Fun at the (toy) fair

AS press launches go, this one in the swanky Covent Garden hotel in London is a little unusual.

Sure, the audience is a carefully selected mix of experts in the field, prospective buyers and other interested parties.

The difference is that most of the crowd are drinking milk from bottles, sucking on soothers, building forts underneath designer furniture, or comparing the merits of the chips in the buffet to those from McDonald’s.

Weekend is present for the launch of toy company V-Tech’s new product, the InnoTab, and a group of young kids has been recruited, along with their over-worked assistants (ie mums), to test-drive the product.

It’s a kind of a pre-school iPad, on which kids can play games, upload pictures and video recordings on the device’s inbuilt camera, and read age-appropriate books.

Earlier this year Weekend also nipped over to the Kensington Olympia in west London for the 2011 London Toy Fair, where I found serious-looking men and women in snazzy suits making deals, closing contracts and being generally very grown-up indeed. And then they started playing with Lego and trying on inflatable 1960s beehive hairdos.

This arena had been transformed into a veritable playground, packed to the rafters with all the newest, hottest, and most in-demand toys that you’ve been hearing all about this year.

It was a little like The Late Late Toy Show without Tubridy’s festive jumper or the precocious children. The first stand to catch my eye was a company called Wicked Vision, which had employed a number of toy-testing models to demonstrate their range of indoor foam boomerangs. I quickly plopped myself on a stand and recruited a Wicked Vision teacher.

The Indoor Booma was trickier to use than expected. You have to give it a hard flick, but for my first few attempts, the boomerang either kept crashing in mid-flight or hitting the adjacent, clipboard-wielding PR woman softly in the face (result!). Once I got the hang of it, the Booma became seriously addictive, and my photographer had to drag me away to re-focus on our toy mission.

The next stop was the Lego section, a perennial kids’ favourite, and a particular darling of mine: Lego was the default gift for me for every birthday and Christmas from the ages of 5-12. The legendary brickmeisters’ big launch for 2011 is the Ninjago range: collectibles that are like a cross between spinning tops and Top Trumps trading cards. The martial arts element shows the range is clearly aimed at boys, and this overgrown boy was quite taken with them.

Moving on, I spotted an area devoted to remote control cars, and one stand in particular: the Takara Tomy GX Buggy. These are super-speed miniature cars, powered by 2.4ghz (the same for a regular-sized remote control car), meaning these little things go incredibly fast.

Building a small ramp, I used the remote control to perfect my jumps, and when I eventually got it right, the GX Buggy leaped about two feet into the air (the maximum height reached, I’m informed, is about 3ft). Even better news for kids, you can control up to 10 cars at a time. Imagine that mayhem on Christmas morning, parents!

It wasn’t all gravity-defying wizardry and gadgetry, however. It seems there’s still an appetite for the simpler, and even smaller toys. Puppets, believe it or not, are apparently hot again right now. The woman at the fair’s Puppet Company stall explained to me that the demand for hand, finger and glove puppets, as well as larger models, was a reaction against gadgets.

Kids are using them in schools and nurseries, and so they also want them when they come home.

Working my way through the arena, I was also drawn to the nicely-titled Air Hedz, a range of inflatable hair-dos, headgear and accessories.

I couldn’t help but try on the Alien Head and Hands, drawing more than one curious look from the prospectors passing by.

From what I could gather, EggBods are also massive this year.

These are basically a range of wind-up mix and match collectable egg characters (with wonderfully punny names like Crack Commando and Fireman Scramble).

In fact, on my way home on the bus after the fair, one young boy sitting opposite me got very excited when he saw the picture of the EggBods on the front of the toy prospectus I was reading. Praise from Caesar right there.

We wrestled to the ground over the catalogue, but I, thankfully, won in the end. The things I do for this job.

There were other recurring favourites at the fair, too. The unstoppable Zhu Zhu hamsters were everywhere, while Doctor Who merchandise was also heavily represented: I especially liked the big Tardis police phone box tent.

There was a big range of bikes, tents, sleeping bags, skateboards and scooters branded with Angelina Ballerina, Peppa Pig, Ben 10, Thomas the Tank Engine, Hello Kitty and Sylvanian Families, meaning demand for these titles is not expected to abate any time soon.

Actually an entire section was set aside for Sylvanian Families, which I found just a little bit creepy. That said, I was won over by the brand’s Royal Wedding figures, little Kate and William mice, perched on a cake.

Elsewhere Angry Birds have obviously make the transition from insanely addictive smartphone game to fully-fledged merchandising phenomenon. There was a big area at the fair devoted to bird and pig teddies from the range, indicating that it’s the kids who are the more likely demographic fuelling the game’s popularity on their parents’ iPhones than the adults themselves.

In terms of film-toy tie-ins the big ones this year are Happy Feet 2, the sequel to the singing-dancing penguin hit, as well as Thor, The Green Lantern, Captain America, and Transformers 3. All these films were represented at the toy fair in the form of action figures, costumes, bikes and helmets. Incredibly, Toy Story still seems to have a powerful hold on the toy market, if the shelves of merchandise here are anything to go by.

There’s no stopping the Justin Bieber pop cultural juggernaut either. Honestly, there was an entire section devoted to Bieber dolls, board games, jigsaws, poster puzzles, and singing microphones, as well as pocket-sized figurines, a Rockin’ Tour Bus, ‘I Heart JB’ teddies, and a range of singing Bieber dolls with — and here’s the savvy marketing touch — interchangeable sneakers and clothes. Terrifying is not the word.

Boyband JLS also have a range of Ken-esque dolls out too, though the muscles and eight packs on the plastic incarnations are only slightly less ludicrous than the delts and abs on the real things.

Other toys making a big impression this year: Ickee Stikeez, a range of collectible tiny monsters with suction pads that can be stuck to one another, and Goochicoo Talk Back Tots, which are rag-dolls that can record and play back the child’s voice. Kids have to learn how to talk back sometime, I guess.

It’s nice to see that the old-fashioned racetracks, swingball sets, play kitchens, toy trucks, diggers and JCBs are also still popular, as well as board games, with titles like Prank Call, Play That Tune, and the rather ominous-sounding Beat The Parents. Top Trumps — another relic from my youth in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s — are also on the comeback, with sets devoted to Harry Potter, The Muppet Show, Hello Kitty, and, er, Top Gear.

By the end of my time at the Toy Fair, I had a definite case of toy fatigue (fa-toy-gue?), like a child who has overdosed on presents of a December 25th morning. Still, I mustered enough strength for one last go of the Indoor Booma. After all, how many chances do you get to spend an afternoon acting your shoe-size, not your age?