Brain Bending Playthings: The products vying for your children’s attention — and your cash

Toys used to be so simple— parents could play with their kids, but the trend now is for the weird and the far-out, says Ed Power.

WHEN I was a child, boys played with Star Wars figures, girls with Cabbage Patch dolls and My Little Pony. Children and adults might meet halfway, bonding over a rudimentary board-game, such as Buckaroo! or Operation: a bucking plastic donkey, a man with a glowing nose, in urgent need of funny-bone extraction, respectively — these were concepts grown-ups could get.

Today, children’s playthings are brain-bendingly bizarre. For anyone out of short-pants, franchises such as Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Ben 10 are as incomprehensible as Mick Jagger’s long hair was to parents in the ’60s.