File this under Toys I Haven’t Thought About in, Like, Forever: the Little Professor! I had one of these as a lad. It was made by Texas Instruments in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Instead of an LCD it had a display backed by a row of red LEDs. The yellow buttons were stiff and made a satisfying click when pressed. Note that it looks like a calculator but it’s not (there’s no “=” button); it’s a game that throws up a series of math problems that need to be solved. Ultimately, though, I don’t think the Professor made me enjoy math any more than I already did (and still so).

(See also my top-five “kit” toys and my memories of the Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone, which I’ve noticed makes an appearance in Toy Story 3.)

(photo via The Science Museum)

After work, I drank my favorite, a Double Fill Up (rye, muddled mint, lemon juice and pomegranate syrup), at Death & Co. then bought a pair of Kubrick-like miniature toy figurines at Toy Tokyo and gave the Peecol one (a guy-in-a-hazmat-suit designed by low-res German art collective eBoy) to Vincent when we met later for a manly dinner and drinks at our favorite local honky-tonk, Rodeo Bar & Grill. According to the character’s bio, “Hazma never landed his dream gig as a chemical cleaner, but he heads to his desk-job in a Level A suit anyway.” In between this frivolity, I somehow procured a new hardcover copy (for half-off!) of John Hodgman’s new book, More Infomration Than You Require, even though its sale date is October 21. Hooray for rifts in space and time!

My brother Andrew sorted through a box of his childhood toys that had been in storage in our parents’ basement. Highlights included G.I. Joe, Transformers and random plastic dinosaurs: ah, the memories.

Remember this happy little fellow? I played with one very similar to it as a tot in the ’70s. There’s a thin plastic pull-string attached to the front (and not visible in my photo). The wheels wobble and squawk when they turn and the eyes move up and down. And every turn of the dial produces a ring-ring, a feature I imagine has annoyed generations of parents. Only now do I realize it’s strange that a phone from an educational toy manufacturer should make an incoming call sound every time a digit is dialed.

Stranger still that Fisher-Price has produced the Chatter Telephone for at least the past 45 years even though phones with dials fell from regular use decades ago. The newest model has been cutesified, is too plastic and curvy, and the colors are all wrong. See here:

During the middle of last month, I developed an uncontrollable urge to have my own Chatter Telephone as I remembered it, so I bought a worn 1961 model on eBay for $20 from a guy in New Jersey named Rick. (It’s the one in the first photo above.) It has a solid wood base with a pasted-on cartoon face, a candy-red plastic handset I remember attempting to chew on and a string cord connecting the handset to the base. It arrived today and stealthily, I showed it to a select few old-timers around the office who I knew would remember it.

My classic toy reminiscences began when Jimi mentioned that The Man insisted on queuing-up at the holidays-obnoxious Toys “R” Us on Times Square just to buy the Hasbro pop-up game Perfection, which he remembered fondly from his childhood. With that one, too, I see they’ve bastardized the colors; if memory serves, they were yellow and orange.

Surely I’m not alone in thinking the toy designs of my own youth were the best ever.

While waiting to be seated for a traditional Cleveland Heights lunch at Tommy’s, Dana and I moseyed over to Ohio’s best toy store, Big Fun, to see how their new digs have been faring.

Sometime over the last 12 months, the store moved from a shack-sized location across the street, crammed literally floor to ceiling with antique and retro toys and novelties, to a store at least three times as large on the other side. We were curious to see if the proprietors had been able to maintain the feel of coziness and wonder the original location had, while allowing freedom of movement; space issues in the original store dictated frequent pressing up against cabinets of Smurfs or vintage lunchboxes in otder to let other customers pass. High Tide/Rock Bottom, the business that used to be located in the larger space, was a bland sort of Spencer’s Gifts, selling saucy cards, posters and knickknacks: maybe ironically, the sort of store that dreams of being a store like Big Fun. But the ceilings there were high and dropped, of the white acoustic tile variety found in soul-sucking corporate office environments, and the hard floors were covered in that thin gray carpeting, also on loan from the land of Aeron chairs and fluorescent tube lighting. In short, not the atmosphere anyone wants in a toy store billed not only as big but fun.

Happily, they’ve been able to sort it out. They’ve ripped up the carpeting in part of the back, revealing unpolished but pleasing-to-the-feet hardwood flooring. Other major swaths of the floor have been expertly covered in sturdy plywood painted caution yellow, which makes sense somehow. And the ceilings: well, there was apparently no option to jettison those acoustic tiles, so the storeowners hired some artists or hooligans or artistic hooligans to plaster-tag the thing with vibrant spray-painted graffiti of psychedelic bursts, mischievous cartoons and the name of the store in explosive typefaces. It’s now the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, ghetto-fabulousized. Why I didn’t take a photo of this for your elucidation, I’m unsure, but believe me when I tell you the overall effect is like the hermit crab getting all comfy in its roomy new shell.

Decor aside, the practical benefit of the bigger Big Fun is of course more display space. Mouth-watering to those of us born in the ’70s and early-’80s are the tall glass cases crammed with seemingly every Transformer ever transformed, every G.I. Joe figurine ever posed with Action Accessories (or, if Zartan, placed in the freezer), even every Strawberry Shortcake, all artfully posed, all for sale. The centerpiece in the back corner, at least for those of us who gain instant fond memories upon hearing the phrase “and knowing is half the battle,” is a cheesy display (covered in “Do Not Touch!” signs) of the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier, as big as Gary Coleman and a premium item surely only that dick from Silver Spoons could afford. For scale, the G.I. Joe Hovercraft I once owned and painstakingly applied approximately 100 decals to, is floating indistinctly nearby in the poorly painted styrofoam sea. I couldn’t help but notice the depth charges were missing and that it’s an awful lot smaller than I remembered it being during intensive battle missions in the bathtub.

What a great store. It’s a challenge still to avoid exclaiming “Whoah!” like Keanu or asking your shopping companion every five minutes “Hey, remember this?” (or just telling her, “You gotta see this!”) while pointing at some near-forgotten plaything.

I was at the Stoned Crow the other night with some female friends and the subject of My Little Pony came up, probably because we had one right there on the table (long story) and were grooming its mane while drinking beer, eating raw French-Toast Pop Tarts and watching Dirty Dancing on the TV mounted in the corner.

(The Stoned Crow is just that relaxed, although I’m told that of the many photos of handsome male celebrities pasted in the ladies’ room, the one of Antonio Banderas slouched in his tighty-whities is unerotic to the point of discomfort. Strangely, the men’s room also is plastered with photos of handsome male celebrities and one of Patti Smith, so it’s clear straight gents are getting dicked over.)

But back to the Pony: I said I had always thought the toy was at least once named My Pretty Pony, but everyone was like, “Nuh-huh! My Little Pony.” Well the internet claims there really was a My Pretty Pony. It was a 1981-1983 predecessor to My Little Pony, an ur-Pony, if you will. I just couldn’t let this slide.

You know, it’s never too early to start Christmas shopping. With that in mind, what better gift for your friendly neighborhood blogwriter than a Marshmallow Blaster.

Mattel, which has had several quarters of declining sales and an 18% domestic sales drop over the holidays for Barbie, its largest and most profitable line, decided to shake things up by today rolling out a new look for Ken. Like the last time Mattel pulled a stunt like this, two years ago when Ken and Barbie broke-up, the announcement made headlines.

Ken’s new look, you see, is “aimed at making a love reconnection with Barbie,” although I don’t think it’s gonna work out.

One of the new Ken styles has him decked out in “torn, rough jeans, a weathered, motocross leather jacket, vintage t-shirt and rugged boots,” while the other has him dolled up as a beach boy with less poufy, “sun-kissed” hair.

Hollywood stylist Phillip Bloch, who advised Mattel on the new designs, says Ken’s new look reflects how the character has “spent time exploring the world and himself.”

Ken has revamped his life—mind, body and soul. Everyone knows how difficult it is to change, especially when you’ve lived your life a certain way for more than four decades.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Ken=GAY! Or at least a Jude Law caliber metrosexual. Look out Barbie; before you know it, Ken will have more personal styling products in the bathroom than you do.

My friend Tina, who moved to Florida recently, was in town on business, so I stopped by to visit her, appropriately enough for a toy inventor/designer, at the International Toy Center, a two-building complex at 200 Fifth Avenue and 1107 Broadway connected by an enclosed pedestrian bridge on the 9th floor.

The 1107 Broadway segment was built in 1911, and at 16 stories tall, was one of the highest buildings in New York. (This record means little as it was being broken rapidly at the time; the nearby 21-story Flatiron Building, for instance, was completed in 1915.) But the timing coincided with an influx of German toy manufacturers to the U.S. prior to and during World War I, shifting the industry from a European one to an American one by the end of World War II. By then, most toy companies were headquartered in the Madison Square area and New York was the toy capital of the world.

Of course, that’s far from the truth today. Lately, the building has served as temporary showroom and office space for toy manufacturers and suppliers in town for the Toy Industry Association’s trade shows held every October and February at the Javits Center, the International Halloween Show and the American International Toy Fair.

Then, in January, real estate developer The Chetrit Group bought the complex for about $360 million with plans to turn it into apartments starting early next year. (In March, a similar fate hit the 1 Madison Avenue complex located across Madison Square Park from the Toy Center. SL Green Realty Corp. bought it for $918 million and plans to convert its signature 50-story building, topped with a clock tower modeled after the one at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, into luxury condominiums.)

When I checked in with the security guard in the Toy Center lobby, telling him I was there to see Tina in 1510, he squinted at me like I was an idiot. I saw why after I got off the fancy elevator (depicted above): the building now is mostly vacant in preparation for the gutting. I passed bank after bank of deserted offices, the sound of my footsteps echoing off the walls as I walked down the unlit hallway. I saw through some windows that the adjoining Toy Center building was empty, too. Tina had a small, unfurnished office in the back that she was using as a showroom for a new project and with all the packaging and the samples and prototypes of toys strewn about the room, it looked as if a children’s birthday party had exploded.

We headed out to a simple little restaurant with cozy booths, Mustang Sally’s, a block away from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and frequented by Tina during her time there. It was halfway decent, with a standard salad, sandwich and steak menu. I had a burger and fries, which were rather costly. Tina had the salmon and shrimp Caesar salad, which she said was tasty.

Parting at Penn Station, Tina gave me her paperback copy of The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle. Because she’s on the Long Island Railroad much of her time in New York, she reads a lot and shockingly revealed to me that sometimes, as she finishes reading a page, will tear it from the book, so by the end, all that remains is a limp cover with a jagged paper spine. Less to carry that way, she explained. I was glad such a fate didn’t fall Inner Circle because so far, it’s a good read, even with the shrieking infant on the 1 train and his father who shouted shut up! enough that even the jaded New Yorkers were getting a little shifty in their seats.

Mustang Sally’s

• 324 Seventh Avenue (at W. 28th Street)
• (212) 695-3806
• Meal 28 of 52: Mustang Burger ($9.95) with sautéed mushrooms ($1.50 extra), fries ($3.95) and a Diet Coke ($2.75).

The kind wonks at Lego recently rolled out a new version of their Lego Digital Designer (LDD), a free, CAD-like program for PC and Mac that lets you drag-and-drop virtual Lego bricks. Completed models can be uploaded to Lego’s website to share or sell, and you can get a list of the physical Lego bricks needed to build the design.

This is the first I’ve heard of the program, although it’s been around in less-powerful versions at least a year. I’m reminded of Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs, my favorite book of his.

It’s about a group of young, overeducated, overworked and sarcastic Microsoft programmers. Some of them are working on Oop! (short for Object Oriented Programming), “a virtual construction box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives.”

The base of this fictitious program does just what the real LDD does, although Oop! has additional features, some of which seem inspired by SimCity. An Oop! brick can be customized to have from eight to 8,000 bumps, custom colors and surfaces, and structures can be destroyed by earthquake, fire, decay or kicking (“elder sibling simulator”). Properly built kit models result in rewards; for example, King Kong will scale a successfully built Empire State Building and plant a flag on top. Maybe Lego can pick up on some of these ideas for the next version of LDD!

Coupland presaged or inspiried at least one other Lego-related development. In February 2000, he wrote on his website that Lego should make a “‘Fluffer’ Amateur Porn Movie Set.” That didn’t happen, but take a look at the lawyer-friendly named Block Structure Porn, posted in 2002 by Drew, the guy behind the Toothpaste for Dinner cartoon.

Before my usual weekly trip to Academy Records, I took a brief detour to Jimi’s old laundromat on W. 4th Street to buy more Homies for my burgeoning collection. Alas! The Homies vending machine had been unceremoniously replaced by one dispensing tacky smiley-face necklaces and plastic-bejeweled rings for young pimps-in-training. I’ve gotta find a new source that’s more convenient than the Lower East Side, or Brooklyn, god forbid.

When I was younger, I collected matchbooks and matchboxes. For a short spell a few years ago, I collected old Polaroid cameras. Now I’ve started buying Homies, based mostly on the fact that I see my coworker’s expansive collection every day, lined up on the partition wall between his cubicle and mine; it’s like semi-subliminal advertising.

If you’re unfamiliar with them, Homies are figurines designed by artist/designer David Gonzales. Each is typically 1-and-3/4-inches tall and represents a Mexican American person. They’re getting to be like baseball cards; the first set of the six original figurines was issued in 2001, after which each set consisted of 24 figurines. They’re up to set 8 this year and they seem to get more fun as time passes. Set 4 introduced two dog figurines and a guy in a wheelchair named Willie G. Set 6 has an ice-cream man. Set 7 even has a grim reaper, La Muerta, that I’d love to get my hands on.

In short, Homies are barrio Smurfs.

For sets 4 though 8, you can buy the full sets of 24 figurines directly from the supplier, athough they cost $24. The true collectors buy the figurines for 50 cents each from vending machines, the kind that typically stock gumballs or superballs. Not only are they 50% cheaper than buying them in a set, the potluck style makes it more fun. If you get a duplicate, for instance, you can haggle a trade with another Homies’ collector from his or her duplicate stock.

The two other people in my office who collect Homies both live in hipster Brooklyn and have no trouble finding vending machines that stock Homies, but I must have searched 101 bodegas near where I live and work to no avail. Vending machines in general just aren’t as popular as they were when I was a kid, when you’d always find them in KMarts and any drug store. I don’t think chains like Walgreens, CVS and Duane Reade even allow vending machines anymore.

But today, I got lunch down in the West Village and for some reason remembered there was what I thought was a Homies vending machine at Jimi’s old Laundromat on W. 4th, so I checked it out, and sure enough, it was there, so I bought my first Homie. Later, back at the office, I got a tip that there was another Homies machine on Eighth Avenue near W. 49th, so of course I checked that one out, too, and ended up buying six more. I’ve got to contain myself lest my Homies collection run as wildly out of control as my CD collection; but maybe if I’m lucky, the Homies will overtake my want for CDs. They’re certainly cheaper.

Finally, I can’t decide if I should be offended by Homies. I mean, it’s not like I’m collecting, say, “mammy” cookie jars, but Homies could be close, right? Gonzales certainly thinks ethnic themes are a fine idea. Last year, he introduced the Palermos, Homies-like figurines that are Italian-American, with names like Teflon Tony and Nicky No Neck.

Of the toys I remember playing with as a youth, the best were the ones that fostered creativity by allowing me to assemble various pieces and parts into a whole of my own devising. These are the top five.

Radio Shack Electronics Learning Lab
My Dad’s Dad was forever getting my brother and I Christmas gifts from Radio Shack and these sets were the cream of the crop. You were presented with a web of loose wires which you would attach, via tiny spring-coil connectors mounted on a circuit board, to resistors, capacitors, a LED, and—the pièce de résistance—a piezo buzzer. With it, you could fashion a burglar alarm that would trip the buzzer when a wire was disconnected from a circuit. But they never provided a wire long enough to make it effective. So if you wanted to burglar-protect a foot-wide area, and were certain your burglar would be stupid or lucky enough to disconnect just the right wire, you were safe.

Capsela
Capsela were the gold standard of modular building, by which I mean the most expensive. The clear plastic spheres contained motors and rotors and could be interlocked via sockets. You could make motorized stuff like hovercrafts and windmills. Complicated stuff, and lots of D batteries.

Lincoln Logs
Was there a smell as capital as the fresh wood blast that hit you upon opening a canister of Lincoln Logs? Maybe only the smell of a fresh 64-count box of Crayolas (with sharpener!) smelled better, but not by much. What you could make with these was limited: a Unabomber cabin, two small cabins or a duplex cabin. If you were feeling adventurous and had two sets of Logs, you could create a castle or a Branch Davidian Compound. And if you were of a certain age, these were great to teethe on, particularly those slats meant for roofing. It was good to mix and match Lincoln Logs with Matchbox cars or Fisher-Price Little People so you at least you had someone to live in your damn cabin. What is it that makes me think our President really likes Lincoln Logs?

Lego
My brother was always more into these than I was. Although it was against the Lego Code, it was fun to mix sets, so you could have, say, a space station on your pirate ship, or a tree sprouting from your Lego Person’s head.

Tinkertoys
The coolest thing you could make with these was a giant jungle gym-like cube, or possibly a windmill. Grandma had a set of these in a musty closet upstairs and they were only to be played with as a last resort. Played with, that is, until dissolving into whipping those wooden honeycombed discs at someone in an all-out mêlée.

Walking to work this morning, I passed a flatbed tow truck loading up a white Lamborghini Countach on the corner of W. 58th St. and 11th Ave., which is the middle of nowhere, Manhattan-wise, but a good place for hotroddin’, considering the unusually smooth roads, relative lack of traffic and favorable stoplights. I hadn’t realized how small those cars are, nor was I aware anyone still drove them. But I was pleased to see, judging by the leather-jacketed man scowling at the tow truck from the sidewalk, that the drivers of Lamborghinis still seem to be insufferable jerks.

Anyway, the car reminded me of one of my favorite toys as a lad: Sideswipe, which was one of the good-guy Transformers. It was a fire-engine red Lamborghini Countach that transformed into a good guy Autobot robot. As a “warrior class” ‘bot, he came with a trusty clip-on rocket-launcher accessory that fired a missile with the push of a tiny button, good for both robot mode (smacking down evil Deceptacons) and car mode (rush-hour road rage). That whole line of toys was awesome, not just because they transformed from motor vehicles and other objects into robots, but they were very well made. (The Transformers TV cartoon, which served nicely as a half-hour ad for the toys, was a whole other story.)

Sideswipe was mostly plastic (like the real Lamborghini), but had real rubber tires that you could remove from the rims. You could roll and race these toys on flat surfaces, just like Matchbox cars, only with better traction. Another Transformer I owned around the same time, Hound, which was a military-grade Jeep, was made mostly of die-cast metal. Sturdy stuff, except after repeated “transformings,” at which point they would develop poor posture in robot form. Good attention to detail, too. You could fold the tiny little seats in the Jeep up and down, and open and close the doors.

It’s also interesting, at least according to several internet fan sites, that these toys were never reissued in the U.S. Sideswipe and Hound in particular were only made during 1984 and 1985 and never again. I suppose these toys are my generation’s baseball cards, except instead of horror stories involving Mickey Mantle rookie cards whisked into the garbage by an unwitting parent, our stories involve a grab bag of extra-loose Transformers, a jumble of He-Men and G.I. Joe guys, 101 mismatched “action accessories,” and, for good measure, a Rubik’s cube, some random Happy Meal toys and a few stray Lego bricks that someone spilled orange Faygo on, all bagged up and sold at a garage sale for $5 (or best offer).