Toy H.O.F. - 2023 Inductees

Yesterday, Pink Slip covered evil, bad, harmful toys from the 2023 W.A.T.C.H. warning list.

Today, we'll mix it up a bit and go happier with this year's inductees into the National Toy Hall of Fame, which is run by Rochester's Strong National Museum of Play. 

This year's shortlist included baseball cards, Battleship, bingo, Bop It, Cabbage Patch Kids, Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, Connect 4, Little Tykes Cozy Coupe, Nerf toys, slime, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Barbie's boyfriend, Ken.

The three winners chosen from the shortlist are all worthy: Cabbage Patch Kids, NERF, and baseball cards. A fourth inductee was chosen "by popular vote" from a list of past snub-ees: the Fisher Price Corn-Popper. (Kind of like when the veterans committee from the baseball Hall of Fame votes in someone that never made it in via voting by the Baseball Writers Association of America.)

Sorry Ken doll, sorry slime. Maybe next year.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that the Corn-Popper, which dates back to 1957, made it. 

This was after my toddling time, and I can't remember whether the younger kiddos in the family ever had a Corn-Popper. They were in the right era. But I'm thinking not. There was already enough noise and commotion in our house without inviting more in via the Corn-Popper. 

But this is such a sweet toy. It's plenty simple. It's plenty entertaining. And it keeps the little newbie walkers moving. 

And although it now comes in different colors - pink, turquoise, purple - it's pretty timeless. 

What's not to like? A classic! An extra benefit: if you can hear the popping, you know your kiddo's on the move and not eating Tide Pods or sticking their fingers in the one socket you forgot to protect.

So congrats to the Corn-Popper. Better late than never.

And congrats to the Cabbage Patch Kids. 

I didn't have kids, but if I had, those kiddos would have likely have been around when the stork was at his peak delivering these little weirdos.

I certainly remember the commotion around them, with people in those pre-Internet days driving all over the place trying to find a Cabbage Patch Kid. Paying scalper prices Getting into fights - including with baseball bats. 

The dolls were oddly cute and, though I'm sure the notion of adoption of an abandoned child may no longer be PC, the concept was innovative, as each doll had a unique first name-middle name combo. (Wonder if there was a Maureen Elizabeth. Perhaps it's enough that somewhere in Africa, there's supposedly a pagan baby baptized with my name.)

Recently, I met a woman named Buffy. I asked if she'd been named after folksinger Buffy St. Marie, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Nope, her mother found her name on a Cabbage Patch doll.

Nerf is another righteous inductee. Like the Corn-Popper, like the Cabbage Patch Kids, it's a pre-tech toy with endless applications. And unless you're really trying, you can't do all that much harm with it. Congrats, Nerf-dom!

My favorite 2023 inductee is really not a toy. But it's also the inductee that I have the most experience with.

Baseball cards were everywhere when I was a kid. No one thought of collecting them for profit. We all used them for fun.

You could flip them with other kids, and win all the cards they were holding, including the ones fresh enough to still smell of Topp's bubble gum, to still have a bit of the pink talc-ish bubble gum coating on them. 

We even had a special baseball card vocabulary. If someone won all your cards off of you, you were skunned. 

Baseball cards were cheap to acquire. All you needed was a nickel for a package that would get you five baseball cards and a barely-chewable thin slice of gum. Unlike Bazooka brand gum, which was flavorful, and which you could quickly chaw into a consistency that allowed for blowing a bubble, Topp's gum was god-awful. And if you got a stale piece, which as often as not you did, you could split your lip open on a broken shard of it.

Sure, baseball cards were mostly for boys, but girls did occasionally flip cards. (As this girl did.) And both boys and girls clipped baseball cards - usually those of mutt players none of us had heard of - to the spokes of their bicycle wheels. When you pedaled off, the cards made an entirely satisfying clickety-clack that was even more wonderful than the poppity-pop of the Corn-Popper.

Baseball cards had other uses, too.

In our house, we used them as flashcards to teach my baby sister the names of players. Trish - then called Potto, Podie, or Po - was a very good student, and from a very early age could recognized dozens of baseball cards. Among her first words: Gary Geiger - pronounced in Po-speak as Gaggy Geigah). All the better for our little genius baseball fan in the making, Geiger was an outfielder with the Red Sox. 

Most of our baseball cards came from Topps, but at one point, my Aunt Margaret decided that her son Robert, an older cousin, no longer needed his collection of baseball cards. So she dumped a couple of shoe boxes full of cards from the early to mid-1950s on us. Treasure trove! (I'm pretty sure that cousin Bob, who will be 80 next year, still resents that his mother so cavalierly gave away his well-preserved cache of baseball cards to a passel of rampaging younger cousins who destroyed them by spoking every bike in the neighborhood.)

So, baseball cards. Yay, yay, yay!!!

I don't think kids these days buy them for enjoyment. These days, they're potentially valuable memorabilia. What might a Mookie Betts rookie card be worth in twenty years? So a lot of baseball cards end up encased in plastic, just in case they might be worth something in the future. Certainly, the owners of those early Honus Wagner cards had no idea what they were holding.

Anyway, I like all of this years picks. No batteries, no chargers, no screens. 

Congratulations to the Toy Hall of Fame inductees!