FUN AND GAMES

When I watch my grandchildren, or really any kids at all, I am often amazed at how sophisticated (even jaded at times) they are. They seem like young adults long before they have actually reached the "age of majority", as I have not heard it called for quite some time. I remember well that when we were little kids, it was essential to occupy ourselves for many hours, alone or with friends or even sometimes with strangers, kids we didn't know who were also looking for someone to play with. I'm sure if we had game consoles and were able to while away the hours directing adventures in pixel universes, we would have gleefully done so. But we didn't. We had maybe a ball, a bat, and a glove or two. Sometimes if you were a lefty, you wore someone's right-handed glove backward. When I used to reenact the Battle of the Bulge with my neighborhood friends, I was always envious of those who brought out WW II military paraphernalia that had been stored in their basements--munition belts with clips, dis-armed, hollowed out hand grenades, and canteens, etc., brought home by fathers and uncles. I had no such military detritus, so I had to use my imagination. When I launched a grenade into a spider's nest of Nazis, I lobbed a Double-A Eveready battery. It blew up the bad guys just as effectively.

Still, there was a toy that we occasionally "had to have", and we begged that if there was just one gift Santa or his proxies should place under the tree at Christmas, this would be the choice. The most memorable one for me was The Fighting Lady, a toy battleship by Remco. I'm sure the commercial got to me, a susceptible eight-year-old, with the dreadnaught slipping through the mists.

I'm sure I wanted to be a "big shot", the "first on my block" to own The Fighting Lady. The $12.98 price was a big ask of my parents or Santa or whoever. Salaries for breadwinners (that meant dads back then) were in the $100-$150 a week range for most families in my neighborhood. When I unwrapped the gift by our spindly tree on Christmas morning, I was ecstatic. I tried all the bells and whistles. The joys derived from these gifts, however, tended to be ephemeral in nature. Before noon on Christmas Day, my brother had accidentally stepped on the boat's stern--snapping off the catapult. Without jet protection, I'm sure I saw my ship as vulnerable to enemy attacks. But I was a "big shot" from about 6:30AM until noon anyway.

I think it was that year that television was transformed by the first prime-time animated series-The Flintstones. I didn't realize it was basically a cartoon version of the classic sitcom The Honeymooners until years later; I just knew that I liked it, as did nearly all my friends. It was a huge hit, ran for six years, and was voted some time ago as the second greatest animated series of all time, following only The Simpsons. I spent many hours employing my rudimentary artistic skills trying to draw Fred and Barney. When I was ten, my brother and I begged for a new Christmas toy-The Flintstones Village. Looking at the photo below, it seems pretty chintzy. A filmy base, some plastic houses, and a few rubberized, monochrome figures.

But we played with this set for hours. Not content to replicate the quotidian affairs of Bedrock, we sometimes turned Fred and Barney into Paleolithic crime fighters who seemed not unlike Batman and Robin! Because Baby Boomers are of a nostalgic bent as they enter their declining years, it is possible to purchase (at exorbitant prices) the toys and games of their youth. Many do. But I remember The Flintstones as appointment viewing on Friday nights in houses across the country.

To prove my point on the nostalgia craze, the photo at the top of this post is not of a 65-year-old game but a facsimile of that game-Operation Moon Base for those eager to recall the pleasures of childhood. My friend Ricky received this toy, and one of the most memorable experiences of my childhood was a single day when we played with this "game" from early morning to dinner time! We created all sorts of extraterrestrial adventures, and the small, plastic, space-suited figures served their country proudly defending Earth against alien invasions.

It seems to me now that kids today who are now our age then would find these toys rather juvenile. Kids stayed kids for much longer then. I always had to remind my students when we studied Athol Fugard's Master Harold...and the boys, a drama set in the early 1950s, that the 17-year-old Hally probably would seem more like a twelve-year-old by today's standards. He certainly wasn't much like my very "adult" 17-year-old seniors. I'm not saying the change is good or bad, but I will say that back then kids were taught to invest a great deal of their energy into the world of imagination, and were not transported into fantastic universes by the creators of online games like Roblox. They traveled there on their own.