All Hail the Tube of Gloom:
Toyland Roundup
Essay for the Stranger, 11/23/95
Again this year, I’ve canvassed over 30 stores (all within the Seattle city limits) to find the most fantastically cool new toys of the season. With no powerhouse licensed-property product expected this year (the Power Rangers fad peaked early), retailers hope customers will explore a wider range of gift ideas. But that’s what I’ve been advising you for years.
My biggest disappointment was not finding I Love It/I Hate It, a board game being promoted by Daryl Hannah. You’re supposed to guess whether your opponent really loves or hates the thing they’re talking about. I’d be great at it, since people already think I really love things I really hate, no matter how hard I tell them I really hate them.
Inga Muscio’s already told you about one of 1995’s greatest, Sky Dancer ($8.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Basically, it’s a flying plastic helicopter in the form of a beautiful ballerina with gossamer wings on her arms. It’s graceful, it’s serene, and it flies like a dream.
Somewhat less sublime is the Monique Hair Styling Set ($2.99, Pike Place Oriental Food Market). Inside a blister-pak with the quaintest mod lettering is perhaps the closest thing yet to a punk rock fashion doll. It’s a pouty, thin-waisted girl in black tights with assorted-color wigs–orange, black, silver, and pink.
If you must send out-of-town relatives something that says “Seattle” on it, the Oriental Food Market (across Pike Place from that fish stand the tourists love) also has Filipino-made Seattle Slugs ($2.50). They’re sorta like Slinky Dogs only made of folded-paper bodies and wooden heads. Or you can send Seattle’s Strongest Coffee ($11.99, Pike Place Magic Shop), a new label on your basic battery-powered vibrating can novelty.
Archie McPhee’s houses wondrous fun stuff year-round. Among its current goodies is the Tube of Gloom ($1.50), a duck-call-like device inside a grey plastic cylinder. Turn the tube upside down or move it back and forth, and it makes a variety of sobbing, weeping, laughing, psychedelic, and orgasmic sounds.
More aural fun can be had with the Echo Mike ($2.99, Bon Marché), a plastic acoustic echo chamber shaped like a microphone. Talk or sing into it and you make a natural echo while you’re pretending to make an electronically-synthesized echo.
The Bon’s ToyTropolis department’s also got a complete line of Playmobil people (figures $2.99-$4.99, play sets $5.99-$89.99), so you can make your own wood-people tableaux just like on the first Sunny Day Real Estate album.
But ToyTropolis lacks one of the hot toy lines, like the Nickelodeon/ Mattel plastic goops. Fortunately you need go no further than the Broadway Fred Meyer to find Floam, Smud, and the new food-scented versions of Gak ($3.99 each). You’ll have to go to the Greenwood or Lake City Fred Meyer, or to FAO Schwarz, to get the newest Nicksubstance, Zog Logs construction sets ($12.99-$19.99). They use a soft yet sturdy item that looks like candy-colored insulation foam to make nearly any 2- or 3-D artwork you can imagine. Expect hip gallery artists to start making Zog Logs installation pieces by this time next year.
Ex-Catholics and devout agnostics will love the parody prayer candles by local outfit Three Tacky Texans ($10.50, FireWorks at Westlake Center). The entertainingly drawn styles include Prayerful Protection from Alien Abduction, Our Lady of Artistic Inspiration, and Protection from Bad Hairdressers.
Last year’s mad-scientist simulator, the Dr. Dreadful Food Lab, is joined this year by the Juice Lab, Drink Lab, Living Lab, Brain Juice Lab and Squeem Lab ($7.99-$19.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Each makes a different kind of oozing, glowing food product. If you’re giving one, include at least two refill kits ($3.99-$5.99) so your recipient will still have something to do on Dec. 26.
Not all toys are just fun. Some are also useful. The Sputty Ball ($5, FAO Schwarz) is so firm yet moldable, computer users can keep one by their keyboards to help prevent repetitive-stress injuries.
The slogan on the blister-pak says it all: “From the Prehistoric Past, Time Warped Into Our Cosmic Future, Come Insecto-Bots” (the Dollar Store, you-know-what-price). Simultaneously the cutest and most menacing-looking of the transforming-robot figures, they come colorful in Bee, Woolbear, Beetle, Mantis, Mosquito, and Butterfly models.
If David Byrne ever has kids, I’m sure they’ll get the whole Barbie Dolls of the World Collection ($19.99 each, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). As the catalog sez, “Redheaded Irish Barbie wears a vivid green dress. Dutch Barbie looks as if she just stepped out of a tulip garden. Kenyan Barbie wears an authentic African costume.” But no matter what their hair and skin color, they’re all taken from the same mold. It’s a small world (beat) after all.
There’s nothing particularly novel about the kids’ trivia board game Brain Quest ($16.99, PayLess) except for the slogan on the box, proclaiming the unfashionable-in-some-circles notion that “It’s OK To Be Smart!”
There are plenty of DIY drinking games involving various TV shows, but here’s a commercial product to enhance your viewing–the Channel Surfing Game ($15.99, Kmart). Players pick a card and switch channels trying to find something on TV that matches the card’s instructions (“Something Hot,” a car, somebody eating) before a timer runs out. No TV is needed to play The Talk Show Game ($29.95, The Game Place in the U District), in which players play talk-show hosts and guests and opposing players must guess what the “guests” will say next.
But we mustn’t leave out a suggestion for the hard-to-buy-for in your family, the young cynic of a niece who can’t wait ’til she can replace her rub-on tattoos with real ones. What can you get her that her parents won’t confiscate? In separate boxes, send her aSecret Wish Horse ($19.99, Bon Marché and elsewhere) and a Superman action figure ($9.50, Zanadu Comics). She’ll have untold hours of sick, sick fun in the privacy of her room.
