Why is it that the most popular of kids' toys are ugly? And I don't just mean ugly. I
mean ugly like the mutating globs of left-over dinner that's stuck in the sink drain.
Perhaps there's a toy designer named Arnold who ran out of ideas and, searching for a
gimmick that would please the stockholders, complained to his wife that his job was on the
line unless he came up with a new toy that would make all children everywhere annoy their
parents with endless pleas: "Please, I just gotta have this new toy! If you don't get
it for me real soon, I'll hold my breath until I start looking like this toy I want, and
then the neighbors will think you kidnapped me from an alien planet, and Geraldo Rivera
will harass you to get me on his show. . . ."
Listening to this, Arnold's wife, probably did what any normal wife would do: She told
him to wash the dishes. Whereupon he stared at the globs in the sink and behold! An idea
was born.
A few years ago, every kid had to have the Masters of the Universe -- heroes and
villains grossly deformed with muscles on the outside of their bodies and who, spiritually
speaking, in no way reflected the true Master.
Not only that, but they had all the charm and wit of sink globs, graphically
illustrated in their daily half-hour commercials, entitled Stay Tuned for Yet Another
Exciting Episode.
What's the fascination with ugliness?
Remember the Cabbage Patch craze? Those dolls made me shudder because they reminded me
of how my real babies might have looked if, when I was pregnant, I'd bounced around inside
a giant pinball game. They were so popular, grown-ups beat each other up just to buy one.
Why hasn't Barbie caused such a stampede?
And now we have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [editor's update: and Pokémon
creatures]. What every child needs -- or so I'm told by my kids.
"Play with the globs of oatmeal in the sink," I say. "They look just
like the Turtles."
The Turtles were created when some boy carelessly dropped his pet turtles into the city
sewer, and as luck would have it (as is always the case in Stay Tune for the Next
Exciting Episode) a bad guy added green ooze to the sewer gunk, right where those
turtles were gagging. And you know what green ooze does. It mutated those unfortunate pets
into teenagers.
Mix that with mutant frogs, ducks, rabbits, rats, warthogs, rhinos, flies and
alligators, and stir in a living rock and a bodiless, gun-toting brain, and you have what
every child needs for good mental health -- toy nightmares.
Perhaps ugly toys are popular because they help kids and their grown-up counterparts
cope with the ugliness and cruelty of this world. As Christians, however, we have an
advantage in that the deeper our relationship with Jesus Christ is, the more we have His
peace and help in coping with whatever is ugly in our lives. And as stewards of God's
gifts, we are called to bring His beauty into the world.
This means, of course, being careful not to drop our pets into the sewer. And never,
never feed green ooze to the globs in sink drains.
