12.29 Childhood toys

[starlady]

christycorr asked about my favorite toys as a child.

Although I spent a lot of time reading as a kid, I also spent a lot of time playing with Legos, Playmobil, and my American Girl dolls. The Legos and the American Girls in particular were huge for me; Playmobil was fun, although it was something of an also-ran in comparison--I had the medieval castle set with some knights (and at least one lady knight!), and my sister had the Victorian house, which was cool. As for Legos, what didn't I have? I started getting into Legos very young, so I had a decent haul of the late 80s/early 90s space collection--I only had one of the Blacktron pieces, from an assortment box I think, but I had almost all of the Ice Planet sets and several other Space ones. I also had, at one point, almost all of the Pirates sets; I probably spent the most time making up stories to go with the Pirates sets, but I also, in the later 90s, got very heavily into the Aquanauts sets, which were really, really cool--that was the point when Lego was really starting to produce new pieces and get really innovative with the designs, and I just thought the whole world was so cool. (I was a huge fan of Seaquest DSV before it jumped the shark, unsurprisingly.) Although I had several Harry Potter sets, and also the R2-D2 robot, at that point my interest was far more nostalgic than active; it was the 90s when I would sit down with the Legos and just make up stories. I also really enjoyed the construction aspect; although my spatial reasoning is only average, I'd say, I was really damn good at following the Lego diagrams.

I had so, so much fun with those Legos, and it really is both enraging and heartbreaking to see Lego double down on both the relentless gendering of its products, which they emphatically didn't do when I was a kid (although part of the reason I was such a completist is because you only got female Lego people in the biggest sets), and on their commitment to providing a narrative with the sets. Absolutely one of the biggest things I got out of Lego was making stuff up out of my own head, and I very much am concerned that kids today won't have that same easy opportunity to do the same.

I decided Barbie was bad for women at the age of six (this was also the age that I began refusing to wear skirts; I did have a favorite dress in third and fourth grade, but I always wore it with stirrup pants; yes, I was fashionable), but my parents decided to get me an American Girl doll at some point thereafter. Maybe I was…eight? They got me Samantha, because she looked like me and she was the one I wanted; I thought the Victorian period was cool at that point. Eventually I had just about every single Samantha outfit and accessory (I agree, my parents spoiled us), and I also got Addy when she came out--I loved her school outfit and accessories in particular, and she and Samantha were the best of friends. Dressing the dolls was mostly okay, but their shoes were hell to get on or off; on more than one occasion I had to go to my poor father for his help with the same. I subscribed to the magazine for a while, when it was good, and I had the pin collections that they were running for a while, and I think I may still have the sleeping bag up in a closet somewhere. My sister eventually got a Molly doll, and at one point I actually had Felicity's school outfit in my size for a holiday outfit--it looked really cool--and we went to several other American Girls themed events, including to the American Girls tearoom in Chicago my junior year of high school, when me and my mom and my sister did a mini Midwest college tour. That was really cool. Although I've long since outgrown the American Girls, I would totally go back to the tearoom, especially if I had a younger person in company. And though I agree that the dolls are expensive and all the accessories overpriced, I am glad that I had a set of toys that validated girls' experience across time periods as worthwhile and interesting. Again, I'm not surprised that I wound up studying history, given how much time I spent as a kid thinking about how people lived in the past.

Comments

[wild_irises]

You do know that oliviacirce's mother worked for the American Girls company for many years, right?

[starlady]

OMG. No! I knew about the Ponies, but not about American Girl.

[wild_irises]

That's why Olivia grew up in Madison. We watched the development of all the American Girls after the first three, which were in place when Ellen started there.

[juniperphoenix]

I loved Seaquest too, before they made all the cast changes. I keep meaning to rewatch it now that it's on Netflix.

[snickfic]

I came here to exclaim over Seaquest, too! I rewatched the first season a few years ago and found myself enjoying radically different things than I used to, although a fair bit of it was also just Bad. I keep meaning to go back and rewatch the other two seasons.

Anyway, high five, fellow Seaquest enthusiast!

[juniperphoenix]

*high fives*

[starlady]

It's on Netflix? OMG!

[torachan]

Oh man, I never had any playmobile stuff growing up but my best friend's brother had a medieval knight set (prrrrobably not the same one you had? I feel like from posts like this you are quite a bit younger than me, but I imagine it was pretty similar!) and I played with it a lot at their house.

I think I would have liked the American Girl books a lot as a kid, if not been too excited about the dolls themselves. I loved Little House on the Prairie and tons of other historical books like that.

[starlady]

I read all of the Little House books too! Then I even read the tie-in books about Laura in middle age that they wrote for middle grade, and some of the books Rose wrote.

I feel like Playmobil never seemed to change very much; we probably were playing with almost exactly the same sets. :D

[thistleingrey]

I wonder whether I'd have liked American Girl if I'd met it as a young child. No idea it existed till darkforge's niece expostulated about it a few years ago, and of course by then I was a skeptical adult side-eyeing the consumerism. (When I was a year or two past the relevant age, Cabbage Patch Kids were new, and soon they were trying this wacky tie-in idea of collectible Garbage Pail Kid cards....) I did really like the Little House books around 6-7.

Heh, I had exactly one LEGO space set (winter gift for 1984 or 1985) and a small set in ...regular colors--undifferentiated town. But yeah, I played the hell out of them. So great, and so completely different from how they're packaged now. We found Reason a bucket of 1000 regular bricks for my mother's winter gift to her this year, and it was literally the only unbranded set in the not-tiny Toys 'R Us.