Let’s Start the Year (Again) Part 3: Eleven Year Old Me Would Be Upset by This
The one thing about moving house that surprised me is the sheer amount of stuff one accumulates over the years. However, most of this stuff normally has the common decency to secrete itself away in nook and crannies, unseen and unknown until it is required1.
Philip K. Dick coined the word “kipple” in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep2 to describe the human detritus that accumulates in empty spaces, and I tend to agree.
That image is a pile of the aforementioned kipple, having been collected from various cupboards, shelves and corners of the old home. I found it terrifying. I dread to think about the contents of my old room in my parent’s house, most of which is currently buried under my mother’s stuff like some sort of ancient city consumed by desert sands.
A recurring item of kipple we kept finding was box packaging for toys. I am by nature a hoarder, it is something I have battled with for years and I am slowly finding a nice middle-ground of practicality. In an unusual display of adulthood, I binned most of the empty boxes we found3.
As per the post title, eleven-year-old me would be very upset by this turn of events. Some of the empty boxes were for very old figures, purchased over ten years ago. A lot of them had been meticulously opened so they could still be opened in a flap-like action with intention to put figure back into them for display.
What eleven-year-old me will have to come to terms with is that a lot of the packaging had not aged well. Years in the piping hot attic of my parents and then crushed under a bed had not been kind to the plastic – it was yellow in many places and the cardboard was frayed and damaged. My justification for binning these items was that I now own the coveted IKEA display cabinets and the figures are now on display.
I often ruminate that toys should come in plain boxes. So much effort goes into designing packaging that it a shame to waste it. However, it’s not practical or healthy to live in a world where packaging is treated as carefully as what it once housed.
As a consolation to my younger self, here are some scans of various packaging before it was binned for good. It will be converted to digital format and preserved here on this blog, instead of taking up space in some dusty corner. I think young me could appreciate that.
Click on the images below to see the full-size versions.
- The exception to this rule is keys. A crucial item that is always required when leaving the house, keys will always make sure that they are not where they should be at any given time, magically gravitating to The Last Place You Would Think to Look (capitalised as it is a very real place with a name). ↩
- It’s the book film classic Blade Runner was based on and I went on a bit too much about it in Willow’s obituary post. That’s because I wrote this post before she died, hence all the sudden love for DADoES. You should read it at some point, it’s good. ↩
- Most of the boxes were under the bed, which was a sort of packaging Mecca apparently. ↩
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | February 27, 2015 at 5:24 pm | Action Figures, Manchild at Play (Toys), Real Life | No comment
Tags: oh goody let's talk about real life for a change, packaging, they're just toys!