And here's another!

A happier post:

I was thinking back before Thanksgiving about Popples. This was a short-lived line of plush toys from the 1980s. (They were yet another toy out when I was a young teenager, and I secretly wanted some, but also suspected I was Too Old and it was also uncool to care about those things). Popples' gimmick was that they had a pouch on their back that you could invert and wrap around the toy - so you could turn the toy into a ball, or it had a built-in "sleeping bag," or, perhaps more practically, you could fold it up to keep the plush part clean when carrying the toy to a friend's house or something (the pouch was sort of a fleece material, probably more easily surface washable - though maybe these were even machine washable, a few stuffed toys were)

And I was thinking: maybe they need to bring back Popples. They've brought back most of the other toys from my young-teenagerhood: My Little Ponies (though arguably, they never left, and just kept mutating into different generations), Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake (and wow, how she has changed - from the Raggedy-Ann-esque little-girlish figure, to someone who is essentially a young teen and who, though she's still living in somewhat of a fantasy-land, still, it's a fantasy land that has Internet and cell phones and scooters), Pound Puppies....I'm sure there are one or two I am forgetting. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers were out there, but I never cared about them.

And you know? As I said, some of those toys I secretly kind of wanted but feared were too babyish for me, trying to negotiate the minefield that was early-80s teenagerhood. (I was good at being a child. I am okay at being an adult. I was terrible at being a teenager because I wasn't ready yet for adult activities and responsibilities, and I also didn't want to leave childhood behind but also didn't want to look babyish.)

This morning, on a quick run to the Mart of Wal (I realized I couldn't make it through until the 15th on less than a half-gallon of milk) I skulked through the toy section - as I do, when I have a few minutes and the store isn't so busy that I'm likely to run into one of my students when I am contemplating Monster High dolls (Though I have plausible deniability, they don't know for sure that I don't have kids - most of them call me Mrs. Lastname which I take to mean they assume I am married. And anyway, I have a niece and also some second cousins* that are a bit older, so I could pretend I was buying a gift for them)

(*Second cousin is what you call the child of one of your cousins, right? Or is it cousin-once-removed?)

But anyway, I turned an aisle, spotted the endcap, and was suddenly like ERMAGERSH! PERPLES!

Yeah, Popples are back. Like most of these restored fads, they are slightly different in design (this time, the different characters are more distinctive in appearance - as I remember, the old Popples only really differed in color scheme.

(Yes. I bought a small one. Named Sunny. I'll have to look at her tag again and post what her "personality" description is - they have it in English and in French** and the French version is actually pretty funny to me)

(** So I suppose these are being made to be sold in Canada as well? It's rare that bilingual packaging around here has English and French instead of English and Spanish. Though the Aurora My Little Pony plushies I've bought have bilingual English/French tags, which I kind of love, because I read French very well and it's funny to spot where the translations differ slightly)

Edited to add: here's the hangtag copy:

En Français:

"Toujours les pieds sur terre, Sunny adore le sport et le competition, sans oublier ses Super Copains Popples!"

My English translation of that: With her feet firmly on the ground, Sunny loves sports and competition, but never forgets her Super Popple Buddies!

The official English:  "Sunny....is a competitive, logical thinker who loves sports as much as her Best Popple Pals."

I think I like the French better, "Pieds sur terre" is a little bit more than "logical thinker," it conveys something more like being well-grounded or having common sense.





I dunno. It's strange how comforting I find it that some of the toys I wanted but didn't get when I was a teenager desperately trying to seem sophisticated (and also had almost no allowance) are becoming available again. I've said on numerous occasions that one of the few consolations I find in adulthood is that your "allowance" is bigger and you don't, at least if you're single, have someone hanging over you slightly disapproving of your purchases (as my parents sometimes did).

I'm sure this is some kind of calculated marketing decision: "Well, we already own this intellectual property, and now the people who played with the original run of toys are having kids themselves***, so maybe we can sell a bunch more for nostalgia value where parents want their kids to have toys like they had"

(*** I am assuming that the "kids" who played with things like Popples were between five and ten years younger than I was, and so, still within a reasonable range of having kids. Though people in my age group could conceivably be becoming grandparents now, so maybe some of the sales are to nostalgic Gen-X grandparents)

And, okay: I did wind up with one of the first-run Popples, and I still have it (it is stored in my closet at my parents' house, I should retrieve him). I remember as the line of toys was winding down, one of the stores - perhaps even the Children's Palace I talked about before - deeply discounted a few of them, mostly from the sports-ball line. The one I wound up getting was called Big Kick and he was wearing a soccer uniform and folded up into a soccer ball.