Toys, Part 3

As the holiday season sets in, Robert and Joe open up Santa’s toy bag to consider the invention of various toys -- toys intended to teach, toys intended to puzzle and toys that leverage technology for good old fashioned childhood fun.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
This holiday season discovered the true meaning of Christmas in
all of us. I'm not really into the holidays, sorry.
Jack Warmby thought he had it all, a big city job,
a beautiful wife, and a phone that worked in his car,
but his life was missing one thing. I am sent
to Tallows here to administer ful Christmas. I'd bring hot

(00:26):
chain forged in life. It's burning my skin. It's the
story of one man, one Bronze age automaton, and a
whole lot of Christmas year. Welcome to Invention, a production

(00:46):
of I Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome to Invention. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're
back with part three of our exploration of invented toys.
In the previous episodes, we talked about stuff like the frisbee,
the Jack in the Box, the slinky, the hula hoop.
What else do we do? Oh? We did jigsaw puzzles.

(01:08):
We did uh uh yeah, Jack in the Box? Uh
number let's um, we can't remember what we talked about
on here? Yeah, who hoop, frisbee? Uh, A number of
different toys. I mean, really, you just gotta go back
in the bag and started digging around to see what
we discussed. But today I wanted to start off by
talking about one of the most basic toys you could
possibly have. You know, when I was a kid, I

(01:30):
had lots of favorite toys. I remember being very partial
to some branded Jurassic Park action figures, and actually I
had the car, you know, like the car that the
t Rex steps on. So there's like a Sam Neil
action figure. Oh yeah, totally sammyl action figure. He's got
the hat on and he One of the funny things
about the Jurassic Park action figures is that they would

(01:51):
come with weapons that they did not possess at all
in the film. So they've got like an Ellie Sattler
action figure Laura Dern's likeness, with like a grappling hook gun,
like I don't remember the scene in the movie where
she had that. Well, this was sort of this was
the late nineties, um, and I was you're you're a
little younger than me, so I was. I wasn't at

(02:12):
at action figure age at this point anymore. So maybe
I was beyond it, but still still going, well, I
don't know, that's a that's a whole another discussion, because
ultimately my take is you can get action figures anytime
you want during your life, because all they are ultimately
their their deities. They're they're little icons that inspire you
and you can you can play with them or just

(02:34):
be inspired by them at any point in your life.
But um, at that point in my life, they weren't
really on my radar. But now I'm excited by the
idea of having a Jeff Goldblum action figure. Yeah, what
weapon did Jeff Goldblum have? I think maybe he had
he had like a gun that shot a net or something.
How would he have that? Maybe it was shooting like

(02:56):
a like a graph for like mapping the grids of
his is parabolas and all that when he's doing his calculations.
There is that that theme and action figures, especially where
it's like it's not enough that you have the likeness
of a person or a creature or an entity to
the it's not enough that you can then engage in imagination,
play with it, and and even and even pose it.

(03:17):
I like having a posable figure. I grew up in that,
you know, the air of g I. Joe's and it
was nice to have all those those joints move. But
but then there's this level of like, Nope, it needs
some sort of gun. It needs something to have a gun.
It's got to have some sort of not only something
looks like a gun, a functional projectile implement that can
fire the grappling hook or the net at another action figure.

(03:37):
And I think it's largely about so you can have
the action moment in the commercial where one figure does
something to knock over another. Yes, that that's totally it.
I think it may also be driven on the supply
side sometimes, like, oh, we figured out how to make
this little shooter thing, what action figure can we pair
that with? Yes? Uh? And and we'll come back to
this discussion of action figures and and movie and TV

(04:01):
properties towards the end of the episode. Right, But I
want to go way simpler than that. So this has
no guns, no moving parts, no likenesses of Sam Neil
or Laura Dern. I had lots of favorite toys, But
what did I get the most sustained enjoyment out of
I think it's got to be blocks, right, Like I
spent more time with building blocks than any other kind

(04:22):
of toy. Because of course blocks can be anything. So
there's like an infinite amount of play that you can
do with them, though I still remember the pain of
trying to build with blocks in a room completely covered
in soft carpet. That wayalizes death, you know, like you
build a tower, but then you smite its ruin on
the carpeted stair because it's just unstable. It's true, yeah,

(04:44):
I I also have a lot of fond memories of
playing with this one set of standard wooden blocks. Well
most of them were standing, but you also had some
specialty pieces. I was especially pleased with these these double
arches that you could use that you'd be used to
make a bridge, or you could put them together to
make like a circular entrance in something. And I think

(05:05):
a lot of my imagination play with them was based
on Raiders of the Lost Dark, those scenes where Indiana
Jones and others are going into these you know, ridiculously
unrealistic tim spaces, these uh you know, anti chambers and
uh and so forth, and you know, I just had
to reconstruct those and send some g I Joes down there.

(05:26):
I think blocks are very interesting as toys because building
with blocks is a kind of play that combines the
ultimate in freedom and the ultimate in constraint, right, it
has like no established goals rules, no winning conditions unless
it's not really a game, and yet it has extremely
tight and non negotiable constraints based in physics and materials.

(05:50):
And so it's a very different kind of play than
a lot of the imagination play that you would do
where you know, you might have action figures there, where uh,
you know, your action figure play is just not very
limited by physics. Usually a lot of it's just like
happening in the imagination with the action figure as a prop.
A different thing is going on with the blocks, Like
you're trying to stack them on top of each other.

(06:10):
You're trying to get them to behave to like stand
up in a certain way. You know. Yeah, absolutely, yeah,
you're you have like this this basic physical enterprise at
the heart of your your play, no matter how much
imagination you then put on top of that. Yeah. So,
asking the question when toy blocks were invented, obviously we
don't know that. It seems that people have been using

(06:31):
various kinds of homemade toy building materials for centuries, maybe
even thousands of years, but we just frankly don't know
when it began. Um So I was reading a great
article in the history of blocks as tools for learning
and as toys by an author named Karen Hewitt, who
is a scholar of education. Um she's a toy designer

(06:53):
and she has curated museum exhibitions on the history of
educational toys. This article was called Locks as a Tool
for Learning Historical and Contemporary Perspective, published in the journal
Young Children in two thousand one and so um Here
it begins by observing that building based play among children
probably predates dedicated block toys, because you can even watch

(07:16):
children today improvised with building based play using natural materials
like rocks and sticks, or constructor or like constructed or
artificial materials often discarded by adults, you know, like construction,
scrap containers, boxes. I remember getting so much enjoyment out
of empty boxes when I was young. Oh yeah, empty

(07:38):
boxes are are loads of fun. And on top of that,
of course, you know, the the children of builders will
inevitably not only play with the debris leftover from building,
but they will imitate the building activity that they see
in the parents. Sure so, yeah, just watching the way
kids pick up things that are not specifically intended as

(07:59):
toy filding materials and then turn them into toy building materials.
That makes it pretty clear that construction play probably long
predates having dedicated toy blocks. I mean, even you can
think about sand castles. How long have people been making
sand castles where you know, Neolithic people's making sand castles
as possible? Absolutely, yeah, I mean the sand castle is

(08:22):
just playing in the sand, digging in the sand. There's
just something irresistible about it. Yeah. So I think it's
clear that building blocks are not a toy that invents
a fundamentally new kind of play the way say a
slinky or a jack in the box would. There's no
way to play with a slinky before the slinky existed.
There's no way to play with the jack in box
jack in the box before that existed. But you could

(08:42):
basically have blocks in nature, you know, rock sticks, all
that kind of stuff. Rather, I think toy blocks offer
a clean, safe, and convenient way of facilitating the kind
of construction play that children pick up naturally without any prompting,
whenever random materials are available. Though I do have a
question about this, and I couldn't find an answer to this.

(09:05):
Does Homo sapiens have a building instinct that would manifest
even without any exposure to a culture of construction and
artificial structures. Or do children need to see artificial structures
and witness adults building things in order to get the
urge to build as play. Yeah, that's that's a tough

(09:26):
one to I mean, almost an impossible one to investigate. Yeah,
it's like studying on language children. You have to you
have to. It would require, you know, an act of
extreme deprivation in order to study what it would be like.
It's like to deny a child access to like blocks
or the idea of plocks, to the idea of play.

(09:48):
You know. That's says something that's very difficult, if not impossible,
to study. I'm not suggesting we try it, No, absolutely
not so. Hewitt points out that thinkers have long connected
children's orientation towards construction based play with learning and the
needs of a developing brain. She mentions Plato comminists uh
Pestelozzi and Jehan Pierg and apparently this even came up

(10:11):
with the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke in s and
a treatise called Some Thoughts concerning Education, John Locke wrote, quote,
the chief art is to make all that children have
to do sport and play too. Learning anything they should
be taught might be made as much a recreation to
their play as their play is to their learning. So specifically,

(10:34):
Lock here points to children's play with what we now
know today as alphabet blocks. They existed at the time too,
that they didn't I don't think they were being like
mass manufactured at the time. They weren't like you know,
big toy companies putting these out. But some kids just
had blocks they were playing with that had letters inscribed
on them. This reminds me of the origins of the

(10:55):
jigsaw puzzle, or more specifically, the the dissected map that
we discussed in the last EPISOD. So it's something that
began as not even a mass reduced toy, but like
an educational aid. Yes, and this would have been not
always as fully accepted and intuitive as it is just today.
Like so, Locks actually trying to make a case for

(11:16):
using a child's natural tendency towards play as a means
of education. Like you know, he's saying, if the child
automatically wants to play with alphabet blocks, it is no chore,
and thus the child better learns the alphabet and to
put this in context, a lot of the prevailing sentiment
about childhood education in late seventeenth century England would have
focused on like hard work and discipline through threats of punishment,

(11:40):
and uh a Lock instead emphasized that children could learn
through play and enjoyment, and he Witt suggests that this
view contributed to a sort of reevaluation of toys, with
more adults coming to see them, uh, To see toys
less as like sinful icons of idleness and more as
tools for informing and exercising and developing mind, something that's

(12:03):
actually a social good and useful. I'm not sure if
the same would apply to Laura Dern's grappling hook guns,
but I think you could definitely make the case with
building blocks. Uh So. Hewitt writes that in the mid
to late nineteenth centuries, some manufacturers in Europe in the
US actually then began to mass produce building block toys.
Uh And this could often be kind of a side

(12:25):
business of something like. Imagine you've got a woodworking company
and you're cutting wood for you know, whatever it is
that you're mainly selling. You tend to have a lot
of small scraps of wood left over. Could you actually
turn those for a profit? Could you shape them into
building blocks and make money off of what would otherwise
be a waste product? And hew ittt writes that since

(12:46):
the mid nineteenth century, there have been three main avenues
linking learning and play with respect to toy blocks. So
the first one is what we're already talking about. It's
building itself. It's learning about basic physics and material properties
with hands on building experience. Uh. This is, of course
one of the most important parts of education. Sometimes it

(13:06):
gets under emphasized when we think about education because it's
not a technical subject you really learn in school. It's
something that children just have to learn intuitively with hands
on experience in the world. Absolutely, it just allows for
further experimentation with the natural properties of reality. Sure. Uh.
And then okay, So the second thing is surfaces of

(13:27):
blocks as a place to represent symbols like letters, numbers, words.
Of course, we already talked about the example of alphabet
blocks and thus using the blocks as a way of
learning how to manipulate those symbols. Like Hewitt says that
this pairing of abstract symbols with blocks really exploded in
the mid eighteen hundreds, and it it seems like a

(13:50):
very relevant type of learning today, Like allowing the child
to physically move symbols around in real space. This sort
of is a is a physical model of the way
we metaphorically move symbols around in mental space to manipulate them. Yeah,
and basically and engaging. Are you know, are the visual
processes of our brain as well? Um? Yeah? Yeah, these

(14:12):
these are still tremendously helpful. You see them sometimes to
aid in uh, acquisition of foreign languages, etcetera. I was wondering,
did you ever when you were a kid us like
those um sort of balancing scale games with physical objects
to learn algebra, Like, so you're trying to balance two
sides of an equation in math? That no, No, I
feel like my math education was very based in just

(14:36):
wrote memorization of things, uh, you know, memorizing tables, uh,
learning tricks and so I really with with a second
grader who's going through like modern math education, it's been
very interesting to see just this seemingly drastic different approach
to learning how numbers work and uh and how quantities

(14:57):
compared to each other. It's a at times it's difficult
for me to even help him with it. Because I
feel like our our math educations are so different. But
but the way they're teaching him, I think is far
superior to what I had. Oh, you're not going to
be one of those adults complaining that kids aren't learning
stuff the same way you learned it. No, No, I'm
thank goodness they're learning in a different way because the

(15:18):
way I learned it, I feel like did not give
me a true appreciation for mathematics. Yeah, I feel much
the same way. But I think that's such a funny
impulse people have, Isn't it Like it's they're they're not
learning it the way I did. The way I did
has got to be superior. Somehow they're not learning it
poorly like I did. I will not stand for it. No.
I want my kid to be able to actually think

(15:40):
about numbers in ways that have eluded me my whole life. Yeah.
And then there's one third main way that Hewitt mentions
that blocks have been linked with learning, and that's the
transmission of cultural heritage through blocks. An example here would
be quote building a model of an important architectural structure,
and through this, pro says learning architectural styles. In fact,

(16:03):
an example, I was just thinking of was the original
Lincoln logs. You know, these were created by Frank Lloyd
Wright's son. I can't remember his first name, but one
of the sons of Frank Lloyd right, uh yeah. He
got a Lincoln log business going. And one of the
original things that you were supposed to do with Lincoln logs,
like you got these instructions on how to build Abraham

(16:25):
Lincoln's log cabin. Yeah, Lincoln logs. Okay. I'll acknowledge that
Lincoln logs do succeed as an educational toy, in in
the educating you in the basic way that a log
cabin is constructed, but that's pretty much. Yet I always
found them to be a very boring toy. Like you
played with them once and you're like, oh, yeah, that's okay,

(16:46):
that's all I can do with this. I'm gonna go
build something out of a block that allows me to
engage my mind a bit more. I was reading an
old New York Times article in about blocks by the
Canadian American architect and you pen professor v Told rib Chinsky,
and his comment about Lincoln logs was it was something like, well,

(17:06):
at least they smelled good. Yeah, I mean they were wouldn't.
I mean, I don't hate Lincoln logs, but I just
they never really resonated with me. But they certainly survived
due to that. And I think the first episode we
did on toys, we talked about this idea that toys
have a twenty year cycle that you you and you
have a certain toy as a child, and then twenty

(17:28):
years later, you know, give or take. If you have
children or their children in your life at all, you're
likely to give that toy anew if it's still on
the market, still available. And Lincoln logs are exactly like that.
My my son received Lincoln logs from members of the
family just because of that nostalgia. And how do they smell?
I smell fine, and you can still build a little

(17:49):
cabin out of it and then set him aside to
go do something more fun. But of course, another thing
points out is that there are plenty of cases of
blurring of the lines between these categories, right because, uh,
for example, a thing that was I think very common
in the nineteenth century was like you have a set
of blocks that you sold as a as a set

(18:10):
that would represent elements of Bible stories. And this combines
using the blocks themselves as a representation space for symbols
or referring to things somewhere else, but then also transmitting
cultural heritage through the Bible story aspect. I don't think
I've ever seen these. Would it have been essentially it
wasn't sequential art, right, it wasn't. I think there was

(18:31):
some sequential art like that, like Bible story sequential art.
And I think it was also like, you know, build
build Noah's Arc or something. Well, that sounds like a
good fit. Noah's Ark is the the most child friendly
portion of pretty much the whole Bible. So do they
have blocks of all the other people on the earth
getting drowned to death? No, No, we just focus on
the animals. It's the main thing. Uh. So she goes

(18:53):
into the history of a lot of individual block manufacturers
and their businesses. I decided I'm not going to go
into all that here to touch on a couple more
broad issues. Uh though, it is actually interesting and this
paper is worth looking up and giving a read if
you want to go deeper on just like what some
of these manufacturers were doing individually. But um uh. Hewitt
points out that despite the attempts to use blocks for education,

(19:15):
in numbers and letters and so forth. Children most often
play with blocks in terms of pure form like that.
When you actually watch the way children and engage with blocks,
most of the time they ignore the symbolic representations, they
ignore the letters on the alphabet blocks, and instead they
use them to build. They build little towers and little cities.

(19:37):
Usually the form and the physical base of construction play
seems more relevant to the child's mind than the abstract
content does. I don't know how that squares with your experience,
but yeah I would, I would say, so, yeah, it
does with mine. Yeah, Like if I had the Bible blocks,
I think I would just be trying to build like
an Indiana Jones temple out of them. Yeah, I think

(19:57):
that was my experience with with alphabet blocks as a kid.
I would use them to a certain extent to build with,
but they didn't They didn't provide as much flexibility in
terms of what you ultimately built compared to an actual
block set that had varying sizes. There's only something you
can do with identical cubes. Likewise, remember we were gifted
a very nice set of wooden alphabet blocks and character

(20:21):
blocks of when my son came into our life because uh,
they were they would have Mandarin characters on them, which
was very cool, and you know, you get kind of
excited about Ah, he has the learning tool that that
are that that is, that is this block set. But
then you know, ultimately the kids not that interested in
them and just wants to do uh, you know, age
appropriate things with them, which I guess he was like

(20:42):
like one one and a half at that point, and
you know, he just wants to knock them over or
throw them. Uh, he doesn't want to actually build and
much less think about the characters all that much. Oh
but that's actually interesting because another thing he talks about.
She makes a point about the importance of the tearing
down own aspect of block play. She says, this is

(21:03):
a crucial element that's under emphasized in some of the
you know, pedagogical theory, or maybe underappreciated by even some parents. Uh.
There's a section where she says, quote the destructive or
deconstructive activity characteristic of block play, an integral part of
this activity makes some adults uncomfortable. However, as in all learning,
we cannot understand until we take apart, examine, and rebuild. Um.

(21:28):
So you know, She's making a point that a lot
of parents might look at their child's tendency to want
to like knock over a tower of blocks and smash
it and everything, and you say, oh, no, is my
child some kind of you know, little King Kong and
little Godzilla? Are they just pure destructive impulse? But she's suggesting, no, this,
this is also an important part of learning. It's not

(21:48):
something to be afraid of. No, yeah, not at all,
but I mean it can it can be frustrating. I've
been frustrated with it when when when my son was
was much younger, you know, because you want you want
to engage with him, you want to play with them,
you want to play blocks with with your your child.
But in doing that you're like, let's build something together,
and then the kid maybe is not that didn't much

(22:08):
into building or is not very good at it, but
then wants to destroy it at every level of construction.
Or sometimes you encounter it to where you have different
age groups and children and so you have like the
kid who's old enough to really want to build stuff,
be it with blocks or sand castle or what have you,
but the younger kid just wants to godzilla the heck
out of that sand city. U. Um. Yeah, and you

(22:31):
just have to realize that that is that I mean,
that's kind of how they learn. They're at a dissection
stage of architecture. Sure, like both phases are important. Yeah,
they're all about destroying new buildings, ironstruts into new button.
You know. One last thing that was in this paper
that I just point out because it's funny, is that
there's a part where she talks again. This was published

(22:52):
in two thousand one, and she talks about the sort
of recent development of digital construction environments, which are like
computer aims that are marketed as an alternative to physical blocks.
And the way she writes about it, it seems like
she's a little bit skeptical that these would, you know,
replace physical blocks, because you know, if you're two thousand one,
you're thinking, what kids want to play with their hands?

(23:12):
Why would you have digital three D blocks? But then
I was thinking, like, wait a minute, Minecraft, Yeah there
are plenty of examples of it. Um, But I too
am skeptical because yeah, there's something about the physical act
of the building, and even if you have great physics
in a virtual setting, which many of these games do, uh,
there's nothing like having the actual block. Oh sure, yeah, yeah,

(23:36):
you gotta have the physical objects there. Especially for younger kids,
I think maybe it's once you get older that you
can like abstract that level of play out to a
you know, an imagined space or to come back to
the jack in the box. Let's not discount the alarming
noise of a an epic wooden block tower falling onto
the kitchen floor that I think that's also an important

(24:00):
part of the experience. Another disadvantage of playing on carpeted floor, right, So,
so it's harder to build because the floor is less stable,
but also when it finally falls over, you don't even
get the clatter. Yeah, you don't scare everybody in the
house and the dog and the cat boat horrible. This
is my p s A for this episode. Find a
place with solid, hard floors for your children to play

(24:21):
with blocks. Don't make them play on carpet. All right,
it's time to take a quick break, but we'll be
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(25:49):
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(26:09):
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All right, we're back. So we just talked about traditional blocks,

(26:54):
wooden blocks, a little bit of uh, you know, log
cabin action in there, some alphabet blocks as well. But
I think we all know that there is sort of
a final form of blocks in principle, you know, like
how the Power Rangers continually morph up into bigger and
better robots. The ultimate robot that they could achieve, I
think would have to be the Lego. Absolutely Legos. These

(27:18):
were a huge part of my childhood growing up in
the eighties and nineties. These interlocking plastic bricks and the
various building accessories that come with them allow you to
construct everything from castles to helicopters to spaceships. And I
would generally build what the instructions told me to, you know,
I'd follow the instructions once, then i'd throw the directions

(27:39):
away and then I would just free build whatever I wanted,
usually more castles, helicopters, and spaceships, but you know, of
my my own design. For instance, I remember watching the
helicopter film Blue Thunder, and what was almost certainly, you know,
far too young an age for an R rated action film,
and I became a cessed with the two choppers in

(28:02):
the film as a police attack chopper piloted by Roy
Scheider from Jaws. Yeah, and then the huge five hundred
schopper piloted by Evil test pilot Malcolm McDowell. Of of course,
you know Caligula and a clockwork orange fan. How have
I never seen this? And then oh, I should also
point out that Daniel Stern also had a role playing

(28:22):
a voyeuristic creep. Of course, of course what he man?
He was really getting typecast as creeps in the like
late eighties period. Yeah, I guess this would have been earlier.
And so like, how did he bust out of creep
phase and become the narrator of the Wonder Years? Well
maybe like a site unseen casting because he has a
great creep look and plays a fantastic creep. I mean, why,

(28:45):
you know, why try and get away from what works?
And Daniel Stern is is a natural You just it's
that that the six pack life that he's living. Okay,
But so this movie got you building lego helicopters. Yeah,
and and going back to our our destructive aspect of play.
One of my favorite things to do was to was
to build the two Blue Thunder helicopters and have them
dual and then uh, you know, they didn't have one

(29:08):
of them crash. And that's the great thing about a
Lego constructed vehicles. When it crashes, it breaks into pieces.
You have this believable you know, destruction, and then you
can perhaps have a little pilot have to put that
chopper back together so that he can get back in
the sky and defeat Malcolm McDowell once and for all. Wow. Again,
destruction an important part of play. Yeah, Like going back

(29:30):
to blocks real quick. I remember one thing that I
would do a lot with my wooden blocks. Would build
a wall, and then I had a battery power g
I Joe tank that would just would just basically just
move forward on these cool tracks and just have that
drive into the wall and see see if I could
build a wall strong enough to keep the tank from

(29:50):
plowing through it, and then also figure out how to
make the tank approach the wall so as to bust through.
I think I did something almost exactly like this with
the with the controlled car. Yeah, trying to build something
that it like couldn't get through. Yeah. Yeah, So, um,
you know, say what you know about war toys and
we'll have something to say about that. In a minute,
like a nice remote control remote control or just powered

(30:14):
tank toy or vehicle toy. It's great to send it
at a wall of blocks. So, uh, legos. Fast forward
twenty years via the twenty year rule we've been talking about,
and I have introduced my own sign to the joy
of legos, and he's into them big time. He's he's
more obsessed with instructions than I was, but he does
some freconstruction as well. He likes to make creatures out

(30:35):
of them, and most recently he made a falcore from
the Never Ending Story. Yeah. He also loves the Harry
Potter kits, especially the ones that have creatures in them. Um.
Also some of the Lego dinosaur kits he really digs. Uh.
And and I should also drive home that's stepping on
legos is still absolutely no fun but and but an
important part of the experience. So we've got to have

(30:58):
the backstory of the Lego. Right, where does this wonderful,
delightful toy come from? Well, it ties in nicely with
the history of building blocks themselves, because of course you
cannot have Lego building blocks without all the all the
forms that came before, especially just basic wooden blocks. And
it does begin in a carpenter shop with pretty much
the same scenario we're talking about earlier, where a carpenter

(31:20):
might construct toys out of uh, you know, leftover materials, etcetera,
and uh. In this particular master carpenter and joyner was
a man by the name of Ole Kirk Christensen who
worked in the village of bill And, Denmark. So he
opened a shop in nineteen thirty two, selling mostly household
wooden goods like ladders and things, but he also sold

(31:43):
some toys on the side, but the toys became increasingly
important to his business. In nineteen thirty four, the company
ends up adopting the name Lego from the Danish leg gaunt,
which means play well and by accident it also a
lego also means I put together in Latin nicely. And

(32:03):
then in nine five they marketed a wooden duck toy.
They had a construction game that sort of thing, uh,
and they just kept continually building on this. In nineteen
forty six the company bought a plastic injection molding machine,
and by ninety nine the company was putting out two
hundred different plastic and wooden toys mostly I understand you know,

(32:24):
for sell in Denmark, and one of the toys that
they put out were automatic binding bricks. These were interlocking
bricks made out of plastic and if you look at
pictures off them, there pictures of them available on the
in the history section of Legos website, you'll see that
they mostly resemble Lego the Lego blocks of today, with

(32:44):
some you know, some noticeable differences, but the basic design
is there, the little cylindrical bits on the top that
allow them to interlock. You know, it's funny, I would
think with Legos that they must actually have some pretty
tight design parameters to to fit as well as they do.
You know, they don't have like parts that like lock
in place with any moving mechanisms, right, so they just

(33:05):
have to lock in place by pure rigid shape alone.
And this involves like them being just like the pegs
on the top fitting into the things on the bottom
just well enough that they stay together, but you know,
not so tightly that it's tough to put them together
or tough to put them pull them apart. Right, Yeah,
they they have to they have to work, and they

(33:26):
apparently worked pretty hard experimenting with them over the years
to to really get the fit. Uh, you know, tight
and dependable. Uh. They were experimenting with the plastic and
the plastic construction. They were not the first interlocking block
or brick, however, the key predecessor to all this would
have been Uh. I was reading that the Kitty Craft
self locking building brick, which was invented by Hillary Fisher

(33:50):
Page You Live nineteen o four through n seven. But
the automatic binding bricks of Lego were the immediate predecessor
to the like blocks we know today. They were only
sold in Denmark at first, and then in ninety three
they got a new name, Lego Merston or Lego Bricks,
and they steadily extended from their hitting the US and

(34:12):
Canada in sixty one, they go from a regional toy
to an international success. Now, one thing I was thinking
about regarding Lego and my own history of playing with
Lego Blue Thunder toys choppers blowing each other out of
the sky. Obviously, there was never an actual Blue Thunder
movie tie in Lego kit. I know, it's hard to

(34:33):
imagine a time when there were not a million Lego
movie tie ends on the shelf, But I started thinking
about it and I was like, oh, you know, um,
I don't know that I ever saw saying apache helicopter
Lego or any kind of a military helicopter Lego or
a tank or or you know, anything of that matter.
I mean, you'll see some science fiction, um, you know,

(34:54):
battle type stuff, some fantasy stuff, and to a certain extent,
medieval weapon read with the castles, But you don't really
see any war toys, despite the fact that there would
there would clearly be a market for that. Sure if
you if say Lego were to put out Lego models
of say, you know, stealth fighter, stealth bomber, uh, you know,

(35:15):
you know, the the osprey whatever the military aircraft happens
to be their neat planes, that would make neat kits, right,
It seems like a no brainer. So I was looking
into this and uh a little bit more, and I
ran across an excerpt from a two thousand ten progress
report that really drives home some of the key decision
making that goes on here. And I do think this

(35:36):
does get into the idea of destructive play, constructive play, etcetera.
Lego post these kind of reports, uh every year, addressing
a variety of topics that you might expect a major
toy manufactured to tackle, including social and environmental issues on
top of you know, more business level stuff. And this
particular progress report spelled out their key philosophy on weapons

(35:58):
in war in their toys, and so I just want
to read this again. This is coming directly from Lego,
So just bear in mind you're hearing like corporate messaging here,
but I think it does reveal a lot quote. A
large number of Lego Mini figures use weapons and are
assumably regularly being charged by each other's weapons as part
of children's role play. In the Lego Group, we acknowledge

(36:19):
that conflict in play is especially prevalent among four to
nine year old boys. An inner drive and a need
to experiment with their own aggressive feelings in order to
learn about other people's aggressions exists in most children. This
in turn enables them to handle and recognize conflict in
nonplay scenarios. As such, the Lego Group sees conflict play
as perfectly acceptable in an integral part of children's development.

(36:42):
We also acknowledge children's well proven ability to tell play
from reality. However, to make sure to maintain the right
balance between play and conflict, we have adhered to a
set of unwritten rules for several years. In two thousand ten,
we have formalized these rules in a guideline for the
use of conflict and weapons and Lego products. The basic
aim is to avoid realistic weapons and military equipment that

(37:04):
children may recognize from hot spots around the world, and
to refrain from showing violent or frightening situations when communicating
about Lego products. At the same time, the purpose is
for the Lego brand not to be associated with issues
that glorify conflicts and unethical or harmful behavior. So the
idea is that they are comfortable with allowing conflict conflict play,

(37:25):
including you know, uh, weapons and stuff in say historical
settings or fantasy settings or sci fi settings, but not
having like guns that you would recognize on you know,
being used in violence and armed conflict today. Correct. Yeah,
And I looked around at some of the more recent
reports to see if they, uh they had a more

(37:45):
recent voicing of this philosophy, and I was now not
able to come across it. It might exist out there.
Lego has a puts out a lot of communication, but
but it seems to be this, this seems to be
the standard they're still operating by. UH. And and I
think that's I acknowledge that this this makes sense for
a especially for an international uh company. You know that

(38:09):
that doesn't That doesn't say just situated in the United States,
for instance, say for instance, Lego put out a predator
drone kit, that would be that would be awful because
the context would be different and obviously in different parts
of the world. Uh and and uh and and arguably
like this, this particular kit, if it were to exist,

(38:30):
would bring a lot of ethical baggage with it that
you wouldn't necessarily want to inflict upon a child who
just wants to engage in the kind of play we're
discussing here. Yeah, this has got me thinking. I think conflict,
conflict play and violence and play could be something we
come back to and do an episode on and stuff
to blow your mind, because it's something that again it's
kind of like with the destructive play with blocks, you know,

(38:53):
like knocking down towers and stuff. It's the kind of
thing that I can totally understand why parents would look
at it and say like, this can't be healthy something,
something's wrong here. And yet you know, obviously millions of
people around the world grow up playing at games in
which the children pretend to kill each other and you know,
use toy guns and all that kind of stuff, And

(39:15):
it doesn't necessarily translate to you know, real aggressive or
violent behavior in adults. Maybe in some cases it does,
but it doesn't appear to UH to necessarily lead to
that conclusion. So I wonder what the actual research says
about that. Yeah, it would be fun to do a
deeper dive in it, because on another level, what children
are doing in imagination plays, they're making up stories, telling

(39:35):
stories and retelling stories. For instance, if you're if you're
playing with UH that there is a particular lego kit
that is a small one and it's just about one
of the showdowns between Harry Potter and Voldemort, which is
a battle which is a fight between a a murderous
villain and UH in the hero of the tale, which

(39:55):
of course is central to That's the kind of conflict
you have in so many men, so many legends, so
many important stories, and so you know, conflict played to
a certain extent is about embracing this aspect of our
our narratives. Yeah, it seems to me impossible that you
could like remove a child's desire to explore themes of
conflict in their play and in their imagination. I guess

(40:17):
the question is just like what types of physical toys
and models Actually, I don't know what drive development in
unhealthy directions, and I don't know if we actually have
any answers about that, Like, uh, I mean a whole
other issue. Of course, it's gun toy guns, you know,
and toy guns when I was a kid, Oh yeah,
I have some very realistic looking like you would just
have a water gun that just looks like a straight

(40:39):
up oozy black and everything, you know, and not not
brightly colored so that it's obvious. And nowadays, like we've
we've you know, for a few different reasons, we've we've
not let our son play with with toy guns. But
then on the other hand, he's into Harry Potter. He
has the wands, and so he'll go over to play
with a friend and they're just shooting straight um death curses.

(40:59):
That just a gun. Yeah, it's like they're treating kind
of like a gun. And there they are flinging um
forbidden curry what are they called the I don't know anyway,
the bad curses you're not supposed to use, the death curses,
the Crucio curses. Yeah, we were right, yeah, like we were.
In fact, he was dressed as is Harry Potter. When
we were trick or treating, we went past a house

(41:22):
and he was like, Oh, we should go to that one.
And I'm like, I don't think that one's open. They
don't have the lights on, they don't have any candy.
And he he just points his wand to the house and
says uh in Cyndio very coldly. I was like, like, man, man,
that's that's cold, all right. But back to Legos. Another

(41:42):
interesting angle that I came across regarding Legos has to
do with what these blocks are constructed out off, and
of course they are made out of plastic. I was
reading a two thou eighteen New York Times article by
Stanley read titled Lego wants to completely remake its toy
bricks with out anyone noticing Now that title gives pretty

(42:03):
much everything away. There's no mystery what that article is about,
but the main point is that Lego wants to eliminate
its dependence on petroleum based plastics and build its toys
entirely from plant based or recycled materials by and this
is quite a challenge because the Lego block, which hopefully
everyone listening has some familiarity with it, like, these are

(42:23):
durable blocks, they stand the test of time. I'm able
to use blocks from my childhood and build things with
my my son using new blocks. And you can't really
tell the difference unless it's you know, unless a block
has been chewed on by a dog or something. They
held up really well. They hold their color. Uh, They're
able to dependently in interlock with each other. They can

(42:46):
be stepped on, they can go through the wash, you
name it. But at the end of the day, they
are plastic products that are made from petroleum, and so
Lego has been eyeing plant fibers, recycled bottle uh. And
they want to they want to get away from that
petroleum based origin. Namely, they want to get away from
a BS plastic which they've depended on. This is the

(43:08):
kind of plastic you find in computer keys and in
many mobile phone cases. It's tough, it's slightly elastic, and
it has a polished surface so it looks nice. Read
Read points out in this article that at the time
of its publication, Lego had already experimented with something like
two hundred different alternatives to a BS plastic, and at

(43:28):
that point nothing had really worked. So so a particular
solution might be too brittle, it might break, and if
it broke, in some cases it might break into sharpened pieces,
which is no good for a children's toy. In other cases,
it might be aesthetic, the colors wouldn't look right, et cetera.
So the quest continues at Lego, apparently to find a

(43:49):
proper a BS plastic substitute, something that is more sustainable,
that is less dependent on petroleum. But it is another
interesting thing to think about when it comes to toy
it's the toys that we make, the toys that we
have as part of our childhood and then recreate again
and share with children in our lives. Is that they
know they are made out of materials. And uh, you know,

(44:11):
we've talked a lot about older toys that are made
out of wood and so forth, but so many of
our toys in the modern age are made out of plastic.
Well yeah, I mean whatever kind of like large scale
or maybe environmental downsides you might point to. I mean,
it's it's clear why plastic is so dominant in the market.
I mean, has undeniable material benefits for especially the kinds
of uses you want in a children's toy. It's easy

(44:34):
to form and two different shapes and mass produced like that.
It's relatively safe. Yeah, it it makes it really has
made lego possible. Like you go back to that woodworker's origin.
Uh it was it was not really possible to make
an interlocking brick that works as well as a as
a plastic brick with with wooden materials. Oh man, trying

(44:56):
to imagine wooden legos. I wonder if somebody's out there
doing that. That's like somebody's uh, you know, passion craft. Yeah,
I don't know. I mean, I guess I could be
completely wrong here, but I'm guessing you could make some
form of metal lego. But that also doesn't sounds like
a great idea. Man, you think stepping on the plastic
One's wait, you step on the the steel the steel lego.

(45:19):
All right, we're gonna move on to another toy here.
This next one is not going to be as as
much of an in depth discussion, but I decided to
look into the origin of a toy that I don't
know if anyone feels anybody feels particularly strongly about in
a like a positive manner. But I'm talking about the
symbol banging monkey. That mechanical it is. If the jack

(45:46):
in the box is a toy, then the symbol banging
monkey is. I think of it as a prop in
a horror film. Yeah, it's mainly what it does these days,
so I'm sure everyone's familiar with it. It is a chimpanzee,
generally in a setting or squatting position. It is wearing
some sort of baby clothing. Generally it has a pair
of symbols which it crashes together over and over again. Mechanically.

(46:09):
Sometimes there's you know, there's movement to the eyes into them,
like the teeth, and its eyes generally have this kind
of like red rimmed appearance to them that makes it
look like it is completely insane. It has the devil
inside it. Yes, yes, as I was looking into this,
like where did this come from? And uh, basically it
seems to go back to the idea of organ grinders.

(46:31):
But you would have something, you know, somebody a street
musician essentially, with a performing monkey that may be dressed
in small clothing, you know, doll clothing or children's clothing,
maybe brandishing some sort of an instrument it's all about
amusing people and getting them to give you some money, uh,
you know, for the amusement. And then this would be
the mechanical version of it. And I've seen it traced

(46:53):
back to the musical Jolly Chimp created by the Japanese
company uh Dashian c K and then I teen fifties,
but then with additional versions popping up in Japan as
well and making their way to the US and other markets,
again with a number of different names, but generally revolving
around the fact that you have a clashing mechanical noise

(47:14):
and the likeness of a chimp. And indeed, especially with
those reddened eyes, they often provoke a sense of uneasiness. Uh.
They summoned both the spirit of the be steal chimp
and uh the idea of just mindless uh, you know,
automated behavior. There's not a lot of variations. The chimp
is not a music box, It is not playing a song.

(47:34):
It is just clashing symbols and uh. And it has
shown up in a number of different horror properties. The
best example is probably this short story by Stephen King
titled The Monkey. I remember this one. Yeah. The basic
idea here is that there's this cursed toy symbol monkey,
and every time it clashes its symbols, somebody dies. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(47:55):
I remember this. Uh it was? Does the climax involved
of somebody like trying to go out on a lake
to throw it in the bottom or trying to get
away from it, but without without raising the suspicions of
the monkey? Um this This story again came out in
nineteen eighty. It was published in a magazine called Gallery,
which I believe was some sort of fine art magazine. Okay,

(48:17):
now I'm kidding is a skin magazine. But most of us,
probably most of us probably know it from a revised
version that was featured in nineteen eighty five Skeleton Crew,
which was one of Stephen King's great short story collections
of the day. Another source that some some people maybe
remember remembering the story from a nineteen eighty four film

(48:39):
titled The Devil's Gift, which tells the exact thing that
pretty much exactly the same story as the King short story,
but without any attribution to Stephen King. And most of
us know it from the MST three k Rift. Merlin
Shop of Mystical Wonders features an edited down cut of
this film that like it ends up like turn people

(49:00):
on fire and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's
terrible but also good and also creepy. There's something about
this monkey that is legitimately creepy. And I should also
point out Stephen King's Skeleton Crew first edition and many
editions that came out afterwards. That collection had the symbol
banging monkey on the cover. And that's how I've got
on the symbol banging monkey. I mean, maybe not a

(49:22):
deep story. Maybe somewhere out there in the world we
have listeners who know a deeper tale of the monkey.
And uh, perhaps we'll even dare to share it with us,
providing that the dark, simple, clinging monkeys will allow you
to without smiting you with their satanic power. All right,
on that note, we're going to take another break, but
when we come back, we will discuss paper doll theaters

(49:46):
and some cartoon transformations. Alright, we're back. Okay, it seems
like we're doing paper dolls now. Yeah. I wasn't really
expecting to talk about paper dolls because I don't have
a lot of nostalgia for them. Um, like some some toys,
you know, they tend to have sort of gendered marketing,

(50:08):
and I don't think I was. I was ever, Like,
they were never really marketed for me or purchased for
me when I was a child. Oh, I should have
brought up that earlier. There's actually one one mentioned in
Hewitt's paper about blocks, how that there's some egregiously gendered
marketing in the history of of blocks, you know, like
advertising blocks as for the boy constructor you know, which

(50:30):
is just like obviously girls like playing with blocks too. Yeah,
I mean, I think gender targeting on toys tends to
be a bit dumb, but especially with with blocks, if
there was ever a truly gender neutral toy. Blocks are
real because it's not like physics is you know, it's
only Yeah, it's like it's it's part of the human experience.

(50:52):
So don't you know when a girl makes a tower
of things, it just can't fall over. Yeah, it's that's ridiculous.
So with paper dolls, I don't have a lot of
I remember my sisters had them, and I think I
would check them out from time to time, and they
were neat, you know, especially when you get into costume
changes on them. But I found an interesting rite up
on paper doll theaters in particular, and so that's mainly

(51:15):
what I want to talk about here. But but paper
dolls in and of themselves selves can be pretty cool.
And also if you expand that a little bit and
think also of things made out of cardboard, cardboard, cutouts,
folded paper that is used to create some sort of
likeness of a creature or a being. But of course
for to have these different types of toys, you have
have to have paper first. Now, if paper itself has

(51:38):
been with us for a long time since at least
the second century BC in China, spreading more broadly through
the Middle East in Europe in the thirteenth century, and
we'll have to come back and do a full invention
episode just on paper itself because it has a fascinating
history totally. But but of course it proved extremely important
for the conveyance of written language. It also was something

(51:59):
of a value treated as such. For instance, in Western
traditions we see see it in the value of books,
in the reuse of parchment. Oh yeah, that's one thing
that people often don't understand when dealing with like archaeology today.
It's like, why do we have all these old documents
where people would like write something on top of something
else that it doesn't make any sense, But it does
if you consider that writing media, the stuff you'd be

(52:21):
writing on was like expensive and hard to come by.
I mean, we live in a day of very disposable paper,
a day when, for instance, my son can come in
and just he can just go up to the printer,
grab a stack of blank sheets and just start drawing dinosaurs.
You know, the time was when that would be completely unacceptable.
Paper is not a plaything. Paper. In some cases, paper

(52:42):
was sacred. I mean paper was used uh in in
various you know, rituals and ceremonies. We see that in
Eastern examples especially, and there was there was something sacred
about It was a place where you you put the
written word, for example. Uh. And then of course in
the East we see origami arising, you know, an art
form that is about creating three dimensional entities humanoid or

(53:05):
animal or otherwise out of paper, and these date back
to around eight hundred C. We also see traditions of
paper puppetry in Asia, which also resonates with the sacred,
because puppetry at heart is a kind of magic to
imbue created likenesses with the animation of life. And then
then then to use these animations to tell stories. And

(53:26):
so we come back to the idea of European paper dolls,
which seemed to have popped up in the seventeenth, eighteenth
and nineteenth century, becoming basically widely more available and popular
as paper itself became more affordable, because that's the key fit.
For there to be, you know, toys made out of paper,
and then for there to be widespread toys met out
of paper, you've got to get the price point down. Sure.

(53:48):
So I was reading an article by Amelia soft for
j Store Daily titled paper Theaters the home entertainment of Yesteryear,
and it discussed, uh, you know, another detail of paper
doll history that I think I was largely unaware of.
I'm pretty sure I'd seen some reprinted paper theaters at
Atlanta's own Center for Puppetry Arts, but I didn't really
appreciate what I was looking at and realized that this

(54:10):
is essentially an entire puppetry art form that was very
popular at one point. So basically during the eight hundreds,
live theater was that was you know, was was all
the rage. It was extremely popular in Europe, especially in England.
It was the TV of the nineteenth century. If you
wanted if you wanted to see a story, if you

(54:32):
wanted to watch your stories, you needed to go watch
someone present them to you on a stage. But you
have to leave the house. True. Uh, and we'll get
to a way around that. But but performance was huge
soft rights. Uh that that theater goers at the time
rebelled against Covent Garden Theater over high ticket prices by

(54:52):
ringing bells during the show to disturb the actors, and
by bringing live pigs to the theater. Which fabulous. This
this gives me some ideas I think that we can
all use in dealing with, say, the likes of Ticketmaster
and so forth. Okay, you don't like those high prices,
you don't like those scalpers coming in. Everybody, bring a
bring a live pig and some bells to the next concert. Uh.

(55:17):
So you also have people attending unlicensed and illegal theaters
that were called blood tubs to feed their need for
live performance. People could not get enough of it. Wait
why were they called blood tubs? We have any idea?
I think they were just considered um potentially dangerous and
or violent. I mean, imagine going to an unlicensed venue

(55:38):
for I'm thinking like like a hard rock concert, punker metal,
you know, and some of the complications that could ensue. Yeah,
those punk house shows can get kind of rough. But
then there was the home version, often for children, paper theaters,
and you could at the time you could buy them
colored or uncolored for a manner of sense, and then

(55:59):
you could they would you everything you needed for a
for a stand up miniature performance. You'd have a stage,
a set character, striking dramatic poses. You know, you you
have to cut them out, uh, and then stand them up.
And of course it would also come with the script,
often times edited so that the child you know, could
handle it. If there was something, you know, body in there,

(56:19):
it would be removed. Amazing. So like instead of going
to the store and like buying a DVD, you could
you'd buy a set to do a paper puppet play
that comes with a script that tells you what to do. Yeah,
which which is amazing. Especially again, think of a time
when you didn't have DVDs, you didn't have vhs, you
weren't able to just catch the movie again on television later. Uh,

(56:43):
this might be the way to to re experience it
right in a way. It's very much like the like
a novelization of a film, uh, except more physical and
requiring your direct interaction to put on the performance. Yeah,
and so they were very popular, and according to saw It,
they likely lead to imagination play as well, much like
legos in this regard, I'd wager, you know, run it one,

(57:06):
run it through once, maybe with the script, and then
maybe you do a sequel to Uh. I don't know
much to do about nothing, much to do about nothing
to the revenge right first first his tragedy and then
his comedy. Yeah. Uh, now the price by the way, uh,
you know, manner of sense. It's actually referenced in the
title of a Robert Louis Stevenson essay about their appeal,

(57:29):
where he's kind of, you know, waxing nostalgic about his
his love of these when he was a Child's called
penny Plane twopence colored because the the plane version of
everything was cheaper, and if you got it already colored in,
you'd have to pay a little bit more, Okay, Uh Stevenson,
I was looking at this original piece. I looked it up.
It's available online if you just do a search for

(57:50):
that title. And Robert Louis Stevenson. He writes about the
joy of coloring the pages himself. Uh that sometimes he
would get the colored version for the extracent, but it
would just it would feel wrong. He would feel like
he was cheating. Uh. And he would you know, he'd
stage your performance with the paper of figures. But then
he would end up studying the contents of the script

(58:12):
booklet a lot obsessively and uh and and his parents
would not necessarily understand, like why he wasn't playing with
it anymore. And He's like, Oh, it's like a big
meal that I've consumed. I've already consumed that I can't
I can't do it again. Mom and dad. You don't
understand the level of energy I'm putting into this, uh,
this paper theater. Uh. Soft also points out that Gotha's

(58:34):
son August would put on shows in a paper theater
and the quote the family cat always served as one
of the performers. Oh like getting in there and swatting
at the puppet. They would love that, so Soft concludes. Quote.
The magic of the paper theater was not that it
allowed children to replicate a beloved play in their home.
It was that it provided them with the raw materials,

(58:57):
either to copy or create to follow, or some vert
as they saw fit. So it gave children a full
cast and setting of physical representations for imagination play. And
in some cases, I imagine you know, it made you know,
such an array possible given that some children, um, you know,
many children even would not have had access to, say

(59:18):
a toy story for sue cast off material characters. You
wouldn't have like a toy chest of animals and people
representations thereof with which to do this kind of imagination play.
But one of these sets for a mere penny, you
would have good guys and bad guys in a setting
everything you need in the script, I mean the script
that seems like a huge part of it. I mean

(59:39):
I think about how actually this is seeming so weird
to me, But at the same time, I'm like, well,
that's sort of what I did with my action figures,
Like you know, when I played with like Jurassic Park
action figures or whatever, I could like have them sort
of put on a play. Yeah. Another thing that I
read was that people like Igmar Bergman and Orson Wells

(01:00:00):
would use toy theaters to stage things out uh in
miniature for actual for actual performances or productions. So you
know this in and of itself too. It's just a
useful exercise to be able to create in miniature what
you may one day create in real life as a
as an actual theatrical production or a cinematic production. Um. Yeah,

(01:00:24):
these were. These were super popular for for quite a while. Now,
among other things, television helped to decrease the appeal of
these paper theaters and toy theaters in general. But they
live on to this day. Uh, sometimes in a nostalgic
form and old toy kind of form. But then you
also see them utilized as a as a true craft
by some individuals, or even as a performance already, even

(01:00:46):
as a way of performing through a type of puppetry.
I feel like I want to get one of these things. Yeah,
I again, I have seen them for sale, or I've
seen updated versions of them for sale, let's say the
Center for Punctry Arts. So next time I go, I
have to check it out. Maybe they make a Jurassic
Park paper puppets set. It would be great, actually, you know,
because just think of it, instead of buying all these

(01:01:08):
big pieces of plastic or building amount of legos or
what have you, and then building things for the dinosaurs
to knock down out of bricks and blocks, what have you.
In paper form, you could have everything. You could have
all the major dinosaurs, all the major players. You can
even have a who's the lawyer in the first Jurassic Park?
Gennaro or what the actor's name? Well, I don't know

(01:01:29):
about either one. You can have that guy and you
could even rip him in half. He even comes into
two pieces. That's right. Yeah, very easy to dismember paper puppets.
You know what I'd do? What's that flip script? Then
you have dinosaurs make a park with humans, and then
the humans get loose. There you go, See, this is
exactly it like. It allows you to to make all
the changes, all the alterations that you you might be

(01:01:50):
inspired to to to create. Now, Robert, you promised me
that we would end up talking about some kind of
cartoon transformation. What's the deal here? All right? Yeah? I
have one final thing that you have to talk about here,
and it's something that I never thought that I would
I would really come up on the show. I'm gonna
what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna list several
different Japanese cartoon characters made that were indeed each of

(01:02:13):
them made into some sort of toy, and I want
you to figure out what they have in common. You
have mum Rabbi Ever Living from ThunderCats. You remember Mama
I actually never watched, okay, So mom Raw is like
an old decrepit mummy like kind of a cat person mummy. Uh.
And then at a certain point in the show, he's
gonna have to battle, so he has to transform into

(01:02:35):
mum Rabi Ever Living, which is this big, like supermuscular
cat creature with like sort of Fulsa Doom esque Egyptian
inspired garb. It's like in Stephen Summers Mummy movies when
the skeleton critter turns into Arnold Oslou. Yeah, very similar.
I imagine they might have even been inspired by Mamra.

(01:02:56):
Another example Monstar Silverhawks. This was a villain and it
was a sci fi sort of counterpart to ThunderCats. Then,
of course we had Vultron. I definitely remember Vultron, and
then you had Sailor Moon aware of it, but I
never watched it, Okay, So what do they all have
in common? Well, I know the answer because I can

(01:03:16):
see your notes, but I haven't I don't know if
I would have gotten it otherwise. Clearly now that I
know the answer, it's that they all have like a
scene where they go like power up and then they
transform into their their higher form. That's right, Yeah, lengthy
transformation scenes. Um. And again I was not familiar with
all these properties. I don't think I've ever watched sailor

(01:03:37):
Moon and probably you know that gets into gendered marketing,
I'm sure. But I was a big ThunderCats and Vultron
fan growing up. I would catch silver Hawks when it
was on. I always found it like a little weird.
It was it was, it was didn't have the true
magic of ThunderCats. But these were fun shows. And yes,
the transformation scenes were awesome, and they sometimes would would

(01:03:59):
use like a full trans in sformation. Sometimes they would
use a shorter version of its seemingly depending on how
much you know, how much they had to pad out
the episode, because because that really seems to seem to
have been key here, right, because it's a great way
to pad out an animated series, especially when you consider
a show like ThunderCats, which went four seasons one hundred
and thirty episodes. Uh, silver Hawks only went one season

(01:04:21):
and it still has sixty five episodes, so they're really
turning these puppies out. Yeah, but you film a transformation scene,
you can basically just use the same one every time, right,
you can bank Like generally most of these were looking
at You're talking twenty seconds, which you know, maybe doesn't
seem about a lot when you but when you get
into the cost of animation, etcetera. Uh, it makes a difference.

(01:04:42):
It's a it's called the bank method apparently. Uh. By
the way, Sailor Moon five seasons, two hundred episodes. Wow.
So yes, on one hand, you can look at and say, well,
this is a good way to to to fill up
an episode. Just have have twenty seconds or so that
you can depend on, not counting the intro and the
outro to the episode. Would you're already going to be
pretty stationary. I was looking at j Store Daily again

(01:05:05):
and I ran across a post titled selling toys with
the Sailor Moon transformation sequence. And this was very insightful
and made me think about this in a new way.
This was by Jacqueline Manski in October of twenty nine,
and it was largely a look at the work of
Comiko Sito in the Journal of Asian Studies the the

(01:05:26):
So this all points out that the transformation scenes like
the ones we've discussed, but more specifically like the one
in Sailor Moon are are more than we might imagine
they are. So in Sailor Moon, we have a normal
Japanese school girl girl and she transforms into the pretty
Guardians Sailor Moon, the Pretty Guardians. Yes. Uh, And apparently

(01:05:46):
this was like a standard part of magical girl animation
prior to Sailor Moon. And one presumes that, you know,
it connects to the transformations in the ThunderCats and Vultron
shows again just sort of like a differently gendered version
of the same thing. It dates back at least to
the N two animated series Minky Momo, which was a

(01:06:07):
magical princess show that featured a standard twenty three second
transformation scene. By the time Sailor Moon comes around, though,
they get that transformation scene up to forty seconds. This
is interesting that you've got this, you know, animation production
padding technique that is being used over and over in
all these different series to make the cartoon production more affordable.

(01:06:28):
But how does this connect to toys? All right? This
is what the Saito has to write about it. She
says a quote. Although the technique of reusing cells in
multiple episodes was not a new concept in itself, Momo,
by which she means Minkey Momo from A D two
successfully incorporated the well exploited robot animes bank method, in
which mechanical parts are captured in the camera's dynamic tracking

(01:06:52):
motion for the maximum effect of promoting the target merchandise. So,
in other words, if I'm understanding this correctly, it's you
ever see these scenes where it's like the show room
for an automobile. It's on this circular stage that's revolving
and all the fancy lights are on it to just
give you this three sixty fabulous uh, you know, NonStop

(01:07:15):
view of just how wonderful this vehicle is from every angle.
It's like the character creation screen and a wrestling video
game exactly. They'll let you rotate to every angle, you know,
inspect the feed, all all that stuff. Right. So, yeah,
if I'm understanding this correctly, the argument is that that
is what this is. Like, Yes, it's a it's a
banking method. Yes it's a it's part of each story there.

(01:07:37):
It's part of the imaginative element of the of the tail.
But so like you're trying to sell Vultron action figures
or sailor Moon action figures, and this allows you to
do that within every episode of the show, to have
like a merchandise show off segment that gives you lots
of different angles and stuff to examine the toy that

(01:07:59):
you want to buy. Yeah, so mum Raw does his
twenty second transformation scene up. I think I tried to
clock it. I think it's like twenty three seconds, and
and you look at it and you're like, man, Mama
is amazing. This is the centralvilla one of the show
is the best, and I simply must own the toy.
And I did own the toy of Mamra, Like I remember,

(01:08:20):
I didn't connect the two. But it's like I had
to have mom Raw. I had mam Raw. I had
none of the other ThunderCats, but I had to have Mmra.
And I probably would have gotten Monstar as well, but
I couldn't really move my eight year old funds around
enough to make it happen. But but this is a
couldn't get an injection of capital for that, right right? Yeah,

(01:08:41):
But but I think this is a really fascinating take
on on on it. I mean, obviously we know that
if there is a cartoon that has a toy line,
and sometimes the cartoon comes first, sometimes the toy line
comes first. Sometimes they're part of the same effort, we
know on some level that cartoon is about selling the toys.
Oh yeah, I mean it's totally the case was like Transformers, right,
the cartoon was there to sell the toys, but I

(01:09:04):
had not really considered something about the transformation, saying about
how this this might be a key uh tool in
the toy makers the toy marketers toolbox. Well that's funny
because now that I'm thinking of Transformers of course, duh,
I mean also extended transformations. Yeah, you see this once
you you sort of clued into this idea. You see

(01:09:27):
it in so many shows yet Transformers, even some shows
that are perhaps you know, not cartoons, I guess in
Power Rangers, stuff had to come together, some sort of
transformation had to happen. It becomes and part of this
too is it becomes a trope of such shows. Right,
It becomes a thing that people expect and they get
excited about, and maybe to a certain extent, the creators
don't even realize the ways that it can be used

(01:09:49):
that it has this this uh this marketing effect as well. Yeah,
this is really interesting. I've never considered this before. Now again,
I I only have personal experience with with mem Ras
and Monstar and Voltron. But I would love to hear
from anyone out there who can really speak to Sailor
Moon and some of these other princes transformation shows and

(01:10:10):
and and provide a little insight on this, you know,
now that I'm thinking about it, I actually have come
across other examples of this where like specifically cinema like
cinema techniques being used to emphasize toy selling aspects. The
main example I'm thinking of are in Batman movies, like
in the uh in the second Joel Schumacher Batman movie

(01:10:33):
Batman and Robin from I guess it was the late nineties.
I remember, there's all this talk after the film came
out about how like the film had been shaped by
the need to market toys that would be sold in
conjunction with the film. Uh so, like, you know, to
to emphasize the bat vehicles and stuff in certain ways

(01:10:54):
that would make it they thought more appealing for a
toy market. Yeah, I have to absolutely, you know, I
don't know if I ever saw that one all the
way through. But but even the earlier Batman movies, I
mean clearly you got to move some batmobiles and so
you feature the batmobile prominently. But then again, would it
be a Batman film if it didn't have a batmobile
in it? It becomes kind of hard to, uh, you know,

(01:11:16):
to to pull these elements apart again, right, I've been
trying to think of like an Arnold Schwarzenegger price ice
pun it did, it didn't didn't come together right. It
was such hilarious, uh and awful casting. As as as
Mr Freeze, It's one of the all time grades. Yeah,
because I remember even at the time I was already
I was always a Mr. Freeze fan, even like the

(01:11:37):
really crappy Mr Freeze, that version that you had in
the old Adam West uh series, I was still I
would still get excited for him when he was on
the screen. Oh, I didn't know that. I remember he
was always so scary and tragic in the animated series.
He's wonderful in the animated series. I fell in love
with him again, Uh, fell in love with him anew
when when that came out and then here comes Arnold

(01:12:00):
and you're like, who did this? Like who so completely
missed you know, missed the mark on what this character
is and what they should be cinematically. But they saw
a lot of toys though. That's true, and and it
is at least comedically noteworthy. All right, So there you
have it. I think this is good. I think we're
gonna close the toy bag for the year. It's been

(01:12:21):
a heck of a hall it has. Obviously there were
tons of toys we did not get to, but we
can always come back in the future, especially if these
are popular. And then of course, uh, you know, we're
gonna cover more invention inventions in the new year. We'd
love to hear from everyone out there. What do you
want to hear about, what technologies, what specific inventions, big inventions,
small inventions. Really I would love to hear from everyone

(01:12:44):
regarding like what you like about the show, if you
if you like invention, if you want Invention to keep going.
What sort of topics and content are are you finding
the most engaging. Do you like multi episodes that deal
with something bigger like photography? Do you like self contained
episodes that are looking at a singular invention. Do you

(01:13:04):
like grab bag episodes like these toy episodes? I would
just love to know what you think as a listener.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes,
you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. You
can go to invention pod dot com and that I'll
take you to our to a page for us, and
uh yeah, wherever you get the show, just make sure
you rate and review. That is a great way to

(01:13:26):
support the show. Also subscribe. That way you'll always get
new episodes when they arrive. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like
to get in touch with us with feedback on this
episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of

(01:13:50):
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