The Legos and the Playmobils should be Friends

I've read some interesting online discussion about the Lego versus Playmobil controversy. Usually I  respond to any escalating dispute as a peacemaker, seeking to placate both sides, to soothe the savage feelings that tend to erupt over exchange of emotional injuries. 

But this time I'm afraid the Lego people have gone too far. 

An unfortunate by product of technological advance in this country has been an over empowerment of young people, specifically tweens and teens. These overindulged simpletons (Am I overusing "over"?  Not in this case!) have mistaken their superiority, over older people, with iPhones and game boys and social  media, with superior knowledge on anything else. While young minds are quick and alert and adaptable, they labor under a crippling mental handicap; a hyper-sensitive internal coolness barometer. This HSCB hampers any attempt at careful thought in those afflicted with it, and has led to outrageously ignorant Internet commentary on all aspects of society, even including toys. 

Deep breath, enjoying the brief chance to waggle my finger admonishingly at young people. I wonder if there's some kind of Freudian symbolism going on there. 

Back to the Lego people's comments. First, the claim to superior creativity because with Legos you can build whatever you want. This is indeed a neat-o thing about Legos. Once. It was once a neat-o thing about Legos. The actual greedy disgusting corporation that runs Lego (remember them?) has steadily subverted that one and only great thing about about Legos by replacing all the free form block sets with crap Disney movie and Star Wars and super hero themed sets with blocks that are shaped to be a particular piece of the set and do not lend themselves to free form building. Don't get me wrong, I buy Lego sets for my kids, and they still re-work them into their own design, but only after they've lost a portion of the tiny blocks and have to get creative. Kids do that with ANY toy, or any thing at all, actually. Even Playmobil. They mix it all up, they have cheap junk happy meal toys playing with Lego people and fuse beads shapes on the deck of a playmobil boat sailing to a couch island with a junk cardboard box mansion.  Kids make up their own stories, if you let them. 

But I see disturbing things going on with a particular brand of toys. The Lego Woody has a name. The kid doesn't get to name them. The Lego Jessie, the Buzz, the Merida, the Elsa, they have their own names and stories, odiously foisted on them through, gack, "branding" agreements between corporations, chosen by a cynical marketing team in a bloated toy corporation.

 The playmobil people have no names, the kids make up their own stories, their own personalities, for them. That is creativity.  Not movie theme sets. And I won't even touch the grotesquely dishonest theme of the Lego Movie. I will only say that the show was an entertaining grown up movie marketed to children, with an awkward and creepy surreal ending tacked on for what I can only assume was a lame attempt at seriousness. 

The funniest criticism of Playmobil by the Lego people, to me as an actual parent with real kids who play with toys, is that sadly uninformed trope that the Playmobil sets have boring details that only appeal to the adults buying them. Nobody with kids could believe that. My kids love those boring details. People don't seem to really get that to a kid, everything in the world is either food or a toy. Kids want to drive cars, that's why there are toy cars. Kids want to change baby diapers. That's why there are baby dolls who have fake diapers. They want to do yard work. That's why there are toy rakes and shovels. Kids want to do everything grown ups do.  Everything is a toy to them. That's why parents have to say "Stop, that's not a toy," all the time. Toys are what kids are allowed to play with, not necessarily what they want to play with. Kids want their toys to look like the things grown ups play with. That's why they do. That's why kids, at the creative, pre-school stage in their life, like Playmobil. When they start school, and get peers, and begin the long dreary trudge through the harness of Cool, and suffer through the intense need for peer approval that dominates the teens, and have their sense of fun and creativity hammered out by the clothing and music and entertainment corporations (Pure Evil) that market to Cool, they have to give up liking Playmobil. Lego is acceptable for a long time though. Totally cool. 

Honest Evaluation of Drawing Skills

Reviewing another old drawing that I don't believe I ever put in a sklog. 

I drew it while standing under the ominous statue in DC of Ulysses S Grant on horseback facing somewhere that I don't exactly remember because I for some reason thought it faced the Capitol, but looking closely at the picture or even looking rather lazily at the picture one can quickly ascry the Capitol behind the statue, so the statue faces out from the Capitol as if guarding the Capitol from some threat emerging from the Lincoln Memorial, maybe protesters. 

That joke rings so familiar in my mind that I believe that I may actually have done something about the statue drawing  before and included that joke.  How very sad. 

This picture represents, I believe, the acme of my career as a journalistic cartoonist, not because I ever got paid for it but in that I flatter myself that it looks like something that might have gone into a newspaper as part of a think piece about Washington or big government or statues in general. I drew it the last time I went to DC which was about 2002, it was raining and they weren't allowing anyone in the White House and there were cops everywhere guarding everything. 

I had recently turned 35 and had therefore passed the first qualifying hurdle on the path to the Presidency, and I was experiencing continual improvement in my drawing skills, and I had already begun planning my own biographical museum, to be built on the mall on the site of the current American History museum. It was a heady time, and one can see the hopeful euphoria in the intense effort I put into drawing a statue I didn't like while standing in the rain in a city I had never much cared for (except for the museums and its contribution to the TV series "Veep").  Now the original sits on display in the museum I have set up in our basement, a far cry from the magnificent many-storied edifice I once envisioned, which would have had fountains and delis and gift shops and naked statues and my actual body laminated like the body worlds exhibit and an animatronic of myself delivering a withering criticism of American Culture.  Yet I visit it often, sadly, silently weeping into my whiskey, enduring the picture's rebuke for allowing my popularity levels to plummet and my drawing skills to wither and regress. Now I often wonder if I will ever be President, and these days this is the best I can do for Grant and his damn horse:

Amateurish, I know, horrible computerized cartoon, completely lacking the gravity of the original. But hey, look what the horse can do now!