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Oct 27, 2023

5 Toy

The box-office numbers have come rolling in for Barbie and Oppenheimer’s dual debut, and they’re sufficiently large to whet even the ever-hungry money maw of Hollywood. An endless gullet that, given

The box-office numbers have come rolling in for Barbie and Oppenheimer’s dual debut, and they’re sufficiently large to whet even the ever-hungry money maw of Hollywood. An endless gullet that, given the taste of profits it just experienced, is guaranteed to learn all the wrong lessons from and base at least a decade of tentpole strategies around. I hope you like toys and global tragedies, because they’re now forever locked together like a pair of very profitable conjoined twins.

So what half-gruesome twosomes will Hollywood come up with next? Here are my five best guesses…

Pictorial Times

In 1949, a man named George Lerner came up with the idea of a small plastic potato, decorated with peg-backed facial features and a charming little hat. Roughly a century earlier, in 1845, a voracious fungus known as Phytophthora infestans descended upon the potatoes of Ireland, and for almost a decade, wiped out a massive portion of the Irish caloric intake. Luckily, though, the approximately one million Irish who expired as a result of the food shortage will not have died in vain. Their spirits can rest easy knowing that they’re going to make film executives millions when their plight is paired with beloved toy Mr. Potato Head!

Alexander Blecher

The 1986 accident at Chernobyl is one of the worst nuclear accidents in the history of the world. Many people died from radiation exposure, and it contaminated large swaths of land that remain radioactive to this day. Animals and wildlife in those areas have been mutated by their exposure in ways both recorded and unknown. If only those mutations had been as totally tubular as those experienced by the pizza-loving pugilists known as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! A cultural phenomenon and all-time top-selling line of toys, Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael sure didn’t “waste” any of their radioactive gifts!

National Archives

If you thought your little brother did a bad job as a banker while playing Monopoly, you won’t believe how bad real bankers did during the Great Depression! Forget Park Place, when one-quarter of all Americans were unemployed, they’d have a hard time keeping a house on Baltic Avenue. Just like a game of Monopoly, too, the Great Depression was intolerable and induced a feeling of complete despair. It’s also famous for people making people quit early, though in the Depression’s case it was much more tragic and usually involved an open window.

Public Domain

Vehicles that are villains? Well, I can remember at least two very specific instances of that in American history, specifically because I’ve been repeatedly told to never forget them. Even the dastardly Decepticons would have to respect the level of pure evil contained within the events of the terrorist attack that changed the future of the nation as we know it. It turns out Starscream’s attacks on humanity were nothing compared to a regular plane that fell into the wrong hands.

Public Domain

Are there any little plastic life-takers more beloved than the G.I. Joe crew? Armed with biceps, pecs and uniforms way tighter than military spec, they blasted their way into the hearts and toy boxes of kids across the country. Which, of course, begs the question, as some of the armed forces’ premier operatives, were they aware or even complicit in the U.S. military’s spotty history of war crimes? You’re telling me Snake Eyes has never killed a civilian? They’ve got a guy named Charbroil who uses a flamethrower. Nothing about that suggests any respect for the Geneva Conventions.