I live in Los Angeles. The land of broken dreams. The place where it is so easy to become lost. My heart goes out to them and I want to take them home. I am, of course, speaking of the abandoned stuffed animals and toys. It is hard to pass by and not try to rescue them. They call to me and I feel guilt as I walk on by.
Huggably, snuggaly lost
I don’t feel that guilt when I walk past a pair of discarded sunglasses, but I do when I see a lost toy. Perhaps I have seen the Toy Story trilogy too often, but I have a feeling I would feel this way even if Pixar had never brought it to my attention.
Yes, I cried. A lot.
A lost-asaurus
As a child, I had a lot of stuffed animals and toys that were animal-shaped and these became my steadfast friends. My brother was 5 years older than me and the kids who lived around us were my brother’s age and male. They’d occasionally allow me to hang out with them, but mostly didn’t want me around and I was left on my own a lot. I was young and short for my grade and, on top of all that, I was quiet and socially awkward. This did not make for a great combination when trying to make friends. The few friends I did have, I only saw at school. My parents didn’t have a lot of friends outside of work, so there were never any children that I became friends with even out of simple, mutual convenience.
Looking back, it seems like it would’ve been a lonely childhood, but I don’t remember feeling very alone. I had my stuffed animals and, to me, they were alive and they were my friends. So when I see these abandoned anthropomorphic toys, my heart feels a twang. They are lying there and they have no friends and they been unceremoniously ostracized from society without any thought or care. And on some level, I see them as my old childhood friends and see my younger self in them.
Growing up I had lots of stuffed animals... Lots and lots of stuffed animals. My favorite was given to me shortly after I was born and I have kept it ever since, not so much a stuffed animal as it was a blanket mixed with a hand puppet. The stuffed animals, you can still find similar ones today but the toys are a little harder to find. Sometimes they'll make a comeback, but they are changed. Modernized. Bastardized versions of what I had when I was a kid with their main selling-point being an air of nostalgia that they can't quite capture because they have tried to bring it into today's tastes.
These are my favorites:
Popples
These were fuzzy creatures that could be turned inside out and have all the appendages stuffed in so that it resembled a fuzzy ball. Man, I loved these!
Dang, those were so much fun! I always forget how much fun I had with my popples. I even had the small popple-creature offshoots that turned into hats. Yeah those were great, I even gave one a haircut once.
And then I saw this:
WTF!!! I am so glad I did not see this when I was a kid. I don't think I could've slept in the same room with them after seeing this. This is some seriously creepy shit. These popples don't look like cute and cuddly little creatures that roll into cute little balls, they look like demented demons that got spewed from the pits of hell for being too creepy for their demon children.
My Little Ponies:
I didn't have a lot of Barbies growing up. This was for a few reasons, mostly involving them being kind of expensive. I had a few Barbies and lots of clothes, because really, that was the main difference between the dolls, the themes. The other reason I didn't have many was because I had an older brother and he enjoyed pulling the heads off and putting them back on so that while I was playing with them, their heads would fall off. Luckily, I latched onto My Little Ponies; they were cheaper and their heads were a lot more difficult to detach.
Glo-WormOf course I had one of these, what self-respecting, afraid-of-the-dark kid didn't. It was great, a night-light that all you had to do was squeeze to make everything okay again. Except when the batteries went out. Then you couldn't find a screwdriver and when you finally did, you realized you didn't have batteries. You'd have to wait until one of your parents remembered to pick up batteries and until then you were just in the dark. Awake. Waiting for the inevitable moment when the monster in your closet would realize that your glo-worm couldn't protect you anymore. If you ever saw the movie "Rock-a-Doodle" with the owls and the animals running out of batteries for their flashlights, it was exactly like that.
Keypers
These were little woodland creatures whose backs would open up and you could put stuff in them and then lock it. They came with a key and a little friend. They also had smaller ones that didn't have keys, but was a lot like an over-size change purse. I had the snail and the turtle and I loved both of them. For me, one good thing since I was prone to misplacing the keys is that the locks were incredibly easy to pick. I'm not sure it could even be classified as picking a lock, it was so easy.
Wish World Kids
I actually had to look these up, I couldn't not remember if they were real or just a fabricated memory. Turns out they were real. They were a lot like transformers except the lifeforms didn't change, the set pieces changed. I think out of the ones I owned, my aunt had gotten most of them for me.
