The Sparking Sounds of Toy-Joy
Squeezing the trigger of the sparking toy gun, while I was hovering around the toy section of Diaso (in Tampines 1), the din caught the attention a young boy beside me. He turned his head immediately upon hearing the sound of the friction spark gun “in action”, eyes wide open.
He waited for me to leave the rack of pegged toy guns, before rushing towards it and trying to find out where the sound came from.
Was it just the sound he had heard before? Or was it a brand new sound? I would like to think children of this current generation would’ve heard a friction spark happening (c’mon it’s not THAT retr-old, right?). I doubt if this would be something as “old” as his “grandfather”, right?
I was pretty intrigued, because there was some time before the trigger was sparked … was he trying to figure out how it worked? Did he know all he had to do was only to pull on the trigger?
I know I’d use the sound if it were a mobile ring tone tho LOL
I smiled when I thought that, standing in queue at the cashiers, while I was whirling the gun, and telling my mum about the boy—with-toy-gun happenstance just before … all the while, a much older guy (early-20s?) was standing in front of us, turned round and kept starring at the toy-gun in my hand, with a raised eyebrow, and hopefully “with interest” and not “in wonderment” … and even now, as I sit at home, and whirling the gun-trigger non-stop (for the video below), I could feel the toy joy of the gun, and excitement - which I somehow remembered from my own childhood!
In a past bygone time, when “toys” were physical constructs that you had to only hold in your hands (as opposed to pushing buttons on for online / mobile / video games), and when children enacted the characters they held in their hands, by mouthing dialogs and monologues, shouting “in character” … of how “imagination” had been put into play, then?
Now imagine if the toy could “talk back”? At the very least, sounds of pre-recording missile firing (from Made in China plastic robots), to the whirling “rat-ta-ta-ta-ta’s” and the sparks created by friction, a quick reflection caught jin the kid’s eyes … how fun it was? How fun it could be?
Have a toy-ful weekend, folks!
Andy TOYSREVIL
