Living: In All Seasons, Toys Are Us

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But once the wrapping paper has been crumpled up and playing has begun in earnest, the scene looks remarkably similar from year to year, no matter how NEW! DIFFERENT! BETTER! the highly promoted toys may have promised to be. For at their core, most toys -- certainly most of the ones that make a child's short list of favorites -- are in fact manifestations of ancient lore, the oral and written history of the human race at its most impressionable. In their contemporary plastic forms, these objects can seem cheap or irrelevant. But they are frequently based on a firm and ancient foundation. Analyzing folk stories in The Uses of Enchantment, Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim observes, "On an overt level, fairy tales teach little about the specific conditions of life in modern mass society; these tales were created long before it came into being." But, he continues, "more can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society, than from any other type of story within a child's comprehension."

What the scientists and analysts discovered, the poets and writers instinctively knew all along. Musing about the stories of his childhood, G.K. Chesterton noted, "I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since." C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) thought the tales revealed "life as seen, or felt, or divined from the inside." W.H. Auden believed that the fairy tale is "a dramatic projection in symbolic images of the life of the psyche, and it can travel from one country to another, one culture to another culture."

Hardly a plaything exists without a precedent. Take bears, for instance. Goldilocks' supporting cast can be seen in America's old favorite, the stuffed Teddy; in the Care Bears, the saccharine family of TV and nursery; and now in Teddy Ruxpin, a $70 pet that speaks to its owner -- as do Gabby Bear, Bingo Bear and Smarty Bear, the "Talk-a-Tronic you can bare all to." Not even the supposed talking breakthrough of the 1980s is as fresh as might be assumed. Harper's Bazaar was not referring to Teddy Ruxpin when it editorialized, "The doll of today . . . endowed with an interior phonograph, and thus enabled to reproduce the human voice . . . must become a mere toy, stripped of its moral teaching." That was in the 1880s.

Similarly, the wizardly counselor has altered little since King Arthur told Merlin, "Ye are a marvelous man." Conferring enlightenment through trickery, the wise mountebank surfaced in Oz as a con man, changed sexes as magical Mary Poppins and carried the Force as Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi in the Star Wars movies. This year the figure resurfaces in Masters of the Universe and many other action characters who require the advice of someone older.

It is an easy matter to connect the dots between the dragon of St. George and today's reptilian Inhumanoids. From there it is a short trip to this year's most popular dragons, the Stegosaurus, the Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex -- and all the other dinosaurs that might as well be fictive. After all, neither the child, nor his parents, nor his great-great-great-grandparents ever saw one on the hoof.