Looks awesome, but I wanna be an Engineer!
Growing up in the ’70s, I had two fave toys—Hot Wheels and Tyco trains (HO scale). Although each were fun to play with, I never could fully integrate the two worlds together. For one, I was really detail oriented, and even at an early age I knew that HO Scale (1:86) and the Hot Wheels (1:64) didn’t match.
I’m sure a lot of kids my age were into the same thing, and wondered why big toy companies like Mattel never made an ultimate playset that combined railways with roadways. I guess we made do with what we had back then.
On my latest excursion to Toys R’ Us, though, I saw a huge section boasting Tomy’s latest launch of the Tomica system, which presents a fully customizable, expandable world of—yup, you guessed it—cars and trains, complete with interlocking roadways and railways and detailed buildings and people. It was awesome to say the least, and I spent quite a few minutes there, muttering to myself the golden phrase that many other 30-to-40-something males would say—”Man, where were you when I was a kid?”
It was almost the perfect gift idea for my kid, who seems to have followed in his father’s footsteps of Hot Wheels and trains, having amassed about 300 cars in his collection, and a 4×6 Geo Trax train layout. Although he hasn’t really shown any frustration in the impossible seamless melding of the two toy genres, Tomica seemed like just the thing to do it.
Yup, at a glance, Tomica seems to build the perfect world, not only to bond the world of cars and trains, but also to bond father and son—one for his expanding mind, and the other for his sentimental one. But Dear Tomy, you’re missing one crucial thing when it comes to the train part—interactivity.
It’s cool and all to put some batteries in there to have the train travel its track. But take a hint from Geo Trax (and even Thomas The Train’s Trackmaster series)—kids and dads love being able to play engineer and drive the trains themselves with remote controls. There’s just nothing like it.
I’d honestly say that’s the one thing that’s keeping me (and most likely other parents and kids) from being a customer and contemplating on sweeping up the 4×6 Geo Trax layout and converting it to a full-fledged Tomicaland. ‘Coz you’ve definitely got all the other bases covered. C’mon…with all that level of detail, is it really that hard to push it just a bit further?
Tags: Pop Life
For me it was always LEGO. I never got into anything else, probably cos my parents were too po’ to cop me more than one variety of sweet construction-toy goodness! haha.
Funny, I was talking with my BOSS today about how dope lego was, and we were both losing out shit over all the varieties of Lego today – fucking Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Pirates, all the shit we wanted as kids but back then we had to just pretend. Now you get damn Lego Darth Vaders and shit. Wouldn’t mind getting a kid just so I can buy it Lego! hahaha
Hear ya on that, RETALI8. Believe me, I definitely keep an eye out for toys that I know I’ll enjoy as much as my kid does. =D
As deprived as we may feel, knowing all this cool stuff is so readily available nowadays, we’ve certainly developed some wicked brain cells having had to use our imagination so much as kids, right? =)