Back to the drawing board

The official story peddled about this toy’s genesis is that four Japanese engineers were trying to solve the problem of creating a dustless chalkboard. Oh yeah? It’s called a pen and paper, lads. Or is that just too simple for you? Such a story is obviously an elaborate smokescreen for Tyco’s real motivation, which can be neatly summed up in the phrase “let’s get one up on those Etch-A-Sketch bastards”¹.

Now’t more than a magnetic doodling pad (now, how do they think of those brand names, eh?) or, more accurately, a honeycombed magnetophoretic display lattice, Magna Doodle shared a lot in common with its chunky red cousin. That is to say, there was a load of metallic crap in there, and you could draw and erase repeatedly at will. But where the newer box excelled was in the introduction of the magnetic stylus pen, which lent it one important advantage; freehand drawing. No more zig-zagging across the screen to fill in an important detail, now you could quite literally dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s (and dot the little “j”s and cross the capital “Q”s – let’s go mad!). At long last, freedom from the tyranny of toymaking pedagogues lay in your hand².

One thing Magna Doodle couldn’t do, though, was let you colour your pictures in. The tyranny of the torpid ferrous particle remained. But, bursting out of this murky dark grey on grey world, we should also mention Tomy’s rich kids’ toy, Lights Alive. We’re not even pretending to know how this one worked, suffice to say you could get stuck in about it with a variery of handheld shapes and produce a multi-coloured Family Fortunes board of pixellated artwork.

The box it came in included some great ‘serving suggestions’ for the toy, ranging from drawing a big twinkling elephant to playing noughts and crosses – futuristically! Alas, after writing your own name on it and then possibly some mild sweary-words (“SNOG!”) Lights Alive’s appeal would again quickly dim. And worse than that, it was supposed to be “educational” too.

Ultimately, both these toys fell out of favour with kids for precisely the same reason they were popular with parents: if these were your drawing implements of choice, how on earth were you supposed to make a right old scrawly mess of the living room walls?