An article on silly toys
Jan. 20th, 2008 05:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Don't ask me what I'm doing up at this hour, I really just woke up.
The Joy of Silly
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
LET us now praise goofy men.
Richard Knerr died last week at the age of 82. He co-founded Wham-O, the corporation that brought us the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee and the SuperBall.
Mr. Knerr and his partner, Arthur Melin, who died in 2002, were able to pull off one of the most difficult tricks in marketing: starting a fad. Repeatedly. Like quantum mechanics and comedy, not everybody can do it.
“Fads are really hard to figure out,” said Dennis Hall, a professor of English at the University of Louisville who specializes in popular culture.
Ray B. Browne, founder of The Journal of Popular Culture and the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, said that fads were an ephemeral artifact of a culture that’s always on the lookout for the next thing. Fads are a facet of the national character, he said, and “I personally think it’s good for society.” He explained, “It’s a dynamic in society that really does keep us pretty much alert.”
A culture that thrives on newness and flexibility, he said, will go through fads quite naturally. He added, “I’m not sure that fads aren’t fertilizer to American culture.”
Edward Tenner, visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity,” called toy fads “a surprisingly serious subject,” and added that the toys that make it big say a lot about the societies that love them. “Toys really are us,” he said.
Our toys, Dr. Tenner said, flow from the cycles of innovation and refinement that define all technologies. The playthings tend to be the byproducts of a new technology and a fertile imagination. So Silly Putty came from failed experiments in making artificial rubber, and the Slinky was a tension spring that a naval engineer saw potential in — and not just potential energy. The postwar period from 1945 to 1975 was especially rich in innovation, and thus toys, Dr. Tenner said.
But the cultural moment has to be right as well. “You can see pictures in Bruegel of kids running after a hoop and a stick,” he noted, but in the Hula Hoop the technology of cheap, plastic manufacturing dovetailed with a nation ready to shake its hips. The message of the Hula Hoop, and for that matter of Elvis Presley, he said, emerged in a time for many of intense optimism, which seemed to say: “You can let yourself go. You can dance wildly. You can swing wildly. You don’t have this dignity to preserve.”
Dr. Hall said one thing that defined the early Wham-O toys was that they were “a little transgressive,” and involved physical activity with a little naughtiness or risk. Now 65, he recalled his own boyhood Wham-O slingshot: “My mother was not pleased that I had gotten one.” And though he figures now that boys and girls must have used Hula Hoops, he recalls watching only girls use them, and was grateful that the toy meant “you could watch them engage in a bump and grind that was legitimated by this stupid piece of plastic.” His voice carried an air of wistfulness and what sounded like wonder.
It is precisely this silliness that makes such toys beloved of our culture, said Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. To Dr. Jamison, the author of “Exuberance: The Passion for Life,” the defining and saving quality of the faddish toys was the value in plain old goofiness. “The old toys and gadgets — so noneducational in that dreary, earnest, modern sense of ours — were so much more open to imagination, zaniness and unstructured fun.”
Dr. Tenner agreed, citing his own favorite creative toy from boyhood, the “Hoot Nanny.” It was an early version of the Spirograph drawing toy. “Something like this could animate family life in a way that a screen and a mouse never can and never will,” he said.
Dr. Hall of Louisville noted that modern toys, for all their technological sophistication, tended to lay down the rules, where the wacky toys of yore tended to be more open ended. A Hula Hoop lets you make up your own dance; Dance Dance Revolution gives you the steps. A guitar lets you create; Guitar Hero “is really well defined,” he said.
What gets lost, perhaps, is childhood. Dr. Hall expressed a preference for the anarchic sense of play that the cartoonist Bill Watterson depicted in “Calvin and Hobbes” and the crazed game of Calvinball: primitive, wild and playful.
Of course, wildness in the wrong place can be a bad thing. Just ask Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who famously denounced “irrational exuberance” in the stock market in the 1990s.
But that’s grown-up stuff. If the life of Mr. Knerr tells us anything, it’s that maturity has its place, but it’s also important to let toys be toys.
The Joy of Silly
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
LET us now praise goofy men.
Richard Knerr died last week at the age of 82. He co-founded Wham-O, the corporation that brought us the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee and the SuperBall.
Mr. Knerr and his partner, Arthur Melin, who died in 2002, were able to pull off one of the most difficult tricks in marketing: starting a fad. Repeatedly. Like quantum mechanics and comedy, not everybody can do it.
“Fads are really hard to figure out,” said Dennis Hall, a professor of English at the University of Louisville who specializes in popular culture.
Ray B. Browne, founder of The Journal of Popular Culture and the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, said that fads were an ephemeral artifact of a culture that’s always on the lookout for the next thing. Fads are a facet of the national character, he said, and “I personally think it’s good for society.” He explained, “It’s a dynamic in society that really does keep us pretty much alert.”
A culture that thrives on newness and flexibility, he said, will go through fads quite naturally. He added, “I’m not sure that fads aren’t fertilizer to American culture.”
Edward Tenner, visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity,” called toy fads “a surprisingly serious subject,” and added that the toys that make it big say a lot about the societies that love them. “Toys really are us,” he said.
Our toys, Dr. Tenner said, flow from the cycles of innovation and refinement that define all technologies. The playthings tend to be the byproducts of a new technology and a fertile imagination. So Silly Putty came from failed experiments in making artificial rubber, and the Slinky was a tension spring that a naval engineer saw potential in — and not just potential energy. The postwar period from 1945 to 1975 was especially rich in innovation, and thus toys, Dr. Tenner said.
But the cultural moment has to be right as well. “You can see pictures in Bruegel of kids running after a hoop and a stick,” he noted, but in the Hula Hoop the technology of cheap, plastic manufacturing dovetailed with a nation ready to shake its hips. The message of the Hula Hoop, and for that matter of Elvis Presley, he said, emerged in a time for many of intense optimism, which seemed to say: “You can let yourself go. You can dance wildly. You can swing wildly. You don’t have this dignity to preserve.”
Dr. Hall said one thing that defined the early Wham-O toys was that they were “a little transgressive,” and involved physical activity with a little naughtiness or risk. Now 65, he recalled his own boyhood Wham-O slingshot: “My mother was not pleased that I had gotten one.” And though he figures now that boys and girls must have used Hula Hoops, he recalls watching only girls use them, and was grateful that the toy meant “you could watch them engage in a bump and grind that was legitimated by this stupid piece of plastic.” His voice carried an air of wistfulness and what sounded like wonder.
It is precisely this silliness that makes such toys beloved of our culture, said Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. To Dr. Jamison, the author of “Exuberance: The Passion for Life,” the defining and saving quality of the faddish toys was the value in plain old goofiness. “The old toys and gadgets — so noneducational in that dreary, earnest, modern sense of ours — were so much more open to imagination, zaniness and unstructured fun.”
Dr. Tenner agreed, citing his own favorite creative toy from boyhood, the “Hoot Nanny.” It was an early version of the Spirograph drawing toy. “Something like this could animate family life in a way that a screen and a mouse never can and never will,” he said.
Dr. Hall of Louisville noted that modern toys, for all their technological sophistication, tended to lay down the rules, where the wacky toys of yore tended to be more open ended. A Hula Hoop lets you make up your own dance; Dance Dance Revolution gives you the steps. A guitar lets you create; Guitar Hero “is really well defined,” he said.
What gets lost, perhaps, is childhood. Dr. Hall expressed a preference for the anarchic sense of play that the cartoonist Bill Watterson depicted in “Calvin and Hobbes” and the crazed game of Calvinball: primitive, wild and playful.
Of course, wildness in the wrong place can be a bad thing. Just ask Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who famously denounced “irrational exuberance” in the stock market in the 1990s.
But that’s grown-up stuff. If the life of Mr. Knerr tells us anything, it’s that maturity has its place, but it’s also important to let toys be toys.
