#42 - Toy Story

Toy Story

10/1/04 (#42)

As most parents will readily admit, having a child provides the perfect alibi for recapturing one's lost youth. Unlike my smarter friends who have maintained a relationship with their comic books and action figures, I had lost touch with the hands-on joy of play---despite a handful of avid creative pursuits, "results" became an integral part of my definition of fun. Who can afford to spend time just playing? (Workaholic readers are now uttering, "Amen", while the rest of the world says, "You're a freak.")

These days, I'm all about toys. But I'm a very picky person when it comes to my...er, I mean my daughter's toys.

Toy stores can be subdivided into a few categories. One type is what my friend Barry calls "wooden toy stores", those "quaint" and "adorable" little shops with names like Gepetto's and Santa's Workshop, populated with barely-3-dimensional ducks dragged by an over-sized rope and shelf after shelf of unvarnished wooden cars that differ from one another only in the number and location of the holes drilled into the pine to simulate windows. Despite a long-time interest in woodcraft, I feel the same way. I appreciate the work that went into them, and I think they make nice knick knacks on a high mantle where the action-verb toys do not reside, but I can usually survey the entire inventory of such stores before the clerk is able to mutter, "Let me know if I can answer any questions."

One question: "How do you pay the rent?"

Preferable to me are stores such as Portland's own Finnegan's Toys. Finnegan's is the embodiment of the thinking-parents dream store---check your Barbie and Barney at the door, this is a toy store, not a clearinghouse for industrial product placement. Mickey Mouse can't be reached at this address.

Finnegan's features a densely-packed collection of toys that fuel a child's imagination, the toys that encourage your kids to think and dream with neither the lameness of "educational toys" nor the annoying beeps, bangs and bongs that are so famous at chains like Kaybee Toy that most parents I know cringe at the site of the chain-store logo imprinted on a bag that sits among the birthday party gifts. Finnegan's specializes in play---doll houses, stuffed animals, puppets, board games, those ubiquitous Brio train sets (the best selection of accessories in the city), science kits, telescopes, puzzles, pirate action figures, medieval play sets, ad infinitum. (Though if you don't like toy stores, you'd likely end that list, "ad nauseum.") Best of all, a huge selection of 1/32 scale plastic wildlife replications---indestructible figurines depicting everything from aardvarks to zebras, brown bears to yaks. I want to own the entire biosphere of the earth's creatures in 1/32 scale; I would even be willing to commit an entire room of my house to it, and I do not have a large house. (As I get older, I'm sure I'll add an HO scale electric train to the terrain, but for now, I'm all about the creatures.) Frankly, Finnegan's selection is so excellent that I am rarely motivated to shop at any other toy store.

Except they didn't stock the walrus.

At 2 years old, and having no formal training in marine biology, there exists the possibility that Sage cannot differentiate between the walrus and the sea lion. Or for that matter, between the walrus and the rhinoceros. But I can.

And that's how I ended up at Toys 'R Us.

Toys 'R Us is the flagship of a third type of toy retailer: Warehouses of crap. I had been to the store in my pre-parent days, a visit I recall with the clarity usually reserved for days spent with a 104 degree fever, but we had recently received a truly lovely stuffed Panda Bear as a gift, purchased at that store, so I had my fingers crossed that a small plastic walrus might be found.

The Jantzen Beach location of Movie-Tie-Ins 'R Us is a ridiculously cavernous building that seems to have been built around the premise that Costco is too easy to navigate. You could build a Boeing jet inside of this structure. Heck, you could land a Boeing jet inside this gargantuan warehouse. Apparently modeled after Disney's version of a well-stocked bomb shelter, the floor to ceiling industrial shelving units are crammed tight with garish, tacky packages scientifically designed to catch the eye of every A.D.D.-diagnosed pre-teen zombie who rushes through the aisles with the mistaken notion that within the building is a destination worth running to. Every aisle is identical, with explosions of light and noise emitting from unprovoked demo models and children whooping and screaming like extras in a movie chronicling pedophobia; the only alleviation of the intense claustrophobia that the store induces is that the aisles are uncluttered by Made-in-China 'R Us employees.

Now I should point out, I am always happy to do my shopping without talking to anyone except the sales clerk, and even then, I cross my fingers that she doesn't want to tell me how tired she is or how many times he's had to work a double this month; I adhere to the Walt Whitman school of shopping---Retail Self-Reliance. To that end, the greatest offering that a store can make to those who share my limited patience with in-store explorations is the sign that hangs over the aisle that tells you what that aisle contains. For instance, at the grocery store, there is a sign hanging at the front of aisle 9 that says, "Aisle 9", followed by a two column, three line listing of the products you will find in that aisle:

Flour	Peanut Butter
Baking Supplies	Jams and Jellies
Kitchen Utensils	Crackers

Sadists 'R Us does not make use of this rather simple feature, likely because the redundancy would be glaringly obvious:

Loud Items	Flashing items
Noise Creators	Items to embarrass you at restaurants
Annoying Gadgets	Items to be broken on the drive home

Thus, when Sage and I entered the explicably small single door of this stadium-sized concrete box in hopes of finding a model walrus, I had the distinctly unsettling feeling that comes over a person from rural Maine whose plan to see Boston Garden is marred by a few wrong turns and the realization that they are not on Yawkey Way, but are driving down an alleyway in Roxbury and the only signs to be seen are physical impossibilities spray painted on vacant buildings. As we moved forward, I quietly implored Sage to lock the doors of the shopping cart.

The physical layout of the store is unabashed commercialism. Unlike a grocery store where you enter to find a large, open tract that allows you to choose the aisle in which you'd like to begin shopping, Detritus 'R Us herds you down an unavoidable aisle of seasonal items, packed so tight that it appears at a glance to be an expressionist mural that might be titled "Hell's Gift Shop". You literally cannot avoid this section, and must navigate your cart around additional bins of colorful injection-molded debris that, once brought to your home, would have the enjoyable shelf-life of unrefrigerated milk.

We wandered the rows for what felt like an eternity (unconfirmed, since not only are there no clocks to be found, and I am fairly certain the video game section is in another time zone), passing by an endless assortment of products that, as a parent, completely horrified me: An entire aisle the size of an average independent bookstore filled completely with items emblazoned with the Barbie logo; a huge selection of so-called musical instruments such as a plastic bongo that made noise only by pressing button on the side of the casing (so the bongo shape was purely aesthetic---it could have just as easily been a "drum" machine in the shape of a cash register); generous offerings of indecipherable electronic games seemingly designed to remove the hair of any adult within earshot. I was literally twitching with discomfort.

Unable to divine the logic of the store layout (and sensing that it was foolish optimism to suspect there was a logic), with no signage to help and most of the staff on break, I had to wait in line at one of the registers to ask where I might find the plastic animal replications. I reached the register where a nice young man, too young to understand that not all retail jobs involve a parade of screaming brats and beleaguered parents, pointed me toward the furthest reaches of the store, to the Animal Planet section. (I don't think there is any product in Soulless 'R Us that isn't affiliated with some television show, movie, or serial TV commercial.)

Later that night when we reached the back of the building, I beheld the Animal Planet "section" of the store. It was three small shelves next to the diapers, and the selection was pitiful: Several small tubes of inaccurately colored, choke-worthy insects and animals; A remote control Tyrannosaurus Rex complete with an electronic "roar" that sounded suspiciously like "racing" noises emitted by the remote control cars in Aisle 219; A frog habitat terrarium that miraculously escaped the notice of the SPCA. Pondering the massive inventory of disproportioned Barbie dolls and the woefully limited selection of life-like animal toys, it is easy to extrapolate the underlying reasons that Portland has so many strip clubs and so few wildlife biology centers.

But in fairness to Disposable Items 'R Us, I must admit: They almost had what we were looking for. It was a Polar Exploration set, complete with researchers wearing circa-1940's fur parkas, an igloo, a dog sled, a penguin family, and some killer whales. It was a very cute set, though the animals looked like cartoons more than accurate representations of actual wildlife. It even had a creature that looked sort of like a walrus, though it might have simply been a large seal.

Or perhaps a rhinoceros.

We left empty handed.

©2004 wpreagan