Mattel Inc. (MAT) CEO Robert Eckert and I have a slight difference of opinion when it comes to toys.
His pick at the 107th Annual Toy Fair in New York City this week was the Fisher-Price iXL.
"This is a fabulous device," he bellowed. "It's an e-book, it's a photo album, it's a game player, it does music, it's a notepad, it's an art studio."
He was so excited because some media pundits had already begun calling it "an iPad for 3-to-6 year olds."
Now ask yourself this: Why does a 3-year-old need an iPad? Isn't this a bit like giving your kid an early case of attention deficit disorder?
I would rather give my kid swine flu, or salmonella, or E. coli, or mad cow disease or some flesh-eating virus.
And thanks to a toy maker called Giantmicrobes Inc., Stamford, Conn., I can do just that. The company makes stuffed animals resembling just about every kind of microscopic bug you can name. It even offers a full line of STDs, including gonorrhea, herpes and chlamydia.
The photo on the Giantmicrobes box claims the toys inside are one million times actual size--but I know how misleading these claims can be. "It's creative license," acknowledged David Callahan, the company's director of sales. "Some of them are 32 million times actual size."
The plush germs, viruses and bacteria launched by former Harvard Lampoon editor Drew Oliver in 2002 are a big hit with medical students. But kids love them, too.
"It's not a toddler item," Callahan conceded. "The lowest threshold age, I think, is 6, and that's for a really smart kid. Eight is a little more of our sweet spot, and by 10 they're hooked."
Jeepers. Creepers. I am old enough to remember when kids this age got hooked on more wholesome things like Donny Osmond.
The former teen-idol, in case you didn't know, is now the reigning champion on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars."
His pick for best toy at the fair was a plush, robotic thing called "Dance Star Mickey," by Mattel's Fisher-Price and the Walt Disney Co. (DIS). He actually challenged the real Mickey to a dance contest at the Toy Fair to help launch the product.
"What I just did, every kid on the planet would love to do," Osmond boasted after the showdown. "And that is dance with Mickey Mouse. Obviously, every kid on the planet cannot do what I just did. So if you can't have the real thing, Fisher-Price has come up with the next best thing."
Personally, I prefer typhoid, malaria and even Ebola by Giantmicrobes. And if you really want to watch someone dance, why not just mail them a cute, little, fluffy white anthrax spore?
I shook the hands of both Osmond and Eckert to sort-of congratulate them on their toy picks, even though they were both horribly conflicted by obvious profit motives. And I'm not sure which of these celebrity encounters was a bigger thrill.
"Do you know what?" Eckert said when I told him Osmond might have been more enthralling. "He's younger than I am."
Osmond is 52 and looks 15. Eckert is 54 and looks 54. But that's pretty good for a guy who used to be CEO of Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT) and president of its Oscar Mayer division, and remains a director at McDonald's Corp. (MCD), and probably ate enough of this highly processed corporate cooking to give him a Giantmicrobe or two.
I thought about sending Eckert down to see a toy company called Bluw, where I had tried out a blow-up walker and an oxygen tank, designed to lampoon all those old people who are now threatening to bankrupt our country with all their costly Social Security and Medicare entitlements.
Toys that make fun of geriatrics are big sellers, said the company's founder, Charlie Rudge, a London-based novelty product designer.
"We sold over a million units of these," he said, showing me a "Racing Grannie," a windup toy resembling an old lady pushing a walker.
This is the kind of idea that would never occur to a giant company like Mattel or Disney, even though Mickey Mouse is an octogenarian. Nor would they ever think of dangling their characters from the blades of a ceiling fan.
Pittsburg mom-trepreneur Anne Zacharias came to the Toy Fair to launch her new product called, Fandangling. It's a bunch of plush toys you hang from ceiling fans and let your babies watch them spin. Wee! (See it at www.fandangling.com).
"It's kind of like a big mobile without having to have to wind it," Zacharias said.
But don't try hanging just any plush toy from your ceiling fan. Each had to be carefully balanced so as not to throw the fans off kilter, which can overheat their motors and burn them out.
Another product I liked at the Toy Fair was called "Shield It All" by Brooklyn entrepreneur Terry McTigue.
McTigue told me his computer cleaning products company took a nose-dive because, apparently, in a recession, companies don't clean their computers so much. They just let the germs from their remaining employee's filthy hands build and build on the keyboards, spreading even more misery and despair.
The toy industry, however, continues to do well. So McTigue came up with a product to clean and protect toys from microbial deposits. It's a hydrogen-peroxide and polymer-based solution that seals up all the tiny pores on a toy surface where mold, mildew and bacteria might collect.
"It's especially good for nurseries," McTigue said, "or the pediatrician's office where one kid is sicker than the other and they are playing with all those toys...It cleans down to the molecular level and there's nothing left behind."
So I told McTigue about my favorite toy of the show: The anthropomorphized bugs made by Giantmicrobes.
"Little stuff animals?" McTigue said, furrowing his brow. "Unbelievable."
Yeah, I agreed, they are unbelievable, and if you were to spray them with this stuff, they'd be ruined.
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