Word: toying
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With little policing power, the agency is largely dependent on the good faith of profit-minded toy companies to remove hazardous products. By law, they must report safety concerns within 24 hours of their discovery, a process that usually results in a voluntary recall, like the large number of Chinese-made toys pulled in recent months. Ed Mierzwinski of U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), calls this self-regulation. "It presumes that the laws are being complied with unless the CPSC is notified that they are not," he said...
...problem with the toy-movie connection, say child development experts, is that it's helping to speed a gloomy trend that has been developing for decades?the creative death of playtime. "The most imaginative play takes place when children have gaps in information that need to be filled," says Susan Linn, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. A generic babydoll, for example, needs a child to give her a personality, a family, what a screenwriter would call a backstory. A teddy bear needs something to do, a plot...
...toy-movie link, like so many modern Hollywood conventions with unfortunate consequences, can be traced back to the success of Star Wars. Over the last 30 years, Star Wars-linked merchandise has grossed a galactic $9 billion. "What was different about Star Wars was that everything you saw on the screen you could get a toy of," says Diane Levin, professor of education at Wheelock College. In the early 1980s, at the height of Yoda figurine hysteria, the toy and entertainment industries successfully lobbied for the deregulation of children's television, allowing them to base animated TV shows around popular...
...After the success of Transformers, more movies based on toys will be rushed into development, never mind the DVDs, which bring some creativity-crushing side-effects of their own. "It used to be that kids went to the movies once and saw a film and then if they wanted to revisit the film and enter that world again, they played about it," says Linn. Now, instead of recreating Snow White's world in their heads, kids pop in the DVD and mouth along to "Magic Mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?" over and over again...
...some of your kid's favorite playthings. On Aug. 14, Mattel, the world's biggest toymaker, called back almost 19 million Chinese-made products--half of which were being distributed in the U.S. It was the fourth major toy recall to hit this summer. What you need to know about the trouble in toyland...