DADWAGON

There was one thing I wanted to do last month in Berlin after I was done with all the smoking, drinking and glamrocking: buy wooden toys.

Unfortunately, they don’t come cheap. If you look closely at the picture, taken at a Berlin toy store, you can see the €19.99 price tag. That’s almost $30 for a single rolling duck. For that price, you could probably get an entire Asbestos Barbie Dream House or whatever they’re making in the roiling pot of ethnic rage that is China’s toy industry.

But I bought anyway: a traditional wooden jumping jack called a Hampelmann for the boy (I think I had one of those when I was a kid), and a wooden shapes puzzle for the girl.

Nancy Gibbs over at TIME has a nicely anthemic piece this week that defends the classic toys against the latest fad, Zhu Zhu Hamsters. I haven’t seen these allegedly lead-ridden toy rodents. I love their names–Chunk, Pipsqueak, Mr. Squiggles, Numnums–but I don’t sense a lot of staying power. Here’s Nancy with a brief rundown of the provenance of the classic toys and games:

The best toys transcend, their survival a testament to their purpose and power. The Babylonians played board games; the ancient Greeks had yo-yos. The Chinese were flying kites 3,000 years ago. Crayola crayons were first produced in 1903. In 1916, Frank Lloyd Wright’s son John, inspired by the way his father had built an earthquake-resistant hotel in Tokyo, invented Lincoln Logs. And many great toys are accidents or improvisations, a serenade by kids whose first drum set is a wooden spoon and a tin pot. Play-Doh was invented as a wallpaper cleaner. In 1943 a Navy engineer trying to smooth the sailing of battleships found that a torsion spring would “walk” when knocked over. If you stretched all the Slinkys sold since then end to end, I’m told, they would circle the earth more than 125 times.

It does make me wonder if there are any new classics out there. Has anything been introduced in our lifetimes that can stand up to Legos or the rest of the canon (not counting the electronic innovations, like Tetris or the Wii)? Why does each shopping season bring a newly hyped toy that falls into obscurity once the marketing budget fades (remember the Furby)? I hate to get all cranky about it, but to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen:

Mr. Squiggles, I grew up playing with the Hampelmann. The Hampelmann was my friend. Mr. Squiggles, you are no Hampelmann.