Once you’ve fitted your three batteries, you need to insert the ammunition, a capsule of detergent-like liquid. Then — and get this — you have to hold down the trigger for 20 seconds to suck the liquid up a tube so you can activate the device. As one family member observed during the Christmas demonstration, “You wouldn’t want the enemy to be advancing.”
Oops! You should have read the warnings first. Here are just a couple to illustrate:
- Do not drink the bubble solution.
- The toy produces flashes that may trigger epilepsy in sensitised individuals.
Now, at last, you’re ready for the magic to begin. Pull the trigger and out will come magical, shimmery bubbles. But they are disappointingly small and there are no long distorted, sausage-shaped ones that were my favourites as a child.
The whole process seemed so complicated. The ones from my childhood involved a little canister filled with washing-up liquid into which you dipped a little plastic hoop arrangement. You then blew on the hoop.
Masses of appealing bubbles of all sizes enhanced your life, yet it had all been achieved so simply. Unscrew, dip, blow.
No batteries, no holding down for 20 seconds, no warnings to read — just simply
produced, magical, shimmering, airborne orbs.
At least the Blaster wasn’t digital with sign-ins and passwords and apps and Bluetooth access (though I’m sure such an item would be available).
What has happened to such simple pleasures, the epitome of which I saw once in the reasonably remote highlands of Fiji?
A young boy was dragging a string on the end of which was an unpainted, undecorated piece of 4 x 2 about 25cm long. When I asked him what it was, he told me it was “a truck”. The nearest silicon microchip must have been a million miles away. As John Cowper Powys once said, “To a real child anything will serve as a toy.”
A decade-long study that started in 2010 at Eastern Connecticut State University looked at the sorts of play elicited by various toys and concluded that “simple, open-ended, non-realistic toys with multiple parts inspired the highest-quality play” and encouraged children to be “more creative, engage in problem-solving, interact with their peers and use language”.
They found on the other hand that electronic toys tended to “limit” children’s play.
They concluded that “the best new toys are the best old ones — sticks and blocks and dolls and sand that follow no pre-programmed routines and elicit no predetermined behaviours”.
I rather like those findings and, based on them, I’m already planning next year’s gifts for our granddaughter. I’ll source a little canister for the dish-washing liquid and, with the aid of wire cutters and pliers, I can easily fashion a dipping hoop from some sturdy wire.
And I’ve already earmarked a piece of 4 x 2; at some stage during the year I’ll attach a length of string to it.
Next Christmas sorted!
