The Evolution of Technology

[naomikritzer]

When I was a kid, I had this toy record player made by Fisher Price that was basically a cleverly designed music box. It came from a garage sale and was battered and scratched but still entirely functional. There were six records, each made from sturdy plastic, with a different tune embedded in each side. It played "Edelweiss" and "Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone" and "Camptown Races," among other tunes. It was a great toy. It vanished one day to wherever the toys went when we'd quit playing with them.

You can still buy these things on Ebay -- the stuff Fisher Price made in the 1970s and early 1980s is almost indestructable -- and my mother (who is well on her way to developing a serious Ebay addiction, which is even funnier when you realize that almost everything she's bought so far has been a toy for Molly and Kiera that I once owned, which she got rid of at some point...) bought one for Molly and Kiera. Molly quickly figured out how to wind it up, change records, and turn it on and off. She was playing with it today.

She calls the records "disks." And she calls the toy a CD player.

Which makes perfect sense -- it's not like she's ever seen a record player in operation. (Ed and I have a large collection of LPs but our record player broke in 1998 or so and we haven't yet gotten around to replacing it.)

On a tangential yet related note, I went to Target today with the girls to run some errands. One of the things I needed was a telephone. I very much wanted a phone that was not cordless to keep in the study. Cordless phones do not work during power outages and I like to have a functional corded phone around just in case. Target....wait for it....didn't have any. Actually, that's not entirely true -- apparently somewhere in the toy section they had a Hello Kitty phone. I had to go to the Radio Shack next door. (With both kids. And the two jumbo packs of diapers and all the other stuff I'd bought, so I couldn't effectively hold on to Kiera. I'm sure the other Radio Shack patrons just loved me.) We actually have a corded phone in the study now, but it quit working this week, hence the need for a replacement.

I pointed out to the guy in the Target electronics department that everyone should keep around a corded phone for power outages, and he agreed emphatically but had no corded phone to sell me. So Radio Shack it was, for the second trip this week. (The first trip there was to buy a tape recorder. Another piece of nearly obsolete technology, apparently.)

Comments

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

I have several old Western Electric phones, and I'm only using 2 right now. Of course they're DIAL phones... but they are almost unbreakable.

[naomikritzer]

Now that is an interesting temptation.

Part of the wear and tear on the phone is that Kiera wants to play with it, so I unplug it and hand it to her. I have to unplug it because it's very easy for a toddler to make calls on a touch-tone phone. A dial phone would be less of a problem...

[mrswebchik.livejournal.com]

We need to get one for the same reason. Wal-Mart keeps cheap ones in stock, so does our local Meijer, thankfully. And now I'll remember to get one when I go shopping on Friday. :)

I had that fisher price toy

[dushenka-ani.livejournal.com]

I loved it!!!

mine dissapeared too...

Re: I had that fisher price toy

[naomikritzer]

Well, if you search Ebay for "fisher price record player music box" you'll find 27 of them, most for about $10. As vintage nostalgia goes, the Fisher Price stuff is generally pretty inexpensive. Because it was INDESTRUCTABLE and thus is almost all still out there.

It drives me crazy that toys like this are simply not made any more. All music comes from tinny-sounding, off-key microchips. *sigh*.

[joykins1.livejournal.com]

I had that toy too!

In fact, in one of my clearer memories from early adolescence, my friend and I took a tape recorder (heh) and acted out this audio drama of detectives trying to solve some mystery or another. The clues were the songs from that Fisher Price "record player" and we managed to tie the songs together into an ad-hoc imaginative, if not entirely convincing, narrative.

My husband purchased about 15 corded phones (mostly dial; some dating back to the 1930s) on ebay for cheap, cheap, cheap. I don't like to rely on cordless phones either--there's the power outage issue, but also the fact that I am always misplacing them.

[queenofstuff.livejournal.com]

Around age 11 or so, my best friend and I did a "radio play" too, about a 40-ft tall rabbit rampaging across the country and eating obnoxious adults. We made up all the songs, and the sound effects were top-notch (metal lunchbox full of small junk for crashing/destruction sound, siblings stomping in snow boots for "army" sound.) I bet I still recall most of the dialog and all of the songs. I think that a sturdy tape recorder is one of the best kid toys around.