And Lego, of course. And for my sister: Stuffed animals. Simple toys, with nothing to plug in, no batteries required — these are the ones I remember really playing with.

Gibbs writes:

The best toys transcend, their survival a testament to their purpose and power. The Babylonians played board games; the ancient Greeks had yo-yos. The Chinese were flying kites 3,000 years ago. Crayola crayons were first produced in 1903. In 1916, Frank Lloyd Wright's son John, inspired by the way his father had built an earthquake-resistant hotel in Tokyo, invented Lincoln Logs. And many great toys are accidents or improvisations, a serenade by kids whose first drum set is a wooden spoon and a tin pot. Play-Doh was invented as a wallpaper cleaner. In 1943 a Navy engineer trying to smooth the sailing of battleships found that a torsion spring would "walk" when knocked over. If you stretched all the Slinkys sold since then end to end, I'm told, they would circle the earth more than 125 times.

I can't lie and say my brother, sister and I didn't play the hell out of video games growing up (Intellivision, because my Dad loved a bargain) but we spent a large amount of time playing with Lego, Matchbox cars, Play-Doh and, yes, Barbie dolls. And I don't know about this year's "hottest" toy, Zhu Zhu hamsters, but Play-Doh had the added benefit of being delicious! (What? Isn't that what they want you to do with it?)

The Power of Play-Doh [Time]

[Image via National Toy Hall Of Fame]

Kenneth Clark's famous study was dispiriting: almost every child preferred the white doll. In
2006, filmmaker Kiri Davis re-created the experiment, and 15 of her 21 young subjects chose the Caucasian baby doll. While, as we all know, children "have to be carefully taught," this is clearly ingrained early - and dies hard. On the View yesterday, Elisabeth Hasselbeck remarked on the looks her daughter got when she carried a Tiana doll from The Princess and the Frog on the street (although I personally might have been looking at the celebrity, but that's just me. And she says she was wearing a hat.)

Yet, what makes the whole thing even more depressing is that on the surface, there have never been so many doll "choices": a piece in today's Wall Street Journal points to the trend in doll-girl matching and, amongst toy companies, "an intensifying concern with matching the characteristics of the figurine with those of its owner."

There are, of course, several different issues at play here. On the one hand, we've got standards of beauty - kids need to see more varietals than Barbie, and know that all kinds of appearance and coloring are equally valid - that one is not always the heroine while the others are the chorus, the satellite, the token friend. In a word, we need diversity of dolls to become commonplace, taken for granted.

And then there are the different forms of play: some children like to "parent" their dolls; just yesterday I saw a little girl assiduously mothering her baby doll while her mother tended to a real-life infant sibling. In these cases, you don't need a shrink to tell you that the play is helpful for transitioning, for working out issues, and for learning positive behaviors. And you don't need to be a sociologist to know that for a little kid, your baby most often looks like you. (Although Brangelina may be putting paid to this notion for any child whose mother has a Star subscription.)

Of course, for most kids, it's not about that particularly. Like Hasselbeck's daughter, most young children just want dolls as friends or characters. As the Journal put it,

More commonly, children have enjoyed dolls not for narcissistic satisfaction but for their imaginative potential as hand-held adventurers that can be moved about and made to talk or fly. A corncob doll works as well for those purposes as a custom-made mini-me.

Which is what makes the whole "model-of-myself" trend kind of strange. There is a difference between wanting to see a wide spectrum of dolls, to know that you're represented as a valid human being, to own a toy you identify with (hopefully unthinkingly) and needing your doll to be a replica of you, the child. One is all about imagination; the other is about the opposite.

For children who wish to see their own faces reflected back at them, the toy industry has never before strained so assiduously to please. American Girl, the Mattel-owned company that sells 18-inch dolls with realistic hair and moveable limbs (including a line of historical dolls), offers an array of mannequins that can be configured with Godlike genetic specificity: For $95 to $109, parents can purchase a playmate that mirrors their daughter's hair (blond, red, auburn, caramel, brown, dark brown, brown-black or black-brown), eyes (blue, hazel, green or brown), skin (light, medium or dark), and even attributes such as freckles, bangs, curls and pierced ears.

While they may be contemporaneous phenomena, companies producing a wide range of ethnicities and features, being able to find a doll with glasses or one with a wheelchair, seems to me a very different thing from the mini-idols that every company from Madame Alexander to Bratz is now producing. I feel like the two get conflated, but they're different. I remarked on this phenomenon when Strawberry Shortcake got her infamous makeover: why, I wondered then, do toy companies think a child can't relate to a doll who isn't exactly like herself? I speak purely as a passionate doll-lover, but it seems to me a real lack of understanding of the toy's appeal. Would I have wanted such a thing? Well, for one thing, I never saw a sallow Blythe doll with matted hair (the only approximation that would have come close), but I don't think so. Sure, it would be fun to see yourself mirrored on Christmas morning, and I imagine there's a satisfaction to acquiring each accessory, making the doll's hobbies and wardrobe mirror one's own, but doesn't that get old, fast? That's not a doll that looks like you in the general sense; it's a model of you.

Do Our Dolls Have To Look Like Us? [Wall Street Journal]
Kiri Davis: A Girl Like Me [YouTube]

Car repair? That's for boys. That look on his face says: "I'm thinking about overcharging you."

Cooking and cleaning? That's for girls. The young lady on the left might also be discovering that a frying pan can double as a weapon, but that's for advanced users.

Grilling? That's for boys. Even though cooking on a stove is for girls, if you cook with fire, you're following our ancestor, Homo Erectus. Early Man, not Early Woman!

Playing with your food is something both girls and boys can do; although only girls work at McDonald's.

Related: When I was four, I loved McDonald's intensely and thought it was a burger and shake heaven on earth. So when a teacher asked me — the only black kid in my pre-k class — what I wanted to do when I grew up, I said "work at McDonald's." My mom witnessed this interaction and, I think, almost died of disappointment.

Being a pretty princess, wearing make-up and jewelry? That's for girls.

And just because you're a princess doesn't mean you shouldn't bake, make toast or blend a smoothie. Duh. That's what girls do.

A plush pet condo, for girls ages 2 and up. Because it's never too early to be a crazy cat lady!

Something all girls look forward to: Graduating from a baking princess to a Queen Of Clean. Maybe someday she'll be in one of those sad mop commercials Sarah Haskins is always making fun of.

Don't tell Danica Patrick, but car racing is for boys. Falling in love is for girls.

Sports are for boys.

Except soccer. Girls can play soccer. And whatever that other thing is.

OMG progress: Girls can be doctors! Or star in primetime medical dramas!

But boys can be paleontologists, truckers, law enforcement officials or doctors.

Lilly's Kids [Official Site]

Earlier: All previous catalog posts

[London, October 28. Image via Getty]

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 28: Jaime, 5, gets to grips with the Kidizoom Multimedia Digital Camera made by V-Tech at the 'Dream Toys' fair of predicted top selling toys for Christmas on October 28, 2009 in London, England. The Toy Retailers Association have announced their annual list of 12 toys priced under 50 GBP which are likely to sell well in the run up to Christmas. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Rainbow Brite, aka Wisp, fashion icon and color-protector, has been re-imagined by Hallmark and is apparently now a Manga character. As Hortense points out, she and the Color Kids now bear an uncanny resemblance to Sailor Moon, who also defends the cosmos, but is a teenager and has nothing to do with colors. In fairness, Brite's makeover is not as reprehensible as is Shortcake's, but she is definitely sleeker and taller and, well, prettier, whereas Rainbow Brite was always cute.


Let's face it, even by 80's vaguely-galactic-pastel-cartoon standards, Rainbow Brite was slightly cockamamie: the plot, involving as it did the Colorless World, the Sphere of Light, the Color Belt, the Color Kids, the Sprites, Color Crystals, Color Caves and the Star Sprinkles, was basically incomprehensible, Kosinksi for the Romper Room set. And her look - which echoed the snowsuits of the times - was pure Reagan-era. They've already resuscitated newly-gaunt care bears and My Little Ponies; do we really need another wrong-headed sop to the Nostalgia Mart?

And here's what's always confusing: if it's all about playing into parental nostlgia - why are they turning everything into Bratz? Back in the day, little kids and cuddly animals could change the world as easily as a glamorous Jem. Nowadays, anyone under 5'10" need not apply, apparently; I'm braced for a modernist Sylvanian Family housed in Frank Gehry. And for that matter, if they want scrawny and big-headed, why not just bring back Rose Petal and friends? They were before their time.


The only toy with guaranteed immunity? Cupcake Dolls.


That is, unless she's rendered fat-free.


Rainbow Brite [Hallmark]
New Rainbow Brite [MyLittlePony]

Horvath first sketched the cute, simple monsters as a way of signing letters to his girlfriend, Sun-Min Kim. Kim and Horvath met twelve years ago, while they were both students at Parsons School of Design. After graduation, Kim moved back to South Korea, and Horvath returned to LA. He ended each letter to Kim with a little monster named Wage, which was his way of telling her he would continue to work hard to bring her back to the US.

The monster first made it into doll-form when Kim sent Horvath a handmade toy, stitched to resemble his doodle. Horvath was so excited - this is the only weird part - that "he carried the doll around with him to show his friends." Eric Nakamura, who had just opened a store specializing in Asian pop culture items, saw the doll, and instead of assuming his friend was off his rocker, he asked Horvath for an order of the Uglydolls.

From there, the weird critters blew up, making their way from small, independent toy-stores into the hands of celebrities. Horvath says that although he could probably sell the Uglydolls at a huge store like Walmart, he would rather see his creation grace the shelves of smaller retailers. But, he adds, "I have nothing against big companies. I just like to shop in mom-and-pop stores. I remember when I was 8 years old, I went to Forbidden Planet, an independent comic book store in New York. I stared into that store window as a boy, amazed by everything in there. For me, it was a huge thrill to be able to see my dolls, years later, sitting in that same window." Kim and Horvath are now married, and live in Manhattan Beach with their two-year-old daughter.

Ugly Dolls Are A Labor Of Love [LA Times]

Thirty six-month-old children were shown a pink doll and a blue truck. With new eye tracking technology, scientists found that while boys and girls both looked at the doll more than at the truck, girls looked at the doll more than boys did, whereas boys looked at the truck more than girls. According to Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily,

The researchers say babies this young don't have the motor skills to actually play with these toys, so the result must be due to different visual preferences in boys and girls. Arguably, babies at this age don't have any opinion about gender roles and don't even particularly distinguish between genders, so social influences must not be responsible for this difference.

Munger, however, is skeptical. He writes,

Personally, I'm not so sure I'm convinced by the researchers' logic. Little girls are dressed in pink and boys are dressed in blue from a very young age. Girls are given dolls and boys are given trucks, so whether the babies are conscious of gender roles or are able to physically interact with these toys, they have been exposed to them more or less based on their gender.

Eric Berger of SciGuy adds, "I think the study might have been more persuasive if the dolls and trucks would have been the same color." Since plenty of people still think it's important to paint a baby girl's room pink and a boy's room blue, I agree that color differences may have biased the results. I also agree with Munger that "it's intriguing to learn that at an average age of 6 months, girls already appear to be more interested in dolls and less interested in trucks than boys are" — although given that both genders looked at the doll more, the difference seems pretty small.

However, I'd also like to point out that the doll/truck dichotomy is sort of an artificial one. Kids are surprisingly flexible, and while it's true that some only like tutus and tiaras and others are single-minded MicroMachine addicts, most kids (and most toys) fall somewhere in between. My brother and I jointly played with the following: Legos, face paint, a Playmobil castle complete with an iron maiden, a set of cardboard bricks we used for our version of "The Cask of Amontillado," Batman and dinosaur action figures (who costarred in our short film, Mr. Freeze and the Velociraptor Rumble in Van Nuys), various wigs, and a stuffed flamingo named Rasputin. As interesting as it is to study gender differences in the way kids play, and to find the source of these differences, we should remember that lots of play — like lots of human behavior in general — is ungendered, and that boys and girls have a lot more in common than an essentialist interpretation of the doll vs. truck study might suggest.

Babies As Young As Six Months Prefer Different Toys Based On Sex [ScienceBlogs]
Even At Six Months Girls Want Dolls, Not Trucks [SciGuy]

This tremendous spoof was sent in by a reader: I've watched it about 5 times and I can't stop laughing. Turbo Heather is a Southern Belle with an extreeeeeeeeeme ride:





"The most awesome, action-packed, fashion-forward dirt racing monsters ever built!" Indeed. Can we please make this a reality? Christmas is only about 6 months away and I seriously want one of these. Rock on, Turbo Heather. You are officially an honorary Jezebel, in the most EXTREME way.

"I'm surprised," Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League tells the New York Times, "It's not offensive. It's sensitive. How about that? Most of the time these things fall into stereotypes which border on the offensive." [NYTimes]