Christmas ‘Toys’ That Can Make Adults Smile

Fanfare. Roaring crowd. Chick Hearn’s unmistakable “voice of the Los Angeles Lakers” cuts in above the cheering.

The Celtics lead the Lakers by a point. Thirty seconds to go, and suddenly the game depends on you. You?

Hearn announces your name to the crowd. Coach Pat Riley orders you into the game. Hearn fires descriptive verbal salvos detailing your height, weight, nickname and alma mater.

The crowd roars as you tie up the Celts’ great Danny Ainge.

Two seconds left on the clock. You grab a pass from Magic Johnson and take your best shot.

“It hits the rim!” Hearn yells. “Bounces high, bounces again on the rim, AND NOW FALLS IN THE BASKET!” The crowd goes berserk. Hearn is beside himself, “The Los Angeles Lakers win the championship behind the heroics of . . . “ Hearn shouts your name.

Hearn and his sidekick Keith Erickson will record that fairy tale for you this Christmas. They’ll tailor it to female or male players.

To make the recordings, Hearn and Erickson take a stock tape and plug in your starring performance along with miscellany about your vital statistics, proudest moments and a few other personal details, like the color of your socks. The 5 1/2-minute “Dream Game” audio cassette is one of the more imaginative of this year’s holiday offerings. A call to the Lakers’ office at the Forum in Inglewood, and $69.50, will get you one. Five percent of the price goes to the National Basketball Assn. Drug Rehabilitation Program.

The Laker tape is one of the wide-ranging choices that abound in the “toys for adults” Christmas categories this year. There also are customized yo-yos, customized cats, customized jewelry, and board games about everything from sailboats to the Jewish way of life.

You can give pedigreed rocking horses or teapots that won’t pour tea, driving lessons for aspiring drag racers or neophyte chauffeurs, an $8,400 jukebox or a $10 mind bender from the inventor of Rubik’s Cube.

You name it--it’s out there.

Take Tom Kuhn’s No Jive Yo-yos. Kuhn may be the only 43-year-old dentist in San Francisco who can work a pair of yo-yos while skateboarding down Market Street.

His Tom Kuhn Custom Yo-Yo Co. in San Francisco employs high school and college students to test each of his oiled maple yo-yos, some of which he decorates with intricate, laser-carved designs. The $20 toys come with 60 feet of spare string (“Yo-yo on stilts or out your office window”), two spare birch axles and a 32-page instruction book called “Pumping Wood.”

If you’re into Space Age yo-yoing, there’s a “Silver Bullet” model of aircraft aluminum that comes with a leather holster for $40.

For those inclined to spend a little more than $20 or $40 on a gift, the recent Adult Toy Show sponsored by Gemini Productions at the Los Angeles Convention Center offered a plethora of exotic possibilities.

A ‘Dallas’ Ring

For example, at the Our Secret Creations booth, Richard Reich said anyone willing to provide his West Hollywood company with $2,800 can walk away with a man-made diamond set in a solid gold ring that duplicates the pear-shaped dazzler worn by Krystle Carrington (Linda Evans) on “Dynasty.” If one’s taste runs more toward “Dallas,” the fan’s $2,800 will purchase a copy of Miss Ellie’s (Barbara Bel Geddes’) engagement ring for the same price.

Across the room, Import Sales Co.’s $25,000 kiddie car drew a lot of lookers. The Tustin importer offers a “children’s toy car” that is a scaled-down, hand-made aluminum replica of the Maserati race car driven to victory by world champion Juan Fangio in the 1950s. Import Sales’ Sandra Weber said the Benelli motorcycle engine that powers the gleaming red, 10-foot-long Italian-made vehicle will drive it at 45 m.p.h.

If you would rather soak than speed, the show featured an exquisitely crafted, brass and hardwood bathtub. It will set you back $15,000 to get this 5x6 1/2-foot bathing beauty into your home. Former janitor/cable splicer/boat builder/race car builder/sculptor Mike Sprague designed everything from the faucet knobs to the brass claw feet on the 170-gallon tub sold by Brass Bottoms Inc. in Newport Beach.

Going back to school may appeal to food lovers given the chance to attend the Great Chefs at the Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville. This Napa Valley classroom is a kitchen where you can spend a weekend or a week watching great French and American chefs demonstrate their skills. Then you get to eat the demonstrations in elegant surroundings.

The deluxe extravaganza costs $525 plus lodging and transportation for a weekend, and $3,100 for a week, including lodging and transportation between San Francisco and Oakville. There are also two- and three-day programs.

Ride a Rocking Horse

If you don’t feel like traveling to Oakville for something deluxe, you can try Abercrombie & Fitch, where a rocking horse, hand-carved of mahogany in England, sells for $3,500. The four-foot high, five-foot long Dobbin comes with membership in the British Rocking Horse Society and a pedigree that tells you if you’ve bought a mare or a stallion, its color, sire and dam, and other such tidbits.

Anyone interested in locomotion that does more than rock to and fro might want to get in touch with Frank Hawley, whose Drag Racing School in Gainesville, Fla., can set you in 200-mile-an-hour motion behind the wheel of a $60,000, rear-engined dragster or a “funny car” that looks like an Oldsmobile but drives more like a rocket.

To view these alcohol-burning monsters in perspective, it helps to know that your family sedan probably boasts about 120 horsepower and accelerates from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 10 seconds or so. Hawley’s racers sport 1,500 horsepower engines and hit 100 m.p.h. in less than two seconds. Four days with alcohol burners at Hawley’s school run $2,000. If you settle for slower, gasoline-powered racers, the price drops to $950 for three days.

Closer to home, there is Sherrie Van Vliet’s Executive Chauffeuring School in Lawndale, where, for $290, Van Vliet offers a 20-hour course that puts you in a Lincoln stretch limo and teaches “etiquette, legal responsibilities, smooth and safe driving techniques and security driving.”

A Rubik Puzzle

A less expensive but more diabolical gift that may have you calling your friends for help is Rubik’s Magic, a $10 offering from Hungarian architecture professor Erno Rubik, who brought us that fiendish bunch of plastic boxes within a box called Rubik’s Cube. His new puzzle is a flat, 4x8 1/2-inch sheet of eight plastic panels with three rings printed across their surfaces. Ingenious hinges join the panels. The problem is to manipulate the gadget until the rings intersect--without twisting the puzzle into a hopeless, irreparable piece of junk, which is all too easy to do.

While Rubik’s Magic is designed to frustrate, the Price of His Toys store in Beverly Hills offers alarm clocks bound to relieve frustrations, particularly for early risers who prefer to remain in bed. They are $24.95 alarm clocks shaped like baseballs, footballs or tennis balls. To shut them off, pitch them at the nearest wall.

Gift givers interested in an artistic tea party will be able to choose from a collection of non-functional (and some functional) teapots by contemporary artists at the new Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue when it opens Dec. 10. Pots from Austria, Australia, England, France, New Zealand and the United States will range in price from $95 to $500.

Across town, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, shoppers can spend $10 on 10 note cards made exclusively for the museum with envelopes lined in a blue, orange, yellow and black Matisse pattern from a collage called The Wild Poppies. Or, more opulent folks may want to part with $9,000 for a rare, 14-inch high perfume bottle designed and signed by Rene Lalique before he gave up jewelry making to become an internationally renowned Art Deco glass designer about half a century ago.

Board games abound in the Christmas market. Three of them, each selling for about $40 (less at some stores), are “Out of Context,” “The Sailor’s Game” and “Tradition.”

“Out of Context” promises to be a big seller at numerous stores, with its challenge to pick legitimate quotes from among fakes attributed to everyone from Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem to the Ayatollah Khomeini.

“The Sailor’s Game” by Sparkman and Stephens (the company that’s designed numerous America’s Cup winners) provides players with more than 2,000 questions about sailing, and requires the right answers to win the race. Abercrombie & Fitch, Hammacher Schlemmer and the Southwest Instrument Co. in San Pedro carry the game.

Jewish Board Game

A Jewish “Trivial Pursuit” type board game called “Tradition” has 3,000 questions in six categories: Yiddish, proverbs and more; customs and holidays; history, geography and politics; Israel; ancient and biblical history; arts, sciences, entertainment and sports. It’s available at Bullock’s and Game Keeper stores.

Big spenders might prefer a solid gold license plate frame (with its own alarm) for $20,000 from Beverly Hills Motoring Accessories.

Or, for something closer to $59, smaller spenders might enjoy one of this year’s most innovative mass-produced gifts, a children’s toy that adults can enjoy. It’s a computerized, Etch A Sketch Animator that looks a lot like the popular child’s drawing toy that came on the market more than a quarter of a century ago. But, instead of one drawing, this picture maker stores a dozen, and they can be made to appear in sequence, creating jumping, waving, dancing people, moving trains.

Puzzle of Your House

If you’d rather use someone else’s artistic talents, you might contact a New York City company called Presents of Mind, which specializes in custom gifts like a jigsaw puzzle of your house ($28.50), or a $110, one-foot-square ceramic sculpture that’s called Babble but looks mighty like a Scrabble game with a personalized name and message scrabbled right on it.

Closer to home, Sharper Image stores in the Greater Los Angeles area offer an $8,400 replica of a 1942 Wurlitzer jukebox. For $200 more it comes with records. Try the machine out for a while before presenting it, and you may make your money back, because the jukebox can be set to play for the coins of your choice.