Got Bush?
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For anyone out there looking to donate an artifact to LATDA, we are looking for one of those new Dubya inaction figures. We have been collecting many comic strip references to the doll… I mean, action figure, and think that there is a future show about action figures of people who have nothing to do with ‘action’.
Which brings me to the topic of what kind of toy it is appropriate for a museum to collect… The philosophy at LATDA is that we will collect with themes for exhibitions in mind. Ideally we would like objects in our collection to reflect the best and sometimes the worst in toy design, but where do you draw the line? For example, the George Bush figure controversy also led us to look at the talking Governator doll, supposedly depicting Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is his voice in the microchip, but the head looks nothing like the subject. It would be better to buy a replacement chip from the company and insert/attach it to a real Terminator action figure. At least people who license images from movies have to hew to a certain level of quality control.
When I visited the site that produces this particular doll, they had an entire line of politically satirical dolls. They had accumulated quite a bit of hate mail that they posted for all to see. The fact that they produce custom action figures was interesting (although, again, the quality was dubious) but I didn’t know whether it was appropriate to support them.
Which brings me to the topic of what kind of toy it is appropriate for a museum to collect… The philosophy at LATDA is that we will collect with themes for exhibitions in mind. Ideally we would like objects in our collection to reflect the best and sometimes the worst in toy design, but where do you draw the line? For example, the George Bush figure controversy also led us to look at the talking Governator doll, supposedly depicting Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is his voice in the microchip, but the head looks nothing like the subject. It would be better to buy a replacement chip from the company and insert/attach it to a real Terminator action figure. At least people who license images from movies have to hew to a certain level of quality control.
When I visited the site that produces this particular doll, they had an entire line of politically satirical dolls. They had accumulated quite a bit of hate mail that they posted for all to see. The fact that they produce custom action figures was interesting (although, again, the quality was dubious) but I didn’t know whether it was appropriate to support them.