War on the Floor

You come out of the subway at Times Square across the street from the Gap and catty-corner to ESPN Zone, walk past the Drug Enforcement Agency's temporary museum ("Freedom is... Drug Free!") with its "Target America: Drug Traffickers, Terrorists, and You" show, stroll past the New York Police Department's office, its name outlined in flashing, red-capped, neon-blue letters, past the U.S. Armed Forces Recruiting Station with the big-screen video ads over the door, and plunge through traffic into thickening crowds before finally being swept through the Toys "R" Us mega-store's automatically revolving door, past a behemoth of an indoor ferris wheel filling with children, by the all-Lego, life-sized Santa Claus, by enough stuffed animals to fill a mega-pound, and up the escalator – you can already hear the fierce roaring – to the second floor where an animatronic T-Rex at least a story high, its feet planted in ancient-looking plastic ferns, its head swiveling, its serrated mouth opening, calls out to... well, all of us, to an answering roar of onrushing customers, standing guard as it is over the floor's well-labeled Jurassic Park display area.

It's an impressive sight, made more so by the shock of brand recognition – and you're talking here about a father whose kids long ago outgrew toys and who, though he had once written regularly about the toy business, probably hadn't set foot in a toy store in a decade. As T-Rex momentarily stills, I take in the action-figure landscape in this near football-field sized area, just a small part of this T-Rex of a toy palace. And here's the shock: Just about every action figure I remember from my kids' childhood years is still here. Along with a modest number of recent movie-themed figures (The Incredibles, Lord of the Rings, and Toy Story), updated Lego sets of space aliens called Bionicles, and a few modest brands I've never seen before like the Alien Racers and Yu-Gi-Oh! (Japanese robotic monsters), there are endless old friends and acquaintances from toyscapes stretching back decades. Here are the Transformers, those adaptable Japanese robots from the 1980s, and the Power Rangers (more Japanese transformable figures), and Star Wars figurines, and Superheroes that, like Captain America, reach back beyond my own childhood, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that once inhabited my son's floors, and that oldest war toy of all, G.I. Joe, still fighting, as he was in the 1980s, the evil COBRA.

It's as if I've staggered into someone's vast attic or a garage sale of unbelievable proportions. Here, under a giant Spiderman webbed to the wall and King Kong climbing a Lego Empire State Building, is a strange panorama of the "landmarks" of what now passes for history in the child's world, and an eerie reminder of how fully that staple of childhood, war-play, has changed since I was a boy.

The View from the Floor: the 1950s

In the early 1950's, my childhood years, boys (and some girls) spent hours acting out tales of American battle triumph with generic fighting figures; a crew of cowboys and bluecoats to defeat the Indians and win the West; a bag or two of olive-green marines to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima.

If ours was a sanguinary tale of warfare against savages in which pleasure came out of the barrel of a gun, it was also a recognizable part of a larger American story that could be found in any neighborhood movie theater. There, we cheered as an enemy who looked nothing like us dropped in his tens, hundreds, thousands before our blazing guns, proof of the triumph of a distinctly American goodness.

On floors nationwide, we were left alone, without apparent instruction, to reinvent such episodes in American history as we then knew it. Who was good and who was bad, who could be killed and under what conditions, were all an accepted part of a collective childhood that drew strength from post-World War II adult culture.