With ever-more sophisticated, colourful and whimsical toys on the market, it’s a game of snakes and ladders keeping up with what’s hot – or is it? Some of Britain’s most popular toys have, in fact, remained at the top of Christmas wish-lists since the 1950s. Here we give a tiddlywink and a nod to their enduring relationship with our playful nature, and find out why they continue to boggle us with a monopoly on our hearts.
LEGO
Building up from a small structure to a mega-monolith has been the approach not just of the millions of children who play with LEGO, but of the founders of the company itself. LEGO was born when a carpentry workshop turned its fortunes around after a fiery blaze and went into the toy-making business after experimenting with miniatures. Plastic bricks already existed, but LEGO added the supporting tubes which allow them to lock together without breaking. In fact, a modern LEGO brick is compatible with bricks produced as early as 1958.
But perhaps it’s the sheer number of uses and types of LEGO that makes this one of our country’s all-time favourite toys. Since the addition of the LEGO wheel in the early 1960s, shortly followed by the LEGO train set, the range has been multiplied and merchandised endlessly, with Toy Story and Star Wars collections, LEGO filmmaking clubs, robotics kits as well as the double-sized DUPLO range – in fact there are over 2,400 different types of brick. And they’re used for everything from play therapy to town planning.
The ubiquitous tiny Danish plastic building bricks continue to be much sought after: The Ninjago Fire Temple, which boasts a dragon which spits fiery bullets to protect a golden sword, is one of 2011’s must-have Christmas toys, according to the Toy Retailers’ Association.
Scalextric
It was the addition of electricity to the traditional clockwork slot car – Scalex – which made Scalextric such an appealing past-time for all ages. The revolutionary change, by Fred Francis, made racing the plastic cars closer to the real thing.
And the appeal of these zippy toys lies largely in their visual and design accuracy as replica models of real cars, ranging from classic racing cars such as the Maserati 250F and the Ferrari 375, through James Bond’s 1960s’ Aston Martin, to your kids’ favourite characters from Cars and Cars 2. Keeping things topical, the latest range, which includes a velodrome cycling set, gives a nod to the London 2012 Olympics.
But it’s not just children who love to play racing driver. In 2009, BBC presenter James May and 300 volunteers assembled around 20,000 different sections of track to create a record-breaking raceway almost three miles long, a tribute to the Brooklands railway circuit.
Playmobil
Hans Beck created Playmobil for toy manufacturer Geobra Brandstätter in response to high oil prices in the 1970s. It paid to make smaller toys – and Hans Beck created the entire world in miniature, using far less plastic than the hula hoops which the toy company had been manufacturing. Nowadays, the Playmobil population of miniature people surpasses 2 billion and continues to grow in everything but size – it seems that they’ll always be 7.5cm.
Like children’s drawings, the characters have no noses, but are rigid enough to encourage imagination, and flexible enough to be involved in lots of different scenarios. Initially just men, the range now includes the whole family, endless types of vehicles and destinations ranging from castles to farms.
