The Current - Did you play with these old toys just added to the Hall of Fame?

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

My Little Pony is being inducted into The National Toy Hall of Fame, along with Transformers and the card game Phase 10. Chris Bensch, chief curator at The Strong Museum of Play, explains why these vintage toys have had such a lasting influence. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. I was a city kid who wanted to have their own pony, and My Little Pony was sort of the answer to that. Stephanie Nizello grew up in Toronto. She's now in her 40s, but her love for the My Little Pony toys has survived the decades. She has a large collection, but it is her first ponies that got her through the tough times growing up. As a child, I was horrendously bullied, and the ponies provided me a form of escapism. And when I discovered collecting, I discovered a whole community of like-minded people who understood how happy

these little small pieces of plastic made me, because we all shared that same passion. And through that community, I ended up making lifelong friends. Stephanie started collecting the colorful figures as a teenager after she saved her childhood ponies from being sold by her mom at a garage sale. I was about 15 and Google had just become invented. And I ended up finding a collector's website and I started thrifting and going to garage sales. I started buying from eBay. I was a teenager and I was spending my money instead of going to parties. And I was spending them on ponies from Germany or from Italy and Greece.

I've purchased from all over the world. Stephanie has thousands of ponies in her collection, which is now worth tens of thousands of dollars. Toys like My Little Pony have left a lasting impression on kids from the 80s, so much so that this year, the horse figures have been inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame. Chris Bench is chief curator at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, and that museum hosts the Toy Hall of Fame. Chris, good morning. Good morning to you. For people who may not remember the My Little Pony toys, we played a little bit of the commercial earlier, and it was a bit of a trip down memory lane. Just describe what these toys are.

My Little Pony toys are pastel-colored horses. They're about six to eight inches tall based on their different model. But their big characteristic is that they have hugely long manes and tails that allow kids to have a lot of hair play, combing, styling. They make them in a thousand different varieties. So Stephanie could literally collect so many different variations. They've got a whole universe to explore. If you are a child of the 80s, you know of the My Little Pony. I mean, these were incredibly popular toys. I'd read that they, at their peak, were out selling Barbie.

They are essentially four-legged dolls, if you want to think of them that way. They've got accessories. They've got friends. They've got hair that you can play with. Yes, they are very much akin to Barbie, and they were everywhere. They were on Saturday morning cartoons. They were on movies. It goes on. Why do you think they made such a lasting impression on people like Stephanie? I think the toys that we value in our childhood resonate with us throughout our lives. They are things that really shape who we turn out to be. And if we've kept them or if we've lost them along the way, they are still very powerful, sending us back to a more innocent time.

How much of that has to do just with nostalgia? I mean, the My Little Pony came back in the 2000s, right? Some of it is nostalgia, and some of it is a cycle that the toy industry has gotten into, where they reintroduce toys every 20 to 30 years, as the kids who grew up with them have kids of their own, and then they have a new generation of fans. But as you mentioned, I mean, there are toys that we all had when we were young that we think, well, that was the best toy. Whatever toy exists

now, that's fine, but I had the best kind of toy. That's right. One of my favorite phrases I hear from our hundreds of thousands of visitors at the Strong Museum is, I had one of those with this tone that I haven't thought of that in years, but wow, it's sending me back in time. So My Little Pony was not the only toy that made it into the Toy Hall of Fame this year. Transformers, more than meets the eye, also made it in. Just remind us what the Transformers were. If people, if that, just me saying that doesn't send them into a spiral. Well, Transformers were robots that masqueraded as autos, trucks. They were amazing in their capacity to click into shapes that you wouldn't have guessed when you just looked at that simple sedan or that semi-tractor trailer.

How do you think toys like that, and the My Little Pony, I suppose, developed the creativity and imagination that kids had? They really gave kids room to go play. That's one of the things that we love to encourage, that everything doesn't have to be rule-based or sports leagues. It can be open-ended play that you are in control as a kid. You're making up stories. You've got these raw materials. And both the world of My Little Pony and Transformers gave kids that sort of possibility. Forgive my innocence, but I did not know that there was a Toy Hall of Fame. I mean, it sounds obvious that there should be one, but I didn't know that it

existed. Tell me about this and how many toys are in the Hall of Fame. The National Toy Hall of Fame was founded in 1998. So we're in our 26th year of inductions. There are currently 87 inductees to the Hall of Fame. Things that, of course, you would think of the hula hoop, the Frisbee, the dollhouse, the bicycle. Barbie and G.I. Joe are both in the Hall of Fame. It's sort of a who's who of evergreen toys, the ones that endure generation after generation. I was going to say, how do the toys get into the Hall of Fame? Three big criteria. One is longevity. They need to be on the market at least 20 continuous years, so kids and their parents could both have grown up with them.

Second, these are toys everyone can recognize. Even if you didn't have a teddy bear or a Frisbee, you would recognize them right away. And third, these are toys with great play value. Learning, creativity, discovery, socialization. They're not the ones you rolled your eyes at when you got them from your grandparents on your birthday and shoved them under the bed. In speaking about that, it's interesting to note that the trampoline was one of the finalists this year, but it did not make it into the Toy Hall of Fame. A lot of people like their trampolines. People over generations have used the trampoline. How would a toy like the trampoline not make it into the hall? There are so many deserving toys. This year we had

nominations from the public for more than 386 different toys. So there's a lot of deserving toys out there and they just all can't get through the revolving door in any one year. I'm confident Trampoline will bounce back. Very nicely done. I was waiting for you to say something like that. The balloon also not in the Hall of Fame? It was the first time for both Trampoline and Balloon to be in our list of 12 finalists, our short list for consideration. So they've got opportunities to appear again.

I have people who say, balloon, they're just party decorations. I try to persuade them that if you're hit with a water balloon, you'll know that it's a thing for play and not just a party decoration. There are some things in the Toy Hall of Fame that perhaps people might be surprised by. The cardboard box is in the Toy Hall of Fame. That's right. In 2005, we inducted the cardboard box, especially thinking of those big appliance boxes that I know when I was growing up, if the neighbors got a dishwasher or a side-by-side refrigerator, that was the backyard with the kids I wanted to be in and turning it into a spaceship, a cottage, a castle, you name it. Cardboard boxes are powerful playthings.

Sand is also in the toy haul. In some ways that makes sense, but I don't think of sand as a toy in some ways. Neither did a couple sports DJs I talked to in 2021 when sand was conducted. And I told them that if they got a sandbox without any sand, they would be sadly disappointed. So I think I turned them around. How do you think, I mean, in doing this work, how have you seen how play has changed over time? We all know through the last decades, our lives, both our work lives and our play lives, have become more and more electronic. So there's a big trend to screen time.

But part of what having a healthy diet of play includes outdoor play, social play, imaginative play, as well as screen play. So having a balance is key, and that's great to remind people of some analog toys in the national toy hall of fame do we dismiss the value of play in particular that unstructured play you said earlier that it doesn't need to be just screens but also just organized things like a sports league or what have you that just letting kids be kids and letting them play wildly um can also be a lot of fun. Have we devalued that in some ways? I think parents have often devalued that. Their lives are so regimented and scheduled. They do the same with their kids. I think having just opportunity to be a little bored and let your imagination run free at that point. I know we also as grownups, I love working in the yard and gardening.

I just did that. What I'm really doing, I'm not working outside. I am playing with dirt and plants and things like that. We don't talk in play terms because we think play is frivolous, but it's anything but that. I was thinking of a toy that I grew up with. I used to have this bionic man, Steve Austin kind of figurine where you could, he had like a bionic eye and you could look through the back of his head and it was like a zoom in on, I'm assuming that's not in the toy hall of fame, but is there, is there a toy that you grew up with that like maybe transformers or my little pony or sand in the sandbox? It's something that even if if it's not in the Hall of Fame, still has great resonance and value for you. Well, we have more than 500,000 items in the Strong Museum's

collection. So let me reassure you that the Bionic Man is in our collection. For me, the toys that I remember most, I was a toy car kind of kid. So when I see matchbox cars and Tonka trucks and Hot Wheels entering our museum collection, those are ones that really have an extra emotional zing for me. Chris, it's great to talk to you about this. Thank you very much. Thanks, Matt. Chris Bench is the chief curator at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, and that museum hosts the Toy Hall of Fame.