The Toys That Made Us

Toy Society

The Toys That Made Us
December 2017 to November 2019
Three Seasons of Four Episodes per Season

Just a quick diversion of a review to give a heads up to a TV series I found by accident, when I needed to kill an hour one day. The Toys That Made Us is, in the words of its brilliantly 1980s cartoonesque theme song over a clever animated title sequence, “An eight part documentary series of the toys that we all know.” And, yeah, if you’re wondering, even if you’re not that good at maths, how an 8 part documentary series could run for three seasons of four episodes... they were obviously not expecting to be so successful with viewers (I’m assuming) and renewed for another season past their initial expectations. For the third series, the lyric changes to an incredibly stretched out “The continuing series... etc”.

That song and title sequence is great, though. With a cartoon boy and girl rushing into a toy shop and grabbing a toy each off the shelves before we see two adults in their own scenarios, still having their toys with them. So a doll in a female manager’s power office and an astronaut retrieving his Luke Skywalker action figure in zero gravity round out the credits... and it’s a perfect visual metaphor for the psychology of modern toy purchasers and collectors.

And the series is just as well put together as those titles. It’s a very humorous but extremely informative look at the background stories behind various successful toy lines and where they had all ended up by the time the series was made a few years ago. Wonderfully witty voice over commentary is pitted against various talking heads of company executives, toy designers and even some celebrity fans (as you’ll see as you read down the page), making for a show which is really entertaining. They also feature, in many cases, little re-enactments of real life events... many shown in a hilarious light.

The first episode covers the Star Wars figures made by Kenner (and Palitoy but they don’t really get a mention here) including the unbelievably lucrative deal they made with Lucasfilm (who weren’t smart on their end of the contract) and it also includes some wonderful knock off toys such as one country’s Dalmation with a Stormtrooper’s head and another showing a character in front of a control panel on the box... except the Death Star technology seems to have metamorphosised into a pocket calculator photograph in a very strange montage.

The second episode is one of my favourites, which surprised me as it’s dedicated to Barbie. Starting off with a re-enactment of the unboxing by the creators of the first Barbie prototypes, the designer hastily files off the painted nipples to make it look more market appropriate for the time. What I didn’t know was that the Barbie doll was a swiped knock off itself, of a German doll based on a newspaper strip about Lilli, a high end call girl and that the doll was given by men to state their intentions to sex workers there. And don’t get me started on the original prototypes for Ken’s sex organs.

The third episode delves into the world of He-Man and the Masters Of The Universe (something after my time in terms of toys, like a fair few of the items explored in the show). But I even found this one incredibly entertaining and it highlighted an issue that seems common among the people who first put a toy design out... a lot of the people who came up with these things at different stages of the process all say they were the inventor of the toy.

The last episode of Series One is dedicated to GI Joe... although mainly from an American perspective. This goes through the years from the first prototypes made behind the bosses back when he was away on a two week vacation, where incredibly authentic weapons were made and built next to artist’s poseable mannequins refitted with clay... which are the versions which are best known to me over here in the UK as the beloved Action Man from my childhood... to the modern, rebooted, smaller GI Joe figures. It demonstrates the huge risks some of the companies involved took and also shows the incredible popularity of the newer figures too.

Season 2 opens with an episode devoted to the toys of Star Trek. This includes those wonderful Mego figures I used to love as a kid (wish I still had mine, they go for a bomb nowadays) and also includes lots of mis-steps along the way such as the infamous Star Trek helmet with flashing light (honestly, Rodenberry would sign off on anything) and shows how, even though it’s a very successful franchise, the various companies trying to launch their action figure lines often failed because of incredibly bad timing.

Next up are the Transformers... another toy I know nothing about other than the live action movies. What I did find fascinating about this one is their origins being from several different Japanese toy lines mixed together and their roots in two of my favourite sets of action figures I used to adore as a kid, the Henshin Cyborg (Cyborg, Muton and Android over here in the UK) and my beloved Micronauts (I think I still have my Pharoid Micronaut in an inaccessible drawer somewhere).

Following this is the amazing tale of Lego, how a successful Danish house builder was hit by the great depression, became a carpenter and started making wooden toys which sold well... and the various stages to get to the full on Lego bricks inspired by the colours of Mondrian’s paintings we know now, including the ‘clutch power’ introduced in 1958, which was a real game changer. It also looks at their decline and almost liquidation before, of all things, their Bionicles sets saved them when, again due to bad timing, their Star Wars and Harry Potter licences wouldn’t sell toys.

The last episode of Season Two is devoted to something called Hello Kitty which seems to be a phenomenon in itself and includes collections and talking heads of such celebrities as Paris Hilton, as well as introducing us to the Hello Kitty vibrator. The writers use a nice Godzilla analogy in here too.

Series Three kicks off with the creation and development of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property, taking it right back to the comics and, in a nice on screen moment, reuniting the estranged comic book creators, Eastman and Laird, for the first time in a long time. Writer/director/actor Kevin Smith also turns up in this one.

Next up is the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and the tenacious, eight year attempt to bring the show to the US, which utilises action footage from Japanese TV shows blended with new American footage... and the rise of their toys, which are retooled versions of the Japanese toys. It even owes some of its origins and shows a clip from that wonderfully bizarre Japanese live action Spider-Man TV show that I’ve been wishing some smart Blu Ray label will make available over here some day. Some nice footage of a younger Stan Lee in here too.

A bizarrely entertaining episode on the origins of My Little Pony comes next with a wonderfully poetic continuation of their success story in terms of their current designer (and let’s hear it for those ‘rump designs’... or butt paintings as the current design gal puts it). And then the series rounds off with a look at the various US themed Wrestling action figures over the years. I can’t believe so many of these non-articulated figures sold to kids at all, to be honest but the rivalry between the various Wrestling companies is certainly as fascinating, if not more so, than the successes and misfires of the toys.

And thats that. The Toys That Made Us is a truly great show and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that, at some point, it will be picked up for a fourth season. It’s shot full of humour and the only thing I will say to people who haven’t seen this is... watch them in order because some of the jokes depend on referencing back to earlier episodes. This one’s thoroughly recommended for both the young at heart and, of course, any grown men (who are, by definition, still just kids anyway). As one such specimen, I got a lot out of this show, for sure.

The Lego Movie

I Get A Brick Outta You

The Lego Movie
(aka Batman 40, Superman 55, Green Lantern 2, 
Star Wars 9, Lord Of the Rings 7, Harry Potter 9)
2014 Australia/USA/Denmark
Directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Hmmm.

Seems to me Lego has been with me all my life in one way or another.

I remember the really large, oversized bricks we used to play with in infants school... and how I invented a three-brick bomber to cause carnage and drop bombs on the other kid’s creations. I was actively discouraged from exercising my sense of invention in that way by the teachers and very soon learned not to stand out from my fellow classmates in any way which would make anyone think I was in any way special or unique. So after the age of about 4 or 5, I never put my hand up to volunteer for anything ever again... a policy I still practice to this day.

I remember when I was 10 years old, I won a runner up prize in a Lego competition at Selfridges by making a Star Wars X-Wing fighter out of scraps of Lego they had in their tub. Now that might not sound like a bid deal to anyone these days... but back then there was a minimum of themed Lego other than the odd set like “Police Station” or “Fire Station”... certainly no film tie-in stuff. This was just standard Lego bricks ‘n pieces I found in the “communal tub”. Luckily, I was able to score two hinged pieces and so I could at least build a useful X-Wing fighter with “s-foils” which locked into attack position when required... just like in the movie I’d seen at the cinema at the tail end of the year before (1977). I remember going to the prize ceremony at the Grovesnor Hotel for ice cream and the presentation of my runner-up prize... um... a Lego set.

I remember when I built the lego set I got as a prize back then. It had one of the “first wave” minifigures as part of the set and, if you weren’t around in the time of early 1970s Lego, then you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. These were not the “really old” minifigures like the Spaceman you see in The Lego Movie. These things pre-dated even those and were first brought out in 1975. Although they had the same basic head design, there were no features painted on them (they were just blank... kids in those days actually were allowed to have imaginations, if I recall correctly) and they were just static figures made out of bricks... no movable arms or legs on them. In fact, no arms or legs of any description, actually.

Flash forward to the middle of the last decade and Lego re-entered my life in a new and, strangely, quite special way. I had a girlfriend but she lived a fair distance away, in Ipswich. I used to go down there weekends and the way we connected, when we finally discovered it, was to get a couple of controllers hooked up to her Playstation 2 and play the heck out of the Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones games. Those games were, and still are, the best platform oriented games ever made... I still play the Lego Star Wars, now it’s been released on the iphone (at the tail end of last year). Girlfriends come and go but the Lego games remained something I’ll always love.

One of the good things about the Lego games was always the humour of the cut scenes. The silent pantomime parodies of famous movie scenes with a whacky twist. I guess a lot of people felt the same and so here we have a movie which caters for the people who like that kind of humour... almost.

You see, the thing I always liked about those Lego cut scenes was their lack of dialogue... it brought you back into a realm of silent cinema. Well, the games have dumbed down a little since then. They’ve put voices into the mix and this is the tactic which they’ve taken with the movie. It’s an easier tactic to follow I guess... it’s harder to come up with something fun without words and, I have to say that, for the most part, The Lego Movie succeeds pretty well in at least being fun.

It starts out with a plot where the main villain of the piece is doomed by a prophecy of the “special” person who will someday find the “piece de resistance” and scotch his plans for world domination which, at the point we arrive at in the movie, culminates with the “Krazy Gluing” of all the Lego worlds into one fixed position as the overall “evil plan”. The film tackles the not so strange idea of people, in this case Lego people, brainwashed and controlled by their governments and constantly distracted by just the “correct” versions of the ruling power’s favourite “bread and circuses”. If this concept sounds familiar, by the way, it’s because that’s the way pretty much everyone of us is forced to live our lives... but that’s a different conversation for a different time.

The film is full of humour and, more importantly, chock full of ideas involving construction and the way the “builder” analogy is applied to various aspects of everyday life and popular culture, including the more surreal flights of fancy and “go anywhere in your head” kind of attitude which I personally can only ever approve of in, pretty much, most all walks of life. However, there’s a point when the neat, self sealed world of, um, Legoland, kinda dies a little for me in the movie... when the film decides to enter the real world of humans and justify why all this would be happening from the viewpoint of real people. And there, in the last 20 mins or so of the movie, is where I think the film loses its edge and starts to feel flat. I can understand that there could be a rich vein of exploration in terms of the outside world and the way the human spirit enables the imagination, but I think in the modern, or should that be post-modern, cinema scene, this kind of almost sugar coated justification is no longer necessary. I think the inner world set up within the picture is enough to highlight the spirit of the human imagination in itself. What with the film being made by, you know, real people and all.

So yeah, the last sequences of this film kinda dulled the edge of the execution of the concept for me, but this didn’t stop the rest of the movie being fun and, like I’ve said a few times before, sometimes the journey is worth it even if the end goal is not always attainable. The effects work, which obviously makes up the bulk of the movie, is all fantastic and the story moves along quite a lot. Batman is in it a fair bit but you also get a fair few cameos from characters in other franchises, including a little sequence where Dumbledore from the Harry Potter films and Gandalf from Lord Of The Rings get into a little verbal disagreement... which made me chuckle and wish I’d brought my dad along.

All in all, despite the unnecessary contextualisation of the play area of the story of the movie, the film works well. It’s not one I could see myself watching again, in all honesty, but it’s certainly an entertaining time at the cinema and the kids will most likely love it.