Game Changer
Please, I'm begging, not another Pokemon-like craze.
Dear Dale Gago:
Stop your bosses now, before it's too late. You were quoted in this newspaper recently as the spokesperson for Spin Master, a toy company that has loosed upon the world something called Bakugan, a collectible series of spheres that pop open to produce the kind of monsters that used to stomp all over tiny reproductions of Osaka in all those movies that Feep the Robot once introduced on Fantasmic Features. Bakugan is now said to be all the rage among America's younger children. Lord, no. In my time as a parent, I have lived through Transformers, Battle Beasts, Pogs, Magic: The Gathering, and, of course, Pokemon. I still step on the occasional Battle Beast that has been hiding under a bookcase for 20 years, waiting for its last chance to strike. I have alarmed convenience store clerks by attempting to purchase gum with a Magic-era "Wrath of God" card that's been sitting in my wallet since the start of the Clinton administration, and I went to see the Pokemon movie, which was about as comprehensible as Un Chien Andalou, except louder. There's no reason for another generation of parents to go through that kind of hell. You are not creating a new line of toys. You are creating a new form of currency. You are giving children their own de facto cash with which to buy, sell, and cheat each other. You are training the next generation of
Charles P. Pierce
