TOYSREVIL's #throwbacktoythursday: Of Playmobils, Blanket-Caves & Root of Play
WHAT-IS: "#throwbacktoythursday is a weekly lookback at toys and play of times past. It could be from my personal childhood in the 70s to my own collectibles collection from a decade back. Enjoy the toy-memories, folks!"
(My thanks to Josh Coldiron of NoriToy for the suggestion!)
One of my fondest childhood "play" memory, was building a make-shift "cave" in the middle of the living room, circa late 70s, using my red-n-black Chinese woolly blanket, covered-wrapped over stacked dining room chairs, and I would crawl in, with flashlights a brandishing!
The semi-darkened space was populated by "Vampires", and a ragtag group of Playmobil adventurers battled them, amidst flashlights and using Battlestar Galactica-styled "Colonial Vipers", made from cardboard toilet-roll cores.
I've only ever "built" the playset once in my life (thus far), and enjoyed myself immensely. Packing up the cave and toys after play, was another thing altogether LOL
I loved PLAYMOBILS. They had offered a level of play in line with their form and design, which on hindsight, was a strange circumstance, given their stylist depictions of humanoids, as opposed to anatomically "correct" action figures (I had some early Kenner Star Wars figures that doubled up as "vampires" here).
Playmobils was pretty prevalent here in Singapore during the 70s, it seems. And while I have not factual statistics to back up my claim, I can only offer et another memory of walking down a toy-aisle in Great World City (before the "new" mall-reboot), and of wanting a box of Playmobil Spanish soldiers. I whined to dad I wanted it, of course to a stern "NO" … then I turned my pleading innocent eyes to Uncle Rodney, who helped take the box to the cashier, and only whipped it out at the last moment to pay, before my dad could reject him! *SCORE*
Playmobils offered me a chance to "imagine" beyond something I could just simply whip-out, play and display, and it is a notion that had shaped and impacted how I view and interacted with "toys" through the years. Hence my fascination with 1/6-scaled articulated figures, no doubt. And of how I connect with certain "art toys" and how I can "play" with them, these days instagramming #toyselfies instead of crawling in built-up blanket-covered-caves, of course!
Dug out a bevy of Playmobils from storage boxes not too long ago, finding the vampire-killing adventurers in varied state of dirt and grime, and realizing this was the first time I "customized" my toys, with stickers, and drawn elements on the toy-bodies, and mix-n-match accessories and even cut-out coats!
Over thirty years later, I am still in the midst of all these "shenanigans", but with a slightly different shift in genre, make and materials, but not in "concept". It's interesting how our childhood play affects our adult life. And while I am not here to extol the virtues of children's toys, it interests me how what I used to play with, has affected my current view and value of toys, and play.
Different people have different reasons for collecting, but perhaps the root of it all, might not be so different from each other, after all.
Cheers
Andy TOYSREVIL
