Fisher-Price Retro Chic

When you were young, did you play with toys that are now considered dangerous?

I sure did.

My parents, at their house, have some [apparently] extraordinarily hazardous vintage toys: a Little People house and a Little People Sesame Street, from the very early seventies.  My sister and I spent hours playing with them when we were kids.

Unlike today’s Little People, these seventies figures are svelte, cylindrical, and made of two pieces of plastic (head AND body).  Therein, I suppose, lies the danger:  some child could, theoretically, ingest the smiling blonde ponytailed head of a Little People mother.  Hence, we have today’s Little People — those squat, chunky childlike figures, which to me are not nearly as charming as their predecessors.

My parents also have a few of the seventies-era Fisher Price Farmyard animals — a jointed white cow with brown spots, a squat black pig with  moveable legs, and a brown horse in truly pathetic shape, missing the tail and the plastic mane and, in fact, nearly everything that identifies him as a horse.  But boy, those ragtag animals bring back good memories.

So when I was shopping for Lukey’s birthday, I was a total sucker for this: the 50th Anniversary Retro Farm. Sure, it comes with only two animals — that black pig, my favorite, didn’t make the cut — but the cow does actually look like the one I remember.  The farmer also looks a lot like the one from my past, only bigger, with a head that even my voracious Luke would never be able to swallow.  And the little lunchbox-like carrying case totally whisks me back over the years, with its cheerful graphics and retro look.

Sure, it isn’t exactly the same as the endlessly entertaining, made-of-way-too-many-small parts farmyard that I loved as a kid.

But it still makes me happy.