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.
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