Inside a long rectangular cardboard box decorated in the retro-futurism of swooping lines and NASA-inspired fonts (think Isaac Asimov and Tron) lays a single sheaf of paper cut to the same long rectangle as the cardboard box. This paper is not the Owner’s Explanation and Operating Manual. It carries this inscription:
A Message to the Citizens of Earth:
The Space Traders Federation presents SPACE WHEEL – released from Space Customs and made available to you by our earthwide distributors. SPACE WHEEL has already delighted the populations of innumerable planets. Its farsighted engineering represents a major victory in the never ending battle against the forces of friction, gravity, and entropy. What was accepted only in astrophysical quark theory is now a reeling reality. Launching SPACE WHEEL onto its curvilinear path will create the effortless motion of winding up by running down. Sit back and observe. Give it space to take its time.
Universal regards, The Space Traders Federation
Yesterday I spent some time sorting through my three plastic storage bins of personal history. One bin is labelled “Peace Corps,” another “Academia,” and the last – where the SPACE WHEEL was lurking – is the catch-all “Mark Historical.”
I don’t recall when I came into possession of the SPACE WHEEL and have only a vague recollection of having played with it. Actually, “played” may be the wrong verb; you kind of just watch it. The toy, itself, appears to me now as I assume it did when I was a kid: a cleverly designed, mildly brain-tickling illusion of perpetual motion. And because of this I assume that for most kids with a SPACE WHEEL, by the time its battery had lost its charge the toy had also lost its novelty and had become another object taking up…space…an object that no longer sparked joy, that inexorably went the way of thrift stores, swap meets, white elephants, landfills.
But my adult brain is tickled by that message, from the Space Traders Federation.
Sure, the cynic can call it a page out of the Children’s Toy Marketing Playbook: embed a mythology around a clever but – let’s be honest – one-trick-pony gadget. But contemplating the message as an adult, I think that, marketing or not, it worked. The message, which must have been genuinely delightful for someone to compose, transforms the SPACE WHEEL into more than its mechanism. It invokes the possibility – the imminent presence – of further frontiers technological and sociological. It is an invitation to imagination.
And it stands in contrast to how I assume most kids toys are packaged today, as solely functional packaging for the toy per se. As such, it evokes a time quite different from now, where children’s toys were not an inventory of big-box-store homogeneity and cheapest-to-mass-produce-wins business decisions. Indeed, the now-defunct company that made the SPACE WHEEL, Andrews Manufacturing Co., appears to have been a small operation in Eugene, Oregon (its Operating Manual includes an address to which you can send requests for replacement parts, $4.00 for a rotor, $3.00 for a set of tracks; it also apparently held the trademark for “TOP SECRET” until 1988).
That’s probably rose-colored thinking…or nostalgia-colored thinking? But it appears I’m not alone: SPACE WHEELs in good condition with original packaging sell on eBay for $150.00.