Читать книгу TV Cream Toys Lite - Steve Berry - Страница 18

Now-defunct toy manufacturer Bluebird was founded on two very solid principles. Small girls like doll’s houses. Small girls also like plastic tea sets for serving cups of invisible tea to their dollies.¹ Then someone fell into a filing cabinet at the office Christmas party and came up with the bizarre idea of crossbreeding the two. Yes, this was a doll’s house, but made of yellow plastic and shaped like a huge teapot.

Why was this? No reason was ever given. The house was inhabited by small plastic peg-like people (somewhere between stunted Playmobil folk and Weebles without the wobble) with welded-together legs, all the better to slide them down the chimney or make them ride round and round in the roundabout-cum-teapot lid (the latter 20 seconds of entertainment–lots of fun for everyone’–also forming the most memorable moment of the accompanying ad). This delightful pied-à-terre was furnished throughout with a small quantity of monolithic red and blue teacup chairs and tables, with the further appointment of additional decor simply printed on cardboard walls (where it floated slightly above the floor in an unconvincing fashion).

See also Weebles, My Little Pony, ‘A La Cart Kitchen’

A rival effort came courtesy of Palitoy, whose Family Treehouse obeyed the same basic design principles and yet had the added bonus of a trunk-based elevator (which presumably attracted a better class of tenant than the average council-estate teapot). Another was Matchbox’s School Boot, adding a whiff of academia to the old ‘woman who lived in a shoe’ routine and thus robbing it of much appeal, although there was at least a variety of playground-themed accessories.² Live-in chimneys and pumpkins caught the tail end of the trend.

Basically, Big Yellow was a doll’s house for the Duplo generation: those who required everything to be large, unbreakable and safe to chew, yet were still innocent enough to refrain from shoving the little plastic people down (or up) the cat for a change (or indeed, trying to create a teapot tropical monsoon by actually pouring boiling water on them).

1 if you were unlucky enough to be a boy and wanted one of these? No chance. You’d get boxing gloves instead and a stern talking-to from Dad.

2 Matchbox had another crack at real estate with the Mushroom Playhouse, a four-floor fungi flat, but Bluebird had already moved on. Their mobile Big Red Fun Bus continued the primary-coloured fun. Sadly, the property market collapsed before the range could be completed with the release of the adult-oriented Big Blue Hotel.