Adults are buying toys for themselves, and it’s the biggest source of growth for the industry
Facebook shot me this article a few days ago and I’ve been thinking about it. “Kidult.”
When I crossed the threshold into glorious, glorious adulthood and shipped off to college, I was excited about my newfound independence and the ability to move past a lot of the trappings that I felt as a lowly high schooler. What this article refers to as a seemingly traditional view of adulthood—being “a very upstanding, serious member of society…intellectually, emotionally, in every other single way”—was very appealing to me. I wanted to go out and try new things and be taken seriously (not that I wasn’t taken seriously in many respects previously).
Now I go to college and there’s student organized group viewings of, like, Hocus Pocus. I have never seen Hocus Pocus and have no interest in doing so, and from what I’ve heard it’s not too great, so I’m not sure why it’s being brought up again besides nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. And nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake is just not something I’ve ever reveled in. My parents just didn’t raise me on Disney films, and none of the TV shows I watched or toys I played with as a kid really stuck with me in a connected or personal manner. I’ve never even seen a Star Wars movie.
A wide scale shift towards multimedia franchises aimed at children is mentioned in that article, and it seems like getting ‘em while they’re young has worked in some respects. In fact, it is so entrenched in our society that the “Disney adult” is an easily recognizable archetype. We make fun of Disney adults and made fun of all that Ready Player One manchild crap a few years ago. But we also lap up whatever new wave of popular nostalgia comes our way. We look to the past for comfort, even though we would never be able to survive a day with only a flip phone or, alternatively, no phone at all. We are told that the past was great, back when we didn’t have brains developed enough to make informed decisions about what was shoved down our throats. So we use current day, dumbed down tech to recapture the times we thought were simple because we could barely think in the first place. I had a really happy childhood and learned later that my parents were dealing with the recession and (successfully) trying their hardest to keep the associated anxiety from rubbing off on me simultaneously. Ignorance is truly bliss.
Today, I go to the dollar store, where a good amount of the items are more than a dollar thanks to good ol’ inflation, and there’s licensed Barbie dolls alongside the wonky off-brand ones. Then I walk past the toy aisle when I’m running errands, and I see shiny new toy lines that emphasize copy-paste blind box “surprises” and literally theming characters after every color of the rainbow for collect-’em-all domination. I’m not quite sure if I understand it, but it’s strangely fascinating to see. It’s weird how seemingly disposable they seem, because they seem like they were produced solely to be bought and discarded. They seem algorithmically generated and kind of crappy. They still make the old ones, or at least updated versions of the old ones, most of the time. Time will tell if these new toys, tailor made for the current ADHD social media generation, have any staying power. Or maybe we’ll all just move onto another “next big thing” before we take the time to remember them.
Before my mom got married, she actually dyed her hair because she didn’t want her highlights to make every photo from her big day scream “early 2000s.” If I were to raise a kid in this day and age, I’d follow a similar philosophy: curiously observing and playing around with whatever trends life throws at us, but never forgetting the value of timelessness.
