transformation scene up to forty seconds. This
Speaker 1: is interesting that you've got this, you know, animation production
Speaker 1: padding technique that is being used over and over in
Speaker 1: all these different series to make the cartoon production more affordable.
Speaker 1: But how does this connect to toys? All right? This
Speaker 1: is what the Saito has to write about it. She
Speaker 1: says a quote. Although the technique of reusing cells in
Speaker 1: multiple episodes was not a new concept in itself, Momo,
Speaker 1: by which she means Minkey Momo from A D two
Speaker 1: successfully incorporated the well exploited robot animes bank method, in
Speaker 1: which mechanical parts are captured in the camera's dynamic tracking
Speaker 1: motion for the maximum effect of promoting the target merchandise. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if I'm understanding this correctly, it's you
Speaker 1: ever see these scenes where it's like the show room
Speaker 1: for an automobile. It's on this circular stage that's revolving
Speaker 1: and all the fancy lights are on it to just
Speaker 1: give you this three sixty fabulous uh, you know, NonStop
Speaker 1: view of just how wonderful this vehicle is from every angle.
Speaker 1: It's like the character creation screen and a wrestling video
Speaker 1: game exactly. They'll let you rotate to every angle, you know,
Speaker 1: inspect the feed, all all that stuff. Right. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: if I'm understanding this correctly, the argument is that that
Speaker 1: is what this is. Like, Yes, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: banking method. Yes it's a it's part of each story there.
Speaker 1: It's part of the imaginative element of the of the tail.
Speaker 1: But so like you're trying to sell Vultron action figures
Speaker 1: or sailor Moon action figures, and this allows you to
Speaker 1: do that within every episode of the show, to have
Speaker 1: like a merchandise show off segment that gives you lots
Speaker 1: of different angles and stuff to examine the toy that
Speaker 1: you want to buy. Yeah, so mum Raw does his
Speaker 1: twenty second transformation scene up. I think I tried to
Speaker 1: clock it. I think it's like twenty three seconds, and
Speaker 1: and you look at it and you're like, man, Mama
Speaker 1: is amazing. This is the centralvilla one of the show
Speaker 1: is the best, and I simply must own the toy.
Speaker 1: And I did own the toy of Mamra, Like I remember,
Speaker 1: I didn't connect the two. But it's like I had
Speaker 1: to have mom Raw. I had mam Raw. I had
Speaker 1: none of the other ThunderCats, but I had to have Mmra.
Speaker 1: And I probably would have gotten Monstar as well, but
Speaker 1: I couldn't really move my eight year old funds around
Speaker 1: enough to make it happen. But but this is a
Speaker 1: couldn't get an injection of capital for that, right right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: But but I think this is a really fascinating take
Speaker 1: on on on it. I mean, obviously we know that
Speaker 1: if there is a cartoon that has a toy line,
Speaker 1: and sometimes the cartoon comes first, sometimes the toy line
Speaker 1: comes first. Sometimes they're part of the same effort, we
Speaker 1: know on some level that cartoon is about selling the toys.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean it's totally the case was like Transformers, right,
Speaker 1: the cartoon was there to sell the toys, but I
Speaker 1: had not really considered something about the transformation, saying about
Speaker 1: how this this might be a key uh tool in
Speaker 1: the toy makers the toy marketers toolbox. Well that's funny
Speaker 1: because now that I'm thinking of Transformers of course, duh,
Speaker 1: I mean also extended transformations. Yeah, you see this once
Speaker 1: you you sort of clued into this idea. You see
Speaker 1: it in so many shows yet Transformers, even some shows
Speaker 1: that are perhaps you know, not cartoons, I guess in
Speaker 1: Power Rangers, stuff had to come together, some sort of
Speaker 1: transformation had to happen. It becomes and part of this
Speaker 1: too is it becomes a trope of such shows. Right,
Speaker 1: It becomes a thing that people expect and they get
Speaker 1: excited about, and maybe to a certain extent, the creators
Speaker 1: don't even realize the ways that it can be used
Speaker 1: that it has this this uh this marketing effect as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is really interesting. I've never considered this before. Now again,
Speaker 1: I I only have personal experience with with mem Ras
Speaker 1: and Monstar and Voltron. But I would love to hear
Speaker 1: from anyone out there who can really speak to Sailor
Speaker 1: Moon and some of these other princes transformation shows and
Speaker 1: and and provide a little insight on this, you know,
Speaker 1: now that I'm thinking about it, I actually have come
Speaker 1: across other examples of this where like specifically cinema like
Speaker 1: cinema techniques being used to emphasize toy selling aspects. The
Speaker 1: main example I'm thinking of are in Batman movies, like
Speaker 1: in the uh in the second Joel Schumacher Batman movie
Speaker 1: Batman and Robin from I guess it was the late nineties.
Speaker 1: I remember, there's all this talk after the film came
Speaker 1: out about how like the film had been shaped by
Speaker 1: the need to market toys that would be sold in
Speaker 1: conjunction with the film. Uh so, like, you know, to
Speaker 1: to emphasize the bat vehicles and stuff in certain ways
Speaker 1: that would make it they thought more appealing for a
Speaker 1: toy market. Yeah, I have to absolutely, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I ever saw that one all the
Speaker 1: way through. But but even the earlier Batman movies, I
Speaker 1: mean clearly you got to move some batmobiles and so
Speaker 1: you feature the batmobile prominently. But then again, would it
Speaker 1: be a Batman film if it didn't have a batmobile
Speaker 1: in it? It becomes kind of hard to, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: to to pull these elements apart again, right, I've been
Speaker 1: trying to think of like an Arnold Schwarzenegger price ice
Speaker 1: pun it did, it didn't didn't come together right. It
Speaker 1: was such hilarious, uh and awful casting. As as as
Speaker 1: Mr Freeze, It's one of the all time grades. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I remember even at the time I was already
Speaker 1: I was always a Mr. Freeze fan, even like the
Speaker 1: really crappy Mr Freeze, that version that you had in
Speaker 1: the old Adam West uh series, I was still I
Speaker 1: would still get excited for him when he was on
Speaker 1: the screen. Oh, I didn't know that. I remember he
Speaker 1: was always so scary and tragic in the animated series.
Speaker 1: He's wonderful in the animated series. I fell in love
Speaker 1: with him again, Uh, fell in love with him anew
Speaker 1: when when that came out and then here comes Arnold
Speaker 1: and you're like, who did this? Like who so completely
Speaker 1: missed you know, missed the mark on what this character
Speaker 1: is and what they should be cinematically. But they saw
Speaker 1: a lot of toys though. That's true, and and it
Speaker 1: is at least comedically noteworthy. All right, So there you
Speaker 1: have it. I think this is good. I think we're
Speaker 1: gonna close the toy bag for the year. It's been
Speaker 1: a heck of a hall it has. Obviously there were
Speaker 1: tons of toys we did not get to, but we
Speaker 1: can always come back in the future, especially if these
Speaker 1: are popular. And then of course, uh, you know, we're
Speaker 1: gonna cover more invention inventions in the new year. We'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from everyone out there. What do you
Speaker 1: want to hear about, what technologies, what specific inventions, big inventions,
Speaker 1: small inventions. Really I would love to hear from everyone
Speaker 1: regarding like what you like about the show, if you
Speaker 1: if you like invention, if you want Invention to keep going.
Speaker 1: What sort of topics and content are are you finding
Speaker 1: the most engaging. Do you like multi episodes that deal
Speaker 1: with something bigger like photography? Do you like self contained
Speaker 1: episodes that are looking at a singular invention. Do you
Speaker 1: like grab bag episodes like these toy episodes? I would
Speaker 1: just love to know what you think as a listener.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes,
Speaker 1: you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. You
Speaker 1: can go to invention pod dot com and that I'll
Speaker 1: take you to our to a page for us, and
Speaker 1: uh yeah, wherever you get the show, just make sure
Speaker 1: you rate and review. That is a great way to
Speaker 1: support the show. Also subscribe. That way you'll always get
Speaker 1: new episodes when they arrive. Huge thanks as always to
Speaker 1: our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future,
Speaker 1: or just to say hello, you can email us at
Speaker 1: contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio because
Speaker 1: the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows. Two