FOR many years now, major toy manufacturers have been producing demonic “action figures” for children, particularly for boys. This is not a new story. But it is still a shocking story.

Just to give you an idea of the latest, here are a few figures that Walmart recommends for children between the ages of two and four. In other words, these are recommended for toddlers.

What are we to think of these hideous “toys?” We are to think of them as child abuse. They desensitize children to extreme ugliness, impoverish their imaginations and acclimate them to the satanic. It would be better to have no toys at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

— Comments —

Bruce B. writes:

We’ve been parents for 14 plus years now and have noticed awful toys from the beginning. Two examples. One called “Homie Rollerz” are Latino-thug cars that come with pimp & drug-dealer-like action figures as well as bikinied girls that look like prostitutes. This was being sold in the Wal Mart toy section over a decade ago. The other are the “Monster High” and similar dolls marketed to girls. They combine slutty dress with ghoul/dead-people themes. Pink skulls on clothes and accessories are also popular with little girls.

William from the Netherlands writes:

Oh, don’t get me started! What are these horrors and monsters, staring at us from the shelves of ‘toy shops’? I know it all too well; I was young in the ’70s and ’80s and I loved the action figures of Star Wars, GI Joe and the like. I remember the day my mother had had enough and went through my collection of figures. She threw one after the other in the bin. (The ones that looked like humans I could keep.) She asserted the toys made me recalcitrant and obstinate. How angry I was! I couldn’t see that they – and the movies/comics they came from – tainted my sensibilities and made me susceptible to the weird, strange and, indeed, the ‘occult.’ Need I add that next morning I went to the bin and fished them all out? How dare she say they ‘had a hold on me’!

Today, the finding of good toys or children’s ‘entertainment’ is not easy. Not that we believe in ‘entertainment’, but even as aware as we are, we dó have our work and need to keep everything in order, so the ‘electronic nanny’ is switched on from time to time. We quickly found out that what my mother said about Disney and Hollywood in general was oh-so spot on. There is the movie about a boy who makes friends with dragons, the one where horror monsters are actually lovable ‘misfits’ or even one where a princess’s true love turned out to be her own sister. Not even the LGBT movement has gone that far. Yet.

And in every one there are the constant mantras of ‘listen to your heart,’ ‘be who you want to be’ and ‘follow your dreams.’ In almost every one the men are either evil or stupid/bumbling ruffians, always prone to violence. The women are smart, beautiful and peaceful, the children are geniuses and have the solution to the problem at hand. They are ‘the chosen ones’ or something like that. Authority is never to be trusted.

Playmobil is not safe anymore: there are the devils, the rockstars, the vampires and other monstrosities. Legos then? Nope. From their designers come such jewels as Aztec Eagle warriors, whose sole occupation was to procure captives as sacrificial victims to their various bloodthirsty gods. Many sets were licensed from popular movie franchises, such as Star Wars or even the Simpsons. Blasphemy toy set anyone? Of course, many of these sets were designed with ‘adult’ collectors in mind and isn’t that the saddest thing? Men, my age (fourties), collecting toys like those. There’s a program on Discovery or some channel like that where pop artists and athletes are filmed, trying to complete their collections. They seem to be completely unaware of adulthood and will probably never attain it, it being ‘boring’ and ‘plain.’ I used to think so. How wrong I was!

We have our children’s souls to consider. They will not die from not having a ‘Monster High’ doll, but they might be led astray by it. My mother was right, thank God she taught me.

Laura writes:

Thank you for your comments.

Here are a few rough thoughts on your mother’s great intuitions.

There is a misconception that “fantasy” figures stimulate the imagination. Actually, they stimulate only the imagination of the demonic. The sublime can’t be depicted in cheap, plastic figures. It’s impossible. These toys are demonic not because they seem to depict demons. Demons are spiritual; they don’t exist in bodily form. These figures are demonic because 1) they are extremely and thoroughly ugly and 2) they are lies. They lie in that they typically combine animal and human characteristics. That is their signature quality: the combination of the claws, teeth, wings, etc. of animals with the legs, heads, arms, faces, etc. of human beings, or perhaps, when they are purely animals, simply the intense and unreal exaggeration of the ugly characteristics of certain animals. In reality, and in truth, no human being is an animal.  These toys are dehumanizing. They are lies.

Toys based on reality stimulate the imagination more. A child lives in the real world. Anything he does with these action figures is based on what he knows of reality. But there’s a limit to where his imagination can go with a world he does not know. He can’t possibly know a human/animal world because it doesn’t exist. If, on the other hand, he plays with two sets of soldiers, one good and the other bad, all human beings, he may actually come closer to the world we cannot see with our eyes. That’s what imagination is: a view into what is real but can’t be seen with the eyes. Playing with human beings, he can imagine supernatural forces, especially good supernatural forces, more than if he plays with these utterly unreal figures because the battle between good and evil involves inner moral and spiritual characteristics that cannot be depicted in plastic. This participation in reality has a calming effect on children, it uses the energy and vitality of their imaginations, whereas the participation in a demonic vision does not. It frustrates them, however enthusiastic and fascinated they may seem about these toys. (People are enthusiastic about heroin too.)

So when your mother said these toys made you irritable or difficult, I think she was getting at an important truth. These toys don’t satisfy the imagination of children, and thus they make children irritable and restless, because these toys are not based on reality and are like plastic drugs. I know they are everywhere and parents can’t help coming in contact with them, but they should be banished from every toy box and tossed into incinerators. It would be better to play with sticks and mud. Amish children are lucky in that way! They don’t come across any of this, forgive me, manufactured crap. And you can see it on their faces.

William writes:

Great comment. I hadn’t thought of it that way, although it is completely obvious.

How would you view anthropomorphism though?

Laura writes:

You mean when children project human qualities on animals?

Well, you know, normally they have done this not with humans that have animal qualities but with animals that have human qualities. Take the Teddy Bear. He has something ineffably human about him. He doesn’t really look much like a real bear at all but he also does not have a human physique either. He is like a child in his dumbstruck innocence. Or the dinosaur. A boy may play with two sets of dinosaurs which are warring each other. But in that case, he really is not confusing the two worlds. He is not setting up a human war. Or maybe he is, but it’s not this demonic thing. He’s typically setting up a bestial confrontation. That makes sense, even if he has the animals talking. That kind of confrontation is real in the animal world.

That sort of anthropomorphism is not the same departure from what is real.

Laura adds:

I’m sorry to learn that Playmobil has gotten into the occult too. Their whole success was based on the minutiae of real situations: all the little plastic, uncanny details such as tiny frying pans and swords and cash registers and cars.

Laura continues:

It’s interesting, William’s mother was not just concerned with his “happiness” or his physical health or his social adjustment. She wanted to protect his imagination too.

Motherhood is warfare.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I grew up with these plastic dinosaur miniatures.

 

Monstrous, I’d say, but certainly not demonic.

Also with this [Godzilla – from Ishiro Hondo’s paradigmatic giant-monster film of that name (1954)]

The Godzilla story was moral.  Godzilla was a mutation, brought to life by nuclear tests in the Pacific.  When he slouched through Tokyo, the military response was to destroy him.  That was reasonable.  But the heroes of the story, especially Professor Kyohei Yamani, the paleontologist, and the marine salvage expert Hideto Ogata, fervently wished that the creature should not be killed, but captured and studied.  The story verges on the genuinely tragic.  There is a love-triangle involving Ogata, Emiko (Yamani’s daughter), and Daisuke Serizawa, a marine biologist who sacrifices himself to destroy Godzilla although he believes with Ogata and Professor Yamani that the monster should be studied, not destroyed.  The movies has real pathos.

Godzilla is a topic that resonates with another recent thread at The Thinking Housewife – the one on whether the nuclear bombings of seventy years ago were justified.

 Laura writes:

Your dinosaurs resemble dinosaurs, as we know of them, and other animals. They are nothing like some of the bizarre, disorienting figures today.

“A Grateful Reader” writes:

Thank you for you lucid post on the occult in toys. It calls to mind ETA Hoffmann’s German-Romantic, odd and robotic creations. I used to blame Hoffmann for most modern monstrosities, but it was really Goethe’s fault. Alas, they would both be disgusted by the poison fruits of the saplings they planted. When I read to [my daughter] your post, she said, “Dickens thought of that. He wrote about Tackleton the Toy-merchant in The Cricket on the Hearth.”

“Tackleton the Toy-merchant, pretty generally known as Gruff and Tackleton–for that was the firm, though Gruff had been bought out long ago; only leaving his name, and as some said his nature, according to its Dictionary meaning, in the business–Tackeleton the Toy-merchant, was a man whose vocation had been quite misunderstood by his Parents and Guardians. If they had made him a Money Lender, or a sharp Attorney, or a Sheriff’s Officer, or a Broker, he might have sown his discontented oats in his youth, and, after having had the full run of himself in ill-natured transactions, might have turned out amiable, at last, for the sake of a little freshness and novelty. But, cramped and chafing in the peaceable pursuit of toy-making, he was a domestic Ogre, who had been living on children all his life, and was their implacable enemy. he despised all toys; wouldn’t have bought one for the world; delighted, in his malice, to insinuate grim expressions into the faces of brown-paper farmers who drove pigs to market, bellmen who advertised lost lawyers’ consciences, moveable old ladies who darned stockings or carved pies; and other like samples of his stock-in-trade. In appalling masks; hideous, hairy, red-eyed Jacks in Boxes; Vampire Kites; demoniacal Tumblers who wouldn’t lie down, and were perpetually flying forward, to stare infants out of countenance; his soul perfectly revelled. They were his only relief, and safety-valve. He was great in such inventions. Anything suggestive of a Pony-nightmare, was delicious to him. He had even lost money (and he took to that toy very kindly) by getting up Goblin slides for magic-lanterns, whereon the Powers of Darkness were depicted as a sort of supernatural shell-fish, with human faces. In intensifying the portraiture of Giants, he had sunk quite a little capital; and, though no painter himself, he could indicate, for the instruction of his artists, with a piece of chalk, a certain furtive leer for the countenances of those monsters, which was safe to destroy the peace of mind of any young gentleman between the ages of six and eleven, for the whole Christmas or Midsummer Vacation.”

Dickens understood the cruel toy merchant to be, indeed, cruel, (“Why don’t you kill that Cricket? I would!  I always do…Scrunch ’em,” comments the Toy-merchant,)  and his audience knew he was cruel and even the toy merchant himself knew that he was so; and because he knew that he was cruel, he was not beyond redemption. Today’s toy designers do not know that they destroy the peace of mind of multitudes.

The same children who become inured to ugliness go on to project monsters portending doom onto the Empire State building and also go on to eat lunch–and keep their food down–while discussing cruelty (“Why don’t you kill that [Child]? I would!  I always do…Scrunch ’em,” comments the [Child]-merchant.) They destroy the peace of mind of the sane by pulling tiny minds to pieces, but the remainder of their audience do not know that they are cruel. They themselves do not know that they are cruel.

 Wendell Berry writes, “What happens when the audience becomes used to being shocked and is therefore no longer shockable–as is the case with the television audience? What if offenses become stimulants–either to imitate the offenses or to avenge them?” Cruelty is catching.

The Catholic author Michael O’Brien, who wrote A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child’s Mind and Harry Potter and the Paganism of Culture (both books I highly recommend), suggests that J. K. Rowling had a demonic muse for the Harry Potter books, although she herself remains “unaware of her work’s significance in the darkening of the times.” Rowling writes, “Magic has universal appeal. I don’t believe in magic in the way that I describe in my books. But I’d love it to be real…The starting point for the whole of Harry’s world is, What if it was real? And I work from there.” She also said, that she had a “revelation” while travelling by train to London:”The character of Harry Potter just popped into my head, fully formed,… Looking back, it was all quite spooky!…My best ideas often come at midnight… [the Potter books] almost wrote themselves.”  O’Brien took on the burden of reading and reviewing the Potter books only after three independent people, in the course of one day, told him that they felt nausea when reading the Potter books.

O’Brien contrasts Tolkien and Rowling: “Frodo’s failures are due to human weakness; they do not derive from malice or pride. By contrast, Rowling portrays Harry’s victory over evil as the fruit of acquiring esoteric knowledge and power, and developing the will to use them. This is Gnosticism. Tolkien portrays Frodo’s victory over evil as the rejection of unlawful knowledge and power; it is the fruit of his humility, obedience, and perseverance in a state of radical suffering. But he cannot do it on his own, and in the end he learns just how weak he is in the face of supernatural evil. He too needs mercy. This is Christianity.”

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

“Your dinosaurs resemble dinosaurs, as we know of them, and other animals. They are nothing like some of the bizarre, disorienting figures today.”

Yes, that is my point: Dinosaurs have an actual referent.  There is a pathos in their extinction that deeply moves children and which is carried over with wonderful effectiveness in Hondo’s Godzilla.  The same thing might be said of director Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933).

One of my earliest reading-experiences – that is to say, one that I can remember – was a boys’ novel with illustrations entitled The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek.  The titular Stegosaurus could talk.

Children, especially boys, like things that are monstrous in the prehistoric-creature-way, which is why they collect plastic dinosaurs and figurines of Godzilla and The Creature of the Black Lagoon, who is, like Godzilla, extremely anthropomorphic.

I agree that the figurines to which the thread refers are grotesque.  I reject them for their ugliness (perhaps also for their “demonic” character).  By contrast, dinosaurs have a intrinsic, natural beauty of form – and so do Godzilla and King Kong.

Just out of curiosity, what would your original commentator make – or what do you make – of Cocteau’s film La belle et la bête (1946).  I can imagine a certain mentality rejecting it because the bête is grotesque, even demonic in his appearance – but of course in a moral story this is precisely the prejudicial obstacle that the audience must overcome.

The objection to the grotesque Wal-Mart figurines is that they are ugly and contextless.  Contextlessness is one the ploys of modern nihilism.

Laura writes:

Contextless. That’s a good way of putting it.

I have never seen Cocteau’s film.

Dr. Bertonneau continues:

The lead image of the thread is modeled after the David-Hedison/Vincent Price movie The Fly (1958).  Hedison plays a hubristic scientist experimenting with teleportation who experiments on himself and gets his genetic material mixed up with that of a fly.  In context, the image has a moral meaning, but by itself and absent any sense of the contextualizing story, it is a meaningless grotesque.  Nevertheless, boys respond to the exaggerated and the grotesque.

Usually I am attuned to The Thinking Housewife.  While I am not entirely in disagreement with the thread, I have a visceral response to it: It is a bunch of women largely failing to grasp male psychology, especially boy psychology, which thrives on outsized and astounding images.  But I give it to you that the image, by itself, is contextless.

Laura writes:

Is it really? Are those fly hands? I hadn’t thought of that.

You mean, William’s mother and I don’t get it? I don’t know, I guess we don’t.

I can understand Spiderman and Ninja Turtles. They’re just soldiers, but I can’t get some of the grotesqueries supposedly for two- to four-year olds.

 

Paul A. writes:

Have you noticed the vast amounts of death’s heads in our society lately? T-shirts, bumper stickers, jewelry, clothing and accessories, etc. Pics of Marylin Monroe in skull-style. There are even at least two varieties of those cute family stickers that adorn the back of mini-vans that are skulls or skeletons. Who is depicting their family members as dead?!? Is that not sick?

And many of these death’s heads have a decidedly demonic flavor to them.

Keep your eye out for them. You’ll be amazed at how often you will see them.

We certainly do live in a culture of death. And death is being glorified on our cars, our clothing, our jewelry, and even our skin.

Laura writes:

It’s everywhere.

We are living through the occultization of mankind. The “occult” is just another word for the demonic.

William writes:

The whole ‘humans-with-animal-parts’ made me think of the ‘humanized mice’, the ‘transhuman’ agenda, the ‘species-confused’ youths and how it ties in with the ‘age of Horus’ as foretold by Aleister Crowley, the ‘Wickedest Man on Earth’ or ‘The Great Beast 666.’

Before people start laughing, please consider that this man with his ‘Law of Thelema’ (‘Do what thou wilt’) is pretty much written on stone tablets in the hearts of modern people and that he has had an enormous influence on pop culture. (Via the Beatles, Led Zeppelin but also via people like Jay-Z. His image and ‘law’ are pretty much ubiquitous in modern pop culture.)

Now, ‘Horus’ is one of the Egyptian gods and also partly animal as are many of their gods. He’s the one with the falcon head.

The Hindus have their slew of gods and demons who are partly animal, and a major Hindu goddess was just projected on the Empire State building a few days ago. Themes, myths and gods from ancient Egypt are a pop-culture staple.

Now, to return to Crowley’s ‘Age of Horus’, here’s an interesting excerpt from his 1904 “Book of the Law”:

He (‘Horus’-ed) rules the present period of 2,000 years, beginning in 1904. Everywhere his government is taking root. Observe for yourselves the decay of the sense of sin, the growth of innocence and irresponsibility, the strange modifications of the reproductive instinct with a tendency to become bi-sexual or epicene, the childlike confidence in progress combined with nightmare fear of catastrophe, against which we are yet half unwilling to take precautions.

Consider the outcrop of dictatorships, only possible when moral growth is in its earliest stages, and the prevalence of infantile cults like Communism, Fascism, Pacifism, Health Crazes, Occultism in nearly all its forms, religions sentimentalized to the point of practical extinction.

Consider the popularity of the cinema, the wireless, the football pools and guessing competitions, all devices for soothing fractious infants, no seed of purpose in them.

Consider sport, the babyish enthusiasms and rages which it excites, whole nations disturbed by disputes between boys.

Consider war, the atrocities which occur daily and leave us unmoved and hardly worried.

We are children.

 This is so, because Horus himself is a child, in Crowley’s view. Look at the points he makes and consider indeed whether it isn’t true of our present age.

N.W. writes:

Thought of an old post I contributed while reading your discussion on toys today.