Absence of a ‘Hot Toy’ May Be Best Gift of All

Pick a toy store, any toy store.

You’ll see all the old standards there: The “Sweet Faith” doll that recites the Lord’s Prayer in honey-dipped robot tones. Buster the Robot, who, its makers brag, enjoys “full directional mobility.” The robotic Tyrannosaurus rex that stalks, growls, moves its immense head around, and does everything saurian but gobble down cavemen.

(OK, kid. I know that 65 million years or so separated T. Rex from the cavemen. Don’t they teach you anything about poetic license in that oh-gaze-upon-our-test-scores school of yours?)

In any event, there is one thing you won’t see in the toy stores this holiday season.

That’s the Red-Eyed, Lip-Quivering Robo-Parent, moving in lock step with a thousand other Red-Eyed, Lip-Quivering Robo-Parents who won’t stop, won’t stop, won’t stop until they have acquired this year’s must-have, no-price-too-high, Hot Toy.

They won’t stop because without the Hot Toy, their children will feel abandoned and unloved. Children who feel abandoned and unloved end up on drugs, in jail or in obscure colleges. And the parents of these poor wretches will torture themselves, asking in the cold, hard light of brunch: Could this be so because of the time we failed in our sacred mission to acquire the year’s Hot Toy?

But this year, unlike so many in the recent past, there is no Hot Toy. In years past, you could find scalpers in toy-store parking lots, charging extortionate prices for the year’s Hot Toy. And you could find parents eager to do business. But not in the year 2000.

Let’s don’t quibble over PlayStation 2.

For one thing, PlayStation 2 is not a toy. It costs more than $300--and that’s if you can manage to find it at a store rather than in the costlier precincts of cyberspace auction houses. “Three hundred dollars” and “toy” should not be included in the same thought. I’ve owned three cars that cost less than $300. In the right season--which is to say, rainy--$300 can buy you a trip to London.

Also, it’s apparent from my research that PlayStation 2 does not exist. PlayStation 2 is a phantom, an urban myth like the ghostly hitchhiker who removes his head after he exits your car. Have you ever seen a PlayStation 2? Oh, you know someone who has a cousin whose friend’s brother saw one. Ah.

So let’s dispense with PlayStation 2 and talk reality.

Donna Hart, the manager of Kay-Bee Toys in Ventura, has seen a dose of it during her 14 years in the toy game.

When legions of parents rushed in desperate for the verbalizing hairy onion called Furby, she was there.

When they’d call, panic in their voices, to ask if there was even the slightest chance of any Pokemon stuff being left over, she was there.

She saw them ripping open Cabbage Patch Kid boxes, stealthily switching outfits with other Cabbage Patch Kids to create the perfect Cabbage Patch effect.

“There’s really no one big toy this year,” she said.

Why? Who can understand the mysterious calculus of the toy business?

“Tickle Me Elmo was just sitting on the shelves for months before Rosie O’Donnell gave it a big plug,” Hart said. “Maybe Rosie hasn’t seen a toy she really likes this year.”

Next year, experts predict, the Hot Toy will be any of a number of planned Harry Potter puzzles, games, trading cards, dolls and what-nots.

As for this year, how about giving a child a stick? What about a ball?

What about those arrows tipped with rubber suction cups? What ever happened to Nok Hockey? How about a nice chess set?

Hart smiled at my Cro-Magnon, non-robotic visions of play.

Aside from dolls--most of which talk, laugh or excrete--hardly an item in the contemporary toy store lacks a computer chip. Not “Slithering Jake the RC Snake,” a radio-controlled, ruby-eyed cobra. Certainly not the remote-control, part-car, part-insect Dragonfly.

Yo-yos, Hart said, are “a seasonal item.”

And tops? The whirly things that spin round and round?

“People come in and ask for tops,” Hart said, wistfully. “We have no tops.”

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com