Turmoil in the Toybox
Phillips
1986
Did you know that Barbie, GI Joe, and Rainbow Brite are out to corrupt your children?
We have featured our guy Phil sharing his SHOCKING truth about Saturday cartoons that will corrupt and ruin your children. He also has a thing against dinosaurs. This stuff is the equivalent of Christian click bait. This time our guy Phil wants to talk about the cult influences of the toys. If you were a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all of your favorite toys have been outed as evil influence by Mr. Phillips. Right now, you could be walking around with all this evil inside of you and NOT EVEN KNOW IT!
If there is one redeeming quality to this discussion, it is the marketing of toys and other products directly to children. De-regulation in the 1980s opened up more aggressive advertising to children. However, Phil thinks its the devil and it really is just profit.
Mary
If I hadn’t read the blurb I’d have thought it was a middle grade adventure novel, something like a precurser to Toy Story. It’s an inviting cover, so a lot of kids who picked it up must have been very disappointed. Can we trace our country’s present turmoil to Skeletor and Frosta?
I thought the same… I literally thought it’s a kind of “early toy story” until I did read the rest of the article…
I remember seeing the always terrifying Jan Crouch on TBN (the religious channel) saying that she threw some GI Joe and Star Wars figures into the fireplace and she heard screams of terror coming from the fire. Or as I suspect maybe it was from the kids who’d just had their favorite toys thrown into the fireplace by some crying overly made-up woman. Either way it was around this time.
You had to Google her, didn’t you, Persia?
You have only yourself to blame for that scary, scary image on your laptop…
*hides under table*
Daaaamn that is impressive (3 pics of her that came up on Bing) in an off way.
Didn’t this guy know that Skeletor is the bad guy ? Not that it mattered, I suppose, if even Rainbow Brite was pure evil. No wonder I’m so messed up. And even less wonder some of the toys were so hard to find, this genius was buying them all. 🙂
Is it me, or does Mr. Phil Phillips look like a demon from the original TV show Charmed?
I wonder if this book is where my Sunday School teacher got the idea that the Smurfs were evil. She told us one Sunday that dead people turn blue, so therefore the Smurfs were supposed to represent dead people reanimated through sorcery. It never stopped me from watching them.
I also played with a lot of She-Ra and He-Man figures as a kid and somehow didn’t grow up to be a teenager that was involved in “actual occult practices”.
Oh, it was all part of a meme that was going around at the time: that everything your kids liked was evil and satanic, and that youthful self-expression or use of imagination would cause them to lose their souls. This book is an artifact and example of those ideas, but it’s very far from unique.
This was also the era when some people would hand out Jack Chick tracts on Halloween instead of candy, if anyone’s looking for more “fun” things to google.
Reminds me of the old definition of a fundamentalist: A person who is horrified by the idea that somewhere, someone is having fun.
I had read a similar definition of puritan: person haunted by the sneaking suspicion that somewhere, someone is having fun.
The version I heard was a puritan, but yah, same joke.
I guess Phil only allowed children to play with blocks (no alphabet, the kiddies might spell something evil) and other boring toys made entirely of wood that kids would have had in the Middle Ages or something.
That photo makes him look like… well, he’d be sending out the wrong signals to a certain percentage of other men.
I blame his parents for naming him Phillip Phillips; that’s got to mess someone up. He didn’t have any fun as a kid, so he didn’t want any other children to.
I notice that the themes of all these shows (other than selling toys) were about cooperation, supporting your fellow persons/ponies/Smurfs, forgiveness, and fighting evil.
I think a really old book based partially on the life and philosophy of a nice Jewish teacher exists, and that guy was in favor of all those things. I’m sure Phil wouldn’t ever read that.
Here’s a short article about him and his work:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Phil_Phillips
Bonus anti-Semitism! You KNOW Phil wouldn’t hold with that guy I mentioned above, then.
American evangelicals wouldn’t accept anything outside of their narrow little beliefs, they are as hardcore as the Taliban. The jewish teacher you mentioned is probably evil for them and I could imagine they would even start antisemitic babble based on this.
If by “wrong signals” you think he looks gay, just one gay guy’s opinion but I don’t see that at all. He just looks repellant. I wouldn’t be surprised if He-Man’s physique gave him strange and scary feelings though.
I loved Garbage Pail kids and can see why adults wouldn’t like them, but Cabbage Patch Kids? Adoption is something evangelicals love to promote. Maybe the problem was the shopping craze/demand, which was the adults’ fault.
“What kind of world do we live in, where we kill babies and adopt dolls?”(paraphrased, but that’s the gist of it).
Over 100,000 “in print” means that 100,000 haven’t been SOLD, at least not to people who plan to read it. That usually means the book was printed up mainly for handing out to churches and church-connected schools, for something like this.
You reminded me of those “Chick tracts” that I’ve seen 2 of in my life and their similar approach to numbers.
I really want to know what is dangerous about the Care Bears and My Little Pony. I’ll never know how I was “harmed” by all the time I spent playing with Cotton Candy and Butterscotch and Cheer Bear. 😉
I think they can do magic from their bellies?
The Garbage Pail Kids trading cards were created by Art Spiegelman, later the author of the Pulitzer Prize graphic book Maus.
In the example this author cites, the influence of “Mad” magazine on Spiegelman is obvious.
People like this “author” are the exact ones who are right now banning “Maus” from being used in schools, for reasons I’m sure you can all guess.
Ol’ Phil seems a lot more familiar with the details of occult symbols and witchcraft practices than most people… things that make you go hmmmm…
Regarding page 94, children of normal intelligence (and most of them who have developmental disabilities) are completely aware that these characters aren’t real, and the toys are plastic. It’s adults like Phil that seem to have trouble with the concept.
I very much doubt that’s Jesus Christ being crucified on the pentagram. Looks more like Conan the Barbarian or any one of a dozen other dark-haired sword and sorcery heroes. Certainly, he’s wearing the garb of the genre. May as well add that I’ve never seen Jesus depicted as clean-shaven.
Hot damn! I remember my mom having this book in the 80s and her panic over Dungeons and Dragons. I guess since I couldn’t play it as a kid is why I happily get together with some pals every week now while I’m in my forties! Good stuff Awful Library Books – hadn’t thought of this gem in ages!
Legos?! NO!!!!! Actually Phil Phillips is wrong. Here’s to Legos.
My mom had this book and went on an anti-cartoons, anti-toy rampage until even her Christian friends told her to walk it back a bit.
Smurfs have an alchemist (Gargamel), drug use (the Enchanted Forest method of travel), and pagan elements. My parents did not let me play D & D and I thought it was because of this but it wasn’t – they had no problem with my mythology books.