Let’s be real: dads get a bad rap in the media. We’re talking Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ninja Rap’ bad. More often than not, they’re either pop lockin’ Soul Train-style after learning they aren’t the father, or they’re selfish man-children who have more toys than brain cells.
The fun of writing established characters is that there’s a rich mythology to draw from – you get to play with toys you loved as a kid.
I was always taking garbage from around the house and making my own toys. I wasn’t given a Wii or an Xbox or anything.
The sound of ‘Take Her Up to Monto’ and ‘Hairless Toys’ is the sound of me and the producer in the studio doing whatever we like. There is no reference. It’s too easy to be referential now; I’m trying to find something else.
When you believe games can only be toys for kids and that you are successful at doing this, why would you look further and take risks exploring new directions?
About tidying up a toy box, you should let your kids experience the selection process by touching all of their toys. It’s also important how they throw away their toys. They can earn a stronger sense of valuing things when they throw things away with respect and appreciation.
I’ve been playing on Christmas for the last 10, 11, 12 years. So just got to get up early with the babies, and give them their toys and try to get a nap in and just come to play.
I think it’s one of the coolest things especially as a young actor, actually at any time – even doing my stuff with Avatar – merchandising, video games come out and action figures and plushie toys. It really ignites the kid in you.
A small child from a developing country has the advantage, from a very early age, of having access to toys which structure his mind, which constitute a sure advantage over the little African child who has never even held a modern toy.
Robotic toys can be very interesting, but it is important that the toy not ‘dictate’ how the child should play with it. Rather, it should take its cues from the child and enhance, teach, and enrich the play experience. We incorporated some of these features into a robotic baby doll we built for Hasbro in 1999.
I often think that could we creep behind the actor’s eyes, we would find an attic of forgotten toys and a copy of the Domesday Book.
One of the things that fascinates me most about the toys of the Sixties and Seventies is that they were characters without stories, as such.
I’ve really missed my Reformer Pilates sessions during lockdown because I’m someone who likes to workout with a lot of toys!
Scale is not just something that a director wants so as to play with all the toys. Scale also lends verisimilitude, to put together a real world.
As I see it, fast food outfits have targeted small children with their advertising in a very effective way. You know, it’s clowns and kid’s toys and bright colors and things like that.
I do what I did as a hobby as a kid, you know, and make a living at it. And I just feel like I’m one of the luckiest guys in the world ‘cuz I get paid to make toys and play with them.
Firemen have the coolest toys ever!
Apparently the new high-tech Star Wars toys will be in stores any day now. The toys can talk and are interactive, so they can be easily distinguished from Star Wars fans.
I’m really focused on looking at where the industry is headed and how the world is evolving. Toys really need to adapt to this new era.
Marvel comics took a chance on me in my youth, allowing me to create so many toys in their sandbox.
I was not so lucky to grow up with toys as I grew up in a remote area of Kenya.
Even at 10 years old, Jonathan and I started saying things like, ‘Hey, what about this for the property?’ And I remember my parents saying, ‘You’re 10. What do you know about real estate? Go play with toys.’
I fell in love with stories watching a British television puppet show called ‘Thunderbirds’ when it first came out on TV, about 1965, so I would have been 4 or 5 years old. I went out into the garden at my mom and dad’s house, and I used to play with my little dinky toys, little cars and trucks and things.
I am quite a calm player. I do have a go at players and refs in the heat of the moment, but I never throw my toys out of the pram.
Pixar is filled with people who don’t get rid of their toys.
What’s interesting about the ‘Smash Bros.’ games, is that the ‘Smash Bros.’ games do not represent the Nintendo characters fighting against one another: they actually represent toys of Nintendo characters getting into an imaginary battle amongst themselves.
As a peace activist, I am dismayed by the encouragement of aggressiveness and violence by television, movies, and war toys.
Motherhood, pester power and emotional blackmail – Indian marketers have cottoned on to the fact that these three themes can sell just about anything – from food and toys, to insurance products, tonics, televisions and air-conditioners.
I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
We lived in a farm village, and no one could afford to buy a car or to fly. We were envious. We couldn’t afford any toys. I couldn’t imagine making a real car.
In the 1950s, Hong Kong was a place where millions of people could go, from the mainland, to start in jobs like sewing shirts, making toys. But, to get on a process of increasing income, increasing skills led to very rapid growth there.
You often hear this about directors, how it’s like having the best set of toys. This fabulous train set, the biggest box of toys that a kid could possibly have. The best directors look like a kid having more fun than you’re supposed to have.
Toy companies aren’t interested in ideology, they want to sell toys. If they would sell a toy that both boys and girls would buy, it doubles profits.
I’m very excited to see the wonderful 2-D characters in Poptropica come to life in the form of 3-D toys. When I first held the characters in my hands, it felt like magic. I’m excited for kids to have the same feeling!
Toy time is holding steady, but kids are spending more time on digital, and toys need to adapt.
I’ve got a quad bike, which I’ve raced against neighbours. You could give me a go-kart with a lawnmower engine – I’d still have fun. I like jet skis, speedboats, all the boys’ toys.
I had an incredibly full life with my imagination: I used to have all sorts of trolls and things; I had a wonderful world around my toys and invented people. I don’t mean I had imaginary friends; I just had this big imagination thing going on. I didn’t need any imaginary friends, because I had so much other stuff going on.
I’ve been afraid of people playing their life away with too many toys.
Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it’s not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
I’m a physicist, and we have something called Moore’s Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.
When my kids were toddlers, they had all these rotomolded plastic things. My life became surrounded by big, hollow plastic toys – from the scale of playhouses down to rocking horses, and everything in between – which we would then take to the secondhand store. But we’d get sentimentally attached and hate to see them go.
You try to be young, maybe you like to have a few toys, but it’s not the most important thing in life.
I was given baby doll toys myself, and they proved a stark reminder that my life was expected to revolve around childbearing – just as my mom’s had before me, and her mom’s had before her.
The happiest moments of my childhood were when my toys broke, because then I could destroy them with impunity.
I have many of the Rock Lords; Magmar, I’m obsessed with. That’s a sign of how versatile the Rock Lords were, that they could come out with toys that turned into rocks.
I was one of those kids who took apart their toys to see how they work, just to see what they were made up of.
I used to think being in the West would be incredible and then when I was nine my parents moved us to Belfast. I was initially amazed by little things – in toyshops you could actually play with the toys, the schools were more colourful and there were so many magazines everywhere.
As men get older, the toys get more expensive.
I’m more into the Spawn toys. They’re really cool. They’re coming out with a Techno Spawn series and another series, The Dark Ages, which are really cool.
I don’t pick up toys. I crush them.
If they were siblings, ‘Hairless Toys’ would be the nice child, and ‘Take Her Up to Monto’ is more of a problem child.
Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.
You just get pickier. I think that’s true of everything. Money, toys, girls – all the hedonistic stuff. You just raise the bar.
Technology is permeating every single thing we do… And to the extent that we can better expose our young people to all the different ways that technology can be used, not just for video games or toys, we’re planning for the future.
