Richard Hearn checks out some modern toys

Now we’re into January, I’ve had a few weeks to properly analyse the new Christmas toys and can make my report on what’s changed, and what hasn’t. Brighton pulls up a chair, and says hold all calls. I can hear one of the toys now, or rather three of them. They’re called HexBugs, and are tiny colourful cockroaches, whose legs shiver from battery power, scuttling around and changing direction as if they have a purpose. The Boy has a small track/cage for them involving heptagonal rooms and pathways between. Christmas Day saw three children – The Boy, Youngest™ and their cousin – crouched over these electronic cockroaches for entertainment, which sounds almost Dickensian, if you take out the word ‘electronic‘.

“There is something hypnotic about watching them”

If you’re an adult, they probably sound pointless. There is something hypnotic about watching them, though. A bit like an aquarium. You just watch, and wait for one to take a particular route. The urge to suggest a bet is overpowering. ‘I’ll lay a fiver that the blue one will be the first to escape’. (Memo to self: Betting for children. Idea for new column?)
Technology getting smaller probably made this toy possible. Perhaps 30 years ago there was a prototype, not cockroaches – the circuitry wasn’t small enough – but instead rhinoceroses powered by watch batteries, crashing around children’s ‘70’s living rooms until the power ran out. Instantly, of course, as a rhinoceros takes a lot of power. The craze therefore never took off (or more probably, I’ve just made it up. For a moment there, you thought you’d been short-changed back in 1978, with your Action Man with eagle eyes.)

Back to those HexBugs. The nearest comparison I could think of from my youth is Scalextric. Repetitive movement around a track. Except you don’t control HexBugs, you merely watch. Oh and there’s not the smell of burning that there was with Scalextric, which is God’s (or Hornby’s) way of saying your red mini was going too fast.

They’ve taken away some of the choices in another toy, too: Lego. You buy Lego now to make one thing. Quite a complicated, specific thing, following the step-by-step instructions. In my day, you got a heap of various bricks in primary colours (plus black and white), with a few suggestions: a plane, a car, a grandfather clock, a bungalow. I kind of miss this, although I imagine a kid of today would consider this a bit mean, with all the work to do. Like giving someone a big bag of atoms and suggesting you try making ‘life itself’.

So my non-scientific assessment based on a very small sample of toys is this: they’re now more impressive to look at, hypnotic even, but with less choice involved. Oh, and less smell of burning.