There’s No More Potato for Mr. Potato Head’s Head

Last year about this time I wrote something about my search for Lincoln Logs. As a child I owned several sets and thought they might make a good present for a friend’s son.

I went to the toy store and after an hour of searching, I found the Lincoln Logs, but they were not quite what I remembered.

What made the trip even more disheartening was the realization that many of the toys I loved as a child were nowhere to be found. It took me just about a year to get over the loss of Mexican jumping beans and the little acrobat who did a flip when one pressed two sticks together joined by a skinny string. The passing of these toys was like the loss of childhood friends and it told me more than I wanted to know about contemporary American childhood.

And so it was with a bit of the Old Testament girding of the loins that I entered the Toys-backward-R-Us. It was only a moment later the bad news began: Mr. Potato Head no longer requires the use of a real potato. Clearly, this creates something of what the analytic philosophers call a problem of identity reference. How in good conscience can we continue to use the name Mr. Potato Head for a toy that comes with a lump of molded plastic to replace the part formerly played by a real honest-to-God potato? At the very least the box should be marked “Mr. Plastic Potato Head.” Or, better still, it should come with program notes which state, “The part formerly played by a real potato is now played by a piece of ugly molded plastic.”

As if the elimination of a real potato were not enough, the piece of molded plastic also comes with preselected holes where the obedient and unimaginative child is to place the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and little eyeglasses, so as to construct the face of the ugly Mr. Plastic Potato Head. In my childhood one of the most wonderful things about Mr. Potato Head was that the child could place the eye, ears, nose and mouth anywhere he or she liked, often creating potatoes like Salvador Dali might have made if he were God.

If one put enough holes in it, and if one managed to convince his mother to keep it around long enough, Mr. Potato Head would grow older. After a couple of weeks, he looked shriveled up and toothless, a sort of vegetable version of Gabby Hayes. Kept another week or so, the potato skin began to act as a metaphor for the way of all flesh.

But the most wonderful thing about the real Mr. Potato Head was its propensity to roll under the couch, where it would lie undisturbed for 2 or 3 months. By the time it was rediscovered, Mr. Potato Head mysteriously had grown hair. This fascinated the children at my house to no end but left my mother quite disgusted. If Mr. Plastic Potato Head rolled under the couch and we didn’t discover him for another 2,000 years, he/it would look look exactly the same except for a thick coating of dust.

A few minutes after coming to grips with the saga of the real Mr. Potato Head, I made a second unfortunate discovery: horseshoes are now made of plastic. Don’t the makers of plastic horseshoes know that the most important thing about horseshoes is the sound they make? Imagine the sound of a plastic horse shoe ringing a plastic stake sticking out of a pit constructed of indoor-outdoor carpeting. This is not the sort of experience of which summer camp memories are made.

Over in another corner of the store I found something called a Hop Scotch kit. I know you are thinking, “What could possibly come in a Hop Scotch kit besides a piece of chalk stolen from school and a Cat’s Paw heel borrowed from your father’s dress shoes?” The answer is that a Hop Scotch kit comes complete with a large plastic sheet, outlined with perfect boxes from one to 10, thus eliminating the need for the piece of chalk and any use of the child’s imagination. The kit also includes a piece of ugly molded plastic to play the part of the cat’s paw. No longer will “sevensees” look more like a rhombus than a square. The Hop Scotch Kit Co. has taken care of that.

On my way out of the store I found an intergalactic replacement for Monopoly. No longer will we pretend to own pieces of Atlantic City, N.J., before there was anything there. The new game, which is subtitled, “The Space Age Game of Real Estate,” provides our children the possibility of becoming slum landlords of planets or even entire galaxies.

I left the store in a state of depression. It made me yearn for the real Mr. Potato Head. It made me want to crawl under the couch for a few months and grow some hair.