In All Seasons, Toys Are Us

By Stefan Kanfer

A brother and sister leave home to wander through a place where exotic figures have the power to enchant and destroy. But the siblings are protected by an even greater force: goodness. At the end of a winding and hazardous journey, the wicked are vanquished and the children are redeemed.

This Christmas the pair may be called He-Man and She-Ra, and their blond manes and mesomorphic torsos beckon from shelves in nearly every toy store in the nation. In other times the wandering children have been differently named and more modestly dressed. Observes Roger Sale, a professor of English at the University of Washington: "A girl is in a wood. Give her a brother, and one has Hansel and Gretel . . . send the girl to dwarfs, and one has Snow White. Make the girl a boy, and one might have Jack, either the one who climbs beanstalks or the one who kills giants." Make the wood the reaches of space, and they are Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, GoBots or Masters of the Universe.

For the past eleven months, toy manufacturers have dangled fresh enticements - before small children, hoping for the greatest separation of them all: the parents from their wallets. More interested in the here-and-now bottom line than in fairy tales or the mythic wellsprings behind children's play, the marketers have long since phased out the elves in Santa's workshop (and kicked the old gentleman upstairs to his present role as the Colonel Sanders of the Yuletide franchise). Big business, after all, is not kid stuff; the other way round is more like it. In the U.S. last Christmas, according to the ledgers of the Wall Street Journal, "the average household bought 30 gifts and spent $315." In 1985 $12 billion worth of toys were sold at retail, 60% of them in the three months before Dec. 25. That was a sparkling $1 billion more than the previous year. This year it is expected to be 5% higher.

No child fights more single-mindedly for a toy than do some 800 manufacturers and distributors for a share of that market. At Mattel, the second largest toy company, with sales of just over $l billion, guards patrol the R&D building in Hawthorne, Calif., as if it were a Strategic Air Command base. Understandably. A successful new product can mean buckets of the stuff that grown-ups' dreams are made of. Coleco came charging out of the Cabbage Patch with its pathetic but lovable doll, and currently ranks third, with annual sales of more than $500 million. Hasbro, the leader, with $1.3 billion in sales projected for this year, is considered the industry hotshot. Every year some 4,000 new products soar and roar out of the factories in hopes of finding a place under the nation's Christmas trees.

But once the wrapping paper has been crumpled up and playing has begun in earnest, the scene looks remarkably similar from year to year, no matter how NEW! DIFFERENT! BETTER! the highly promoted toys may have promised to be. For at their core, most toys -- certainly most of the ones that make a child's short list of favorites -- are in fact manifestations of ancient lore, the oral and written history of the human race at its most impressionable. In their contemporary plastic forms, these objects can seem cheap or irrelevant. But they are frequently based on a firm and ancient foundation. Analyzing folk stories in The Uses of Enchantment, Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim observes, "On an overt level, fairy tales teach little about the specific conditions of life in modern mass society; these tales were created long before it came into being." But, he continues, "more can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society, than from any other type of story within a child's comprehension."

What the scientists and analysts discovered, the poets and writers instinctively knew all along. Musing about the stories of his childhood, G.K. Chesterton noted, "I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since." C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) thought the tales revealed "life as seen, or felt, or divined from the inside." W.H. Auden believed that the fairy tale is "a dramatic projection in symbolic images of the life of the psyche, and it can travel from one country to another, one culture to another culture."

Hardly a plaything exists without a precedent. Take bears, for instance. Goldilocks' supporting cast can be seen in America's old favorite, the stuffed Teddy; in the Care Bears, the saccharine family of TV and nursery; and now in Teddy Ruxpin, a $70 pet that speaks to its owner -- as do Gabby Bear, Bingo Bear and Smarty Bear, the "Talk-a-Tronic you can bare all to." Not even the supposed talking breakthrough of the 1980s is as fresh as might be assumed. Harper's Bazaar was not referring to Teddy Ruxpin when it editorialized, "The doll of today . . . endowed with an interior phonograph, and thus enabled to reproduce the human voice . . . must become a mere toy, stripped of its moral teaching." That was in the 1880s.

Similarly, the wizardly counselor has altered little since King Arthur told Merlin, "Ye are a marvelous man." Conferring enlightenment through trickery, the wise mountebank surfaced in Oz as a con man, changed sexes as magical Mary Poppins and carried the Force as Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi in the Star Wars movies. This year the figure resurfaces in Masters of the Universe and many other action characters who require the advice of someone older.

It is an easy matter to connect the dots between the dragon of St. George and today's reptilian Inhumanoids. From there it is a short trip to this year's most popular dragons, the Stegosaurus, the Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex -- and all the other dinosaurs that might as well be fictive. After all, neither the child, nor his parents, nor his great-great-great-grandparents ever saw one on the hoof.

As for the doll, it is found in almost every epoch and culture, reaching back to the little votive objects of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, as well as the creche miniatures of Europe in the Middle Ages. Even the cheapest five- and-dime figurine is kin to the priceless Japanese ceremonial dolls that museums covet and to the feminine miniatures some African peoples still present to adolescent girls when they reach sexual maturity.

This year's fashion doll is Jem, with her own rock band, the Holograms, and her own theme song, "Jem is truly, truly, truly outrageous." She is related by plastic to Cricket, a talking tot ("Are we having fun or what?"), and to Barbie, the original glitz princess. Barbie's clothes alone sell more than 20 million pieces each year, making Mattel the largest manufacturer of women's wear in the world.

Yet no matter how pneumatic and now these misses are, they are never far removed from the maiden in the tower or the girl in the glass slipper, yearning to be rescued from her room and from her medieval homework. To Sara Wilford, director of the Early Childhood Center at New York's Sarah Lawrence College, "it is not so strange that children would find a Barbie doll to be interesting, something they could idealize and put in a Cinderella framework."

"Every toy and tale throws a long shadow," says Film Animator Chuck Jones. "I could never have done some of the Bugs Bunny cartoons -- and kids couldn't have responded to them -- without a knowledge of knights and witches and giants. Every popular figure, from Daffy Duck to the Cabbage Patch Kids, has ancestors in the old country."

Among the nation of little immigrants:

THE KNIGHT. Chaucer's "verray parfit gentil" hero could be a killer in a metal dinner jacket, slaying unbelievers when it pleased him. Even so, as Mark Twain speculated about the old warriors, "there was something very engaging about these great simplehearted creatures, (although) there did not seem to be brains enough . . . to bait a fishhook with." The knight has been Galahad, Don Quixote and every tin soldier, in Robert Louis Stevenson's couplet, "With different uniforms and drills/ Among the bedclothes, through the hills." The chevalier now answers the roll call as Rambo and G.I. Joe. He wears camouflage, may carry an UZI instead of a sword and has a way of setting off unintended explosions of controversy wherever he appears.

In San Francisco last month, protesters marched before Jeffrey's toy store, distributing leaflets about the hazards of military playthings. Inside, customers went on buying. Outside, a motorcyclist pulled up and shouted at the ! pickets, "If I had my way, the CIA would pick you all up and that would be the end of it!" He did not say what else he wanted for Christmas. Many editorial cartoonists did. Some 100 of them, including eight Pulitzer prizewinners, are drawing antiwar newspaper cartoons urging parents to boycott playthings with violent themes. Says Bob Staake: "Our art asks America to put Gumby, not Rambo, under the Christmas tree. At a time when we are supposed to be celebrating peace, it seems insane to turn war into a Christmas present."

THE MECHANICAL MARVEL. Aaron's rod, which turned into a snake before Pharaoh, was an archetype of the inanimate object made to move like a living creature. In 400 B.C., Archytas of Tarentum devised a wooden pigeon that flew. To commemorate Louis XII's visit to Milan in 1509, Leonardo da Vinci invented a welcoming mechanical lion that could walk toward the throne, stop, then open its chest, spilling out fleurs-de-lis, symbols of the French court, to delight the King. In the next century Descartes built a mechanical figure of a child and displayed it on a sea voyage. By the time of the French Revolution, automatons had been designed to play instruments, sketch and write. There was even an automaton said to win at chess, but this was false advertising. Below the chessboard a boy had been concealed: the first Decepticon.

Later versions are found among the Transformers, high-tech creations capable of changing from space shuttles into swooping birds, from robots into car carriers. But for all the modern elaboration, they are still employed in the classic war of right (Autobots) vs. wrong (those Decepticons). These toy characters, and many others given the Transformers' success, now come with ready-made hagiologies -- which critics believe are vapid as well as constricting to the imagination and which most manufacturers believe sell a lot of product.

THE MIRACLE POWER. In Tales from the Arabian Nights, wishful travelers went by carpet, or journeyed on flying horses or tied to the feet of great birds. An entire island, Laputa, flew in Gulliver's Travels, and Cyrano de Bergerac went to the moon using a magnet. But in the industrial society, fantasy demanded an underpinning of gears and logic. The ideal was H.G. Wells' futuristic Time Machine, an invention that still thrives in the imaginations of toymakers.

In the legend accompanying this year's hot game, Lazer Tag, the heroine can travel through the centuries, backward and forward, like a boat on a river. ( Children who wish to take the longer journey -- from one identity to another -- can watch their toys do it the old-fashioned way in MASK. Ancient civilizations assumed animal and ghost faces when they wished to evoke exotic powers and spirits from the underworld. In the acronym for Mobile Armored Strike Kommand, the principals are futuristic, but the rules belong to the past. MASK Leader Matt Trakker (both "compassionate" and "macho") dons different facial covers to undo his enemies. The motto of the game is "Illusion is the ultimate weapon," a phrase with which any primitive tribe would concur.

THE WAIF. The helpless and the small are favorites of tale tellers: the Grimm brothers' Cinderella who cleaned up after her vain stepsisters, Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl who froze barefoot in the snow. Dickens sentimentalized the waif as Little Nell, and for that matter, as young Oliver Twist. From rag dolls to Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, from Bambi to E.T., the waif has inspired scores of pathetic souls.

Today, children can look down to the Cabbage Patch Kids with begging mouths, saucer eyes and adoption papers certifying their plight. Some $250 million worth of these, including Cabbage Patch Babies -- tiny, even more pitiful infants -- will be sold this year, and they are not the only miserables on the market. Pound Puppies are dogs afflicted with melancholia and creased bodies that only a child could wear down to a nubbin. Their competitors are Canadian-born canines called Wrinkles, with hides like unmade beds and crumpled expressions the young find irresistible. And why not? As Samuel Johnson recognized, "A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization" -- even when the poor mutt is covered with plush.

THE LITTLE PEOPLE. Elves, dwarfs, gremlins, leprechauns -- all seem to intrigue the young, possibly, as Critic Leslie Fiedler says, "because a child may have come to feel that compared to an adult he himself is a Midget." Each period seems to invent new little people: gnomes were first described by the 16th century alchemist Paracelsus. Lilliputians were the creation of Jonathan Swift in the 18th century. L. Frank Baum made the Munchkins part of Oz in 1900, and in 1937 the Hobbits hatched out of J.R.R. Tolkien's brain. As Walt Disney's Dopey, Sneezy, Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful and Doc, dwarfs were Snow White's backup group a year later.

But even those optimistic singers would have to change their tune if they looked at the tiny terrors of Christmas 1986. There are a few benign leftovers -- Muppet Babies, Smurfs -- and the menagerie of huggable little creatures is more stuffed than ever. But the truly fashionable items are Madballs -- grotesque heads with such sobriquets as Wolf Breath, Swine Sucker, Screamin' Meemie. Madball Inventor Ralph Shaffer says, without irony, that the minispheres "will take the world of cute-ugly into a new direction" -- not a bad idea in a season when there are also foul-smelling toys named Victor Vomit and Mackerel Mouth. Grossing out grownups has always been a gas, of course, and ugly ducklings or princesses who are willing to kiss frogs are long- standing reassurances that physical perfection is not a precondition for love and success.

Given these long historical roots, given the crowded shopping malls as the countdown to Christmas narrows to days and hours, December 1986 should be a happy time for both the givers and the gifted. But through the tinsel melodies of Silent Night and Silver Bells, an off-key tune is being sung by critics and consumer advocates. Some of the rancor is prompted by the toys themselves, but much of it is engendered by the performance of that greatest of all supervillains, television.

In Boston, for example, it is possible to bracket the school day with synthetic cartoon adventure shows that are nothing more than program-length commercials for the toy-objects they feature: 6:30 a.m. Voltron; 7:00 Challenge of the GoBots; 7:30 ThunderCats; 8:00 Defenders of the Earth; 8:30 My Little Pony. Time out for school, then: 2:30 p.m. MASK; 3:00 She-Ra; 3:30 He-Man; 4:00 Transformers; 4:30 G.I. Joe. Usually these shows, offered to local stations by non-network syndicators, are written and produced under the control of advertising and marketing specialists working for the manufacturer of the featured toy. Sometimes those same toys are then specifically flogged during the commercial breaks from the story.

Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television, complains, "Programs based on merchandise are a phenomenon unique to children's television . . . Soap opera plots do not revolve around the virtues of Tide vs. All. Adults would be turned off." Dr. William H. Dietz, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' subcommittee on children and television, agrees: "Young children have difficulty distinguishing between commercials and programs. Program-length commercials further blur this distinction. It leaves not only the children but their parents confused. That's certainly unethical."

And damnably effective, as any parent who has been lobbied for the latest G.I. Joe figure knows. The reason for the shows is clear to anyone who examines the animated cast. "Without a story, the GoBot is just another toy with a neat trick that a kid doesn't know what to do with after 15 minutes," admitted Kenneth Kaess, who supervised Tonka's GoBot campaigns. For the shows -- to enrich the pot, not the plot -- a large array of characters must be developed quickly, sharply, above all memorably. (Warning: each figure can be purchased separately.) To fix characters in the little viewer-consumer's mind, stereotypes are common. "The heroes are all mainstream American-looking," observes Beverly Hills Psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, "and the bad guys are Russians, Arabs or dark-skinned people."

Last spring, in an editorial titled "A TV License to Steal from Kids," Advertising Age warned, "Those responsible for the building avalanche of toy- licensed TV should get themselves ready for an even louder consumer group -- and consumer -- outcries. Although it takes the American public a while to react to excesses, reaction is sure to come, and many more voices will be heard." The choir has arrived. Joanne Oppenheim, a child development specialist at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City, notes that "fairy tales and legends were traditionally read aloud to children. They could evoke their own images of good and evil. The toys initiated and promoted on the after-school shows are far too literal. Children have little room for improvisation." At the Sarah Lawrence Early Childhood Center, Director Wilford finds that "young children play the TV characters in a prescribed way, with the flavor taken out of it. When they follow the script it limits their imaginations. They don't have to look around to invent things for themselves. It's done for them."

The old myths still animate these toys, but with an unfortunate difference: designers and promoters are interested more in what children like than in what they are like. They seek to curry out the inconvenient burrs and tangles of human reality. Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of children's books, finds that "we are so busy protecting the young from what we think is bad for them that we don't think of what is being presented to them. Parents are such passive victims. As long as a toy makes money, that will excuse anything ; that's done, even to children."

For grownups these are severe and unsettling judgments. The imagination is, after all, the foundation of the moral sense. A child watching a companion torturing the family pet objects, "How would you like it if you were a cat?" Once he guesses what a cat feels like, "doing unto others" is no longer a mere slogan. Interfere with the imaginative process and conceptions of sympathy and maturity are slowed to a crawl.

But are these games and toys and shows really undermining childhood? Certainly they are hyped too heavily and break too readily, but some also manage to play vital roles. In Goleta, Calif., Katy Clarke, 35, mother of three boys, finds little conflict between her antiwar sentiments and the iron- filings-and-magnet relationship her sons have with G.I. Joe. "For right now," she believes, "the boys are playing pretend. It develops their imagination. It gives them control. All those things are things I'd like my children to experience." In Portland, Ore., Marianne and David Sweeney were not thrilled when their five-year-old daughter Kate began watching She-Ra. But, says Mrs. Sweeney, a fifth grade teacher: "I cannot argue with what she is responding to -- a very strongly drawn woman. I'd much rather have her see that sort of thing than the strong women's roles going to witches. What really matters for these kids is that there is a power that takes care of the evil and the injustice. That is very reassuring."

Early Childhood Center Teacher Betty Ewen reports that "sometimes a child having trouble separating from his mother will bring in one of the more 'powerful' toys to give him the feeling of power. One boy having that problem arrived with a play gun belt and felt safer. He never took the belt off. And there was an increased confidence in his behavior." Ewen has no love for the more violent of the top ten toys, but she notes, "Twenty years from now I don't think they're going to make for poor mental health."

Indeed, 60 years ago, people complained about another kind of war toy. To them Chesterton retorted, "Only this Christmas I was told in a toy shop that not so many bows and arrows were being made for little boys because they were considered dangerous. It might in some circumstances be dangerous to have a little bow. It is always dangerous to have a little boy. But no other society, claiming to be sane, would have dreamed of supposing that you could abolish all bows unless you could abolish all boys."

, Children have always shown surprising resilience. They have been known to bounce back from divorce and war, from the confines of the ghetto. What are a string of plastic playthings and yelping programs compared to the trials of the real world? Ah, but do they help at all to prepare a child for that real world? Perhaps more than any adult can remember. Once upon a time parents complained about silent movies. Grown, their children squawked about radio and their children about double features and comic books. It is the turn of their children, today's parents, to be concerned -- legitimately -- about TV and electronic toys. But even in the most rigid atmosphere, young minds have always been capable of coloring outside the lines and making up the most outrageous fantasies about cracks in the ceiling and ants on the sidewalk. Why should they stick to the newfangled script just because a honey-voiced announcer or an animated figure gives the orders?

Even Sendak admits that "children are such voracious animals that they gain sustenance from the ugliest thing. We can never be sure how." But they rarely manage to get that sustenance without the involvement of parents. The lap is a better gift than any Transformer. Again, Bettelheim says it best: "When the father and mother tell the stories they can stop and explain the stories, tell them over and over, remold them, shape them for the child." The issue, he believes, "is not the programs, although one would wish them to be more intelligent and artistic. The issue is that the child is exposed to this without guidance, and in a technical rather than a human context. You see, the human dimension, the human relation, mitigates everything."

These warnings are priceless, pertinent -- and as old as the tales themselves. It may be of some value to ponder words attributed to a great complainer: "From the day your baby is born, you must teach him to do without things. Children today love luxury too much. They have execrable manners . . . What kind of awful creatures will they be when they grow up?" The questioner was Socrates, and the creatures grew up to create a civilization that shaped the history of Western man.

So, as the set blares its temptations and the Yule log begins to burn, fear not. These may be the worst of toys, these may be the best of toys. Today the roles of Hansel and Gretel may be played by parents, and the mysterious wood may be the toy store. But remember: in the best tales, the good and innocent hearts always triumph.

With reporting by Lawrence Malkin/Boston, Edwin M. Reingold/ Los Angeles and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York