well, kids of ancient olden days would have made do with stones and pieces of wood which looked a bit like animals and dolls and stuff, and world have used their imagination to make them real. Let's call this the non-real generation.

as we moved up the centuries kids toys start getting more realistic and accessible to all. indeed, a quick trip around Pollock's Toy museum shows an amazing range of tin cars and ceramic dolls etc. Let's call this the real generation.

this generation spawned great inventors and the whole victorian age of constuction. kids learnt how things worked from an early age, appreciated their limitations and set to building a better world.

more recently (1970s onwards) toys have become hyper-real. toys represent new made up worlds (telly tubbies, tweenies, fimbles etc). Even those which are meant to show the real world depict it as an improved-real (like the animals in psychedlic colours in the pictures).

kids grow up dissapointed with the natural colour and order of the actual world. who can blame them for trying to recreate the mad world of their childhood.

the solution is to paint all their toys with black lead paint and flashes of radioactive glow-in-the-dark white paint.

i shall set to work forthwith.