A brief andoddly depressing trip to a Kay-Bee toy store this past weekend has only helped
me come to the realization that most kid’s toys are plastic pieces of crap. For
every well conceived and well-made product, there are twenty more cheap,
plastic things that beep or make some other sort of annoying noise. And then
there are twenty more just as cheaply made, but with some sort of television or
movie tie-in. I know I’m probably a little naïve about this (I don’t have a
toddler demanding Dora the Explorer stuff yet), but wouldn’t some good design
and a little old-school craftsmanship be better?
Then last night I saw these wooden toys on Boing Boing. They’re designed by Rodney Alan Greenblat, a guy who among other things is apparently the genius that designed the characters in PaRappa the Rapper (one of the only Playstation video games my wife would play with me back in the day). The toys are part of a line of products he designed for a Japanese catalog company called Felissimo, and they look pretty cool to me. Boing Boing recommends the Crazy Box, Wooden Man and Bird Clock, which seems to have worked because they are sold out of all of them (more will be available on the 15th).