Made in China

Recognize these boats?  I expect you do:  likely your kids play or played with them in the tub.  And guess what:  likely you did, too.  I found the boat on the left at my mother's house some months ago.  I immediately identified it as a bathtub toy from my own very young childhood, part of a set that included a sailboat and a PT boat, possibly one or two others.  I reclaimed it, as well as the sailboat that turned up nearby, and brought it back to my own boys.  It has floated (or, more often, sunk) in our tub ever since.

As of yesterday it no longer sails alone:  a nearly identical ferryboat, not to mention the rest of the set, all shiny and new, suddenly appeared in our bathroom, legitimate prizes, I am told, from a playdate at Luca's house.  This means that someone in China (see below) has been churning out the same set of plastic vessels for forty years.

How many pieces of industrial design can claim a lifespan of so many decades essentially unchanged?  As a historian of technology I ask this not as a simple exclamation of surprise but as a serious research question, good material for a seminar, say, or even a dissertation ("Constant Companions:  A Century of Consistency in Nautical Toy Design").  And as an historian I will offer an educated guess:  not many.

It also raises the question of whether and to what degree new toys are good toys.  I trust we have all heard by now that the "Baby Einstein" phenomenon is nothing but snake oil for tiger parents, but I must admit the boys show no greater interest in the Playskool and Fisher-Price pieces of yesteryear (again, retrieved from our parents' archives) that Talia and I have bestowed upon them than in the more up-to-date pieces from, say, Plan Toys.  Another educated guess, this time speaking as a parent:  electronics aside, the new toys are no better or worse than the old.

That having been said, there's no beating a true classic, such as Hasbro's Millenium Falcon, found roadside and shown below, in an unguarded (by the older brother) moment:

Good toys, bad toys, there's one thing that surely endures throughout the ages:  the sibling's eternal war cry, "THAT'S MINE!"