Lego, Barbie and Hot Wheels: the old staples are cool again

One thing I find myself saying a lot now that I'm in my 30s: "I hate being grown up." I think this probably sounds silly to older people. My dad is in his 70s, so people of his generation still look at me as a child of sorts. And in fact, that's not far off: I started a toy store with my wife 7 years ago, so in some respects I am still grasping desperately at the last vestiges of my childhood.

On the other hand, I have very real, very grown-up issues like paying for rent, health care and credit card bills, which force me to think like an adult on a day-to-day basis. I think this is why I, like my customers, repeatedly come back to the "comfort food" of my childhood: toys.

I grew up as an introverted child who woke up very early. What that meant for me was daily Lego sessions from about 4am to 5:30am when no one else was awake. My older brothers left to me a literal giant sack full of thousands of Lego pieces. I can still play for hours with Legos. They are an integral part of my childhood, and as a 30-something, I still love them.

Another staple of my childhood, perhaps from an even earlier age than Legos, were Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars. My mother told me that I used to play by myself on the stairs with about a dozen cars, moving them all one-by-one to the next stair, lining them all up on each stair like a truly OCD infant. She said the mention of a Hot Wheels car as a reward was the tipping point that got me potty trained one day. Not kidding. By the time I grew into my early teens and stopped collecting, I had amassed 100+ 1:64-scale vehicles. They're all still packed away in my dad's house in the attic. I can't let go of them.

Now I'm a big boy and I run a designer toy shop. Much of what we sell is totally new-school: vinyl and resin art toys created by artists. But you can see the old-school toy concepts like Matchbox, Lego and Barbie creeping their way back into the art toy scene. People never really change. Everything always comes full circle, again and again.

A year or two ago, Lego came back onto my radar with the release of their first series of blind-bagged mystery figures. The iconic Lego guy, released in a series of figures, but sold to consumers blind so that the buyer doesn't know exactly which Lego guy is inside the package. One of the figures pictured on the front, to be sure, but which one? That's the mystery. Now to some of you this might sound odd, but to those of us who cut our teeth on designer toys with Medicom's Bearbricks and Kidrobot's Dunnys, this idea is not new at all. And in fact, the mystery-packaging concept proved so successful for Lego that they are now on to the 5th series of their blind-bagged Lego guy figures.
I can't get these items for my shop, but you can shop at Argos for a range of Lego products, including the Lego Minifigure Series 5.

Another full-circle idea that I can't get enough of is the TYO Toys line of blank white 1:64-scale trucks. Sounds boring, right? But the whole point here is to redirect our fascination with graffiti and street art back onto a medium where it is legal and even encouraged: miniature tags and murals executed in 1:64 scale on the side of a tiny die-cast box truck. I recently attended a show at Dorian Grey Gallery called Street Artists Unite. One of the street artists in the show was Robots Will Kill (RWK). TYO Toys has tapped RWK as one of the artists they put into production, with his graffiti art miniaturized and printed on the side of a tiny box truck, and produced in limited quantities. This is a cool idea to both the 4-year-old me, and the 33-year-old me.

And although I didn't collect Barbies (boys don't deal with Barbies), I have to give props to my friends at tokidoki: somehow they took America's iconic apple-pie girl toy and gave her some street cred. Last year they released a tokidoki co-branded Barbie doll, which created and absolute sensation in the art toy collecting world (and really the Barbie collecting community as well).
The tokidoki Barbies sold out in the blink of an eye, launching the Barbie brand back onto the radar for many collectors who might have lost touch with their childhoods, much like what happened with me and my Legos and Matchbox.
I never was able to get that Barbie for my online shop, but you can visit Argos for Barbies of all kinds, including Barbie playsets with horses, fairy Barbies and Barbie Mini Cooper vehicles. Crazy.

I'm not sure what all this means to me. As I get older, in theory my childhood should move further and further away. I get old and crusty and jaded... I tell kids to get off my lawn. I stop smiling and laughing. Life gets heavier and weighs me down. Wrinkles and frown lines form in my face. I start collecting social security, I start complaining about politicians...

No. I refuse to go out that way. Gimme more toys. I'm never letting go of my childhood.