Pre Conversations with Toys

Now today’s episode is a little different.

Usually, we spend our time tracking the lives of composers, musicians, and artists—people whose names end up in history books, or on album covers, or carved into theater walls. We talk about how they changed the sound of a century, or rewired what pop music could be, or turned their lives into performance.

But for a while now, I’ve been quietly working on something a bit… stranger.

For December, I’m moving us into a different kind of gallery altogether—one where almost nothing is bigger than a shoebox, and yet the stories are enormous.

Transcript

This is Celebrate Creativity. I’m George Bartley and this episode is Pre-Conversations with Toys, and  one quick note before we settle in this series of conversations.

Now today’s episode is a little different.

Usually, we spend our time tracking the lives of composers, musicians, and artists—people whose names end up in history books, or on album covers, or carved into theater walls. We talk about how they changed the sound of a century, or rewired what pop music could be, or turned their lives into performance.

But for a while now, I’ve been quietly working on something a bit… stranger.

For December, I’m moving us into a different kind of gallery altogether—one where almost nothing is bigger than a shoebox, and yet the stories are enormous.

I’m talking about toys.

Not a catalog.
Not a shopping guide.
And not a half-hour commercial for anyone’s brand.

Think of this episode as me pulling up a chair by the fire and saying:
 
“Can I tell you what I’m working on—and why I’m a little obsessed with it?”

Because over the next stretch of episodes, we’re going to be visiting a place that only exists in sound: a fictional museum of toys and childhood artifacts, after closing time.

And before we walk into that museum together, I wanted to spend this episode just talking to you—about where the idea came from, why toys, and what I hope you’ll hear in those stories.


GEORGE (still gentle):
One quick note before we settle in.

This series will blend real history with imagination—there will be fictional scenes, talking toys, and one very opinionated night watchman. While I do my best to keep the facts straight, these episodes are dramatizations, not documentaries or professional advice.

And when we mention real toys, products, or brands, those references are for storytelling only. Nothing in this podcast is authorized by or endorsed by any company, museum, or manufacturer.

All right. Let’s get comfortable.

If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you might be thinking,
“George, you’ve spent months with Bach and Jimi Hendrix and Madonna. How did we end up in the toy aisle?”

It’s a fair question.

Part of the answer is that toys have been following me around lately—popping up in books on my nightstand, in conversations with friends, in boxes pulled down from closets.

But the deeper answer is this:

The more I read and the more I remember, the more I realize:
toys are often the first little sparks of creativity we’re given.

Before anyone ever steps on a stage, or writes a song, or composes a symphony, most of us stage something much smaller: the drama on the living-room carpet.

Two cars, nose to nose.
A doll and a stuffed bear, having an argument.
A tower of blocks, built carefully and then gloriously knocked down.

If you watch a child with toys long enough, you’re watching a little director at work. A designer. A storyteller. A composer of sound effects.

Toys are the first “studio” most of us ever have access to.
No budget. No permission forms. No critics.
Just objects, and imagination, and time.

And that realization kept tugging at me: if Celebrate Creativity is a show about how human beings make things—music, stories, performances—how could I not eventually walk back to those first little sparks?

Let me stay with that connection for a minute.

Toys are, in one sense, just objects. Plastic, fabric, wood, metal. They sit on a shelf doing absolutely nothing.

The creativity happens when a child walks into the room.

That’s when the toy becomes a story starter.
It’s just a bear… until it becomes the captain of a ship.
It’s just a car… until it becomes a rescue vehicle, or a villain’s getaway car, or a spaceship.
It’s just a set of blocks… until it becomes a castle, or a city, or a very shaky bridge over a lava floor.

Every time a child picks up a toy and says, “This one is the hero,” or “These two are best friends,” or “What if this is secretly a dragon?”, they’re doing what writers and directors and designers do all the time: they’re assigning roles. They’re building a world.

Toys also teach us something crucial about creativity:

They show us that we can make rules—and then bend them.

Board games and building sets arrive with instructions. Here’s how many cards you get. Here’s where this piece goes. Here’s the “right” way to build the model.
And if you’ve ever played with kids, you know what happens next.

Five minutes later, the official rules are out the window and you’re playing… something else:

“What if the car can fly?”

“What if the teddy bear is invisible?”

“What if the villain wins this time?”

“What if we use this game board for a completely different story?”

That little phrase—“What if?”—is the heartbeat of creativity. It’s the same question a songwriter asks staring at a blank page, or a painter asks facing a canvas, or a choreographer asks looking at an empty stage.

Toys are often the first, safest place where that creative “what if” gets to run wild.

And then there’s the quieter layer:

Toys are tiny cultural mirrors.

Every toy carries a set of messages about the world:
Who gets to be a hero.
What a “family” looks like.
What jobs are exciting, what bodies are admired, what stories are repeated.

Sometimes a toy reinforces those messages. Sometimes a child uses the toy to argue back.

A fashion doll might arrive in the box saying one thing.
In the child’s hands, she becomes a scientist, or a pirate, or the president.

A little plastic house might be sold with one kind of family.
A child sits down and says, “No… in my version, it’s different.”

That, too, is creativity: looking at a script handed to you and saying, “I’m going to rewrite this.”

So when I say toys are “little sparks of creativity,” I don’t just mean they keep kids busy. I mean they’re rehearsal rooms—for storytelling, for rule-making, for breaking the rules, for imagining different selves and different worlds.

And if we pay attention to those little rehearsal rooms, I think we learn a lot about the bigger works of art that come later.

All of this was swirling around in my head when a picture started to form.

I kept seeing a museum—a big, slightly creaky old building dedicated entirely to toys and childhood artifacts.

Not a children’s museum with hands-on exhibits, though there’s nothing wrong with those.
This was more like a cross between an art museum and an attic. Glass cases, long hallways, faded posters, shelves full of toys from different eras.

And then, because my brain tends to do this, I dropped that museum into the middle of the night.

The doors are closed.
The school groups have gone home.
The gift shop is dark.

And somewhere in that building, a lone night watchman is making his rounds.

In my mind, he’s a man with his own history, his own aches, probably a few regrets. He’s there to check locks and look for leaks and make sure nothing goes bump in the night.

And then, when the building gets very quiet, he starts to hear… voices.

Not ghostly moans.
Not alarms.

Toys.

Let me take you there—just for a minute.

I'd like to introduce you to the night watchmen.  His name is Ebenezer Smith, and he has a lot to say.

Thank you Mr. Bartley. “Every night, same route, same echo of my footsteps. Now, the paperwork calls this place the Metropolitan Museum of Toys & Childhood Artifacts. I just call it ‘the place where everything remembers.’

By day, you got kids with juice boxes and parents with strollers, leaning over the glass. You got docents giving speeches about the history of the yo-yo and the invention of the action figure.

You ever been in a room so quiet you can hear thoughts?
I walk past these cases and I swear, sometimes, I hear them.
The teddy bears.
The plastic cars with chipped paint.
The dolls whose hair has been brushed so much it’s more hope than hairstyle.
They don’t move. They’re very well-behaved museum pieces.
But in the middle of all that silence, they remember.

They remember the hands that held them, the bedrooms they lived in, the Christmas mornings and the birthdays, the long afternoons where they were dragged through the backyard on some grand adventure.

And if I’m patient—if I just stand here a while—they just might talk.”

(light chuckle):
“Course, I can’t listen to all of ’em. I’d lose my mind. So I made myself a rule:

One toy a night.

I pick one shelf, one case, one object.

And I listen.”

That’s the world we’re going to be wandering through in December—not a commercial, not a toy review show, but an audio museum where each episode is one night, one conversation, one toy.

And I’ll be honest with you: this isn’t just an abstract idea for me.  No Mr. Bartley …

Since I’ve been working on these episodes—drafting scripts, reading about toy history, remembering my own favorite objects—I’ve had an experience I didn’t quite expect.

There are days when my body is very clear with me about how old it is, and how much it would like to file a complaint.

But when I sit down to work on these toy episodes—when I start writing the Night Watchman’s rounds or imagining how a particular toy might speak—something happens.
Hours pass.
The pain doesn’t disappear, but it steps politely into the next room.
My mind gets busy.
Not with worry.
Not with news headlines.
With play.
And I realized: I am, in a sense, doing what children do on the living-room floor—I’m taking these small objects and using them as excuses for stories.

Some of those stories will be funny.
Some will be tender.
Some might get a little eerie or bittersweet when we talk about the toys that get left behind.

But underneath all of them is the same question:

“What happens if I listen closely to the objects that helped us learn to imagine?”

And that feels… worth doing.

Let me talk a little bit about how this is going to work, practically speaking.

For December, we’re going to stay fairly close to the present.

Each episode will center on a toy that is popular right now—this season, this Christmas. The kind of toy you might see on the end cap at a big-box store, or on a commercial, or hidden in the back of a closet waiting for its big reveal.

You’ll meet some of the names you’d absolutely expect:

A very confident fashion doll who has spent decades changing outfits and changing expectations.

A tiny car convinced it’s the fastest thing in the known universe… even though it lives in a plastic track on a bedroom floor.

A soft plush toy with very strong opinions about being hugged, slept on, and occasionally cried into.

Maybe a building set that is quietly suspicious of instructions.

In each of those episodes, the Night Watchman will pick one toy from the museum’s shelves and have a conversation with it.
But he’s not just chatting … he’s not just talking … he's having a conversation. And that makes all the difference.

We’ll weave in the real history behind that toy: who designed it, when it exploded in popularity, what it was trying to say about the world, and what messages people actually heard.

We’ll talk about the controversies and the love letters, the marketing campaigns and the homemade modifications.

We’ll ask questions such as:
What did this toy teach kids about beauty, or speed, or strength, or friendship?
Who saw themselves in it—and who didn’t?
How did kids quietly change the story, just by playing differently than the commercials suggested?

So December will be our “present-tense” walk through the museum—starting with the toys on today’s shelves, and listening for the way they spark imagination now.

Then, when the holiday rush settles and the wrapping paper is gone, Celebrate Creativity is going to keep walking the long hallway of history.

We’ll move past the brand-new exhibits and down some quieter hallways.
Back to the handmade toys—rag dolls sewn at kitchen tables, carved animals whittled by hand.
To early board games that taught people what a “modern” city looked like.
To wind-up toys, and tin soldiers, and the first plastic empires.
We’ll look at building toys and see the rise of skyscrapers and suburbia.
We’ll look at simple marbles and jacks and see what children did before screens.

I Will ask:
What did children do with these objects?
What did adults hope they would do with them?
And what can we learn, now, from the gap between those two?

Because in the end, a toy is never just a toy.
It’s a tiny cultural artifact, a little memory device, a spark plug for the imagination.
And I think there’s something beautiful about treating those objects with the same curiosity and respect we bring to a symphony or a great novel.

Let me step back into the museum for just a moment and let our night watchman explain his “one toy per night” philosophy, because it’s become a kind of guiding rule for me, too.
Oh and here's the night watchmen again again - “People sometimes say to me—well, if the toys talk, why don’t you just stand here all night and interview all of ’em?

And I tell ’em:
You ever try to listen to twenty conversations at once?
You don’t really hear any of ’em.
So I made myself a rule.
One toy per night.
I slow down.
I lean on the railing.
I pick one bear, one car, one doll, one game.
And I stay long enough to hear more than just the headline.
Sometimes it’s a famous one—a toy that’s been on a million birthday lists.
Sometimes it’s the thing nobody notices anymore, with the paint rubbed off and the box long gone.
Either way, if you give ’em time, they’ll tell you more than you expect.
And if I’m being honest…
That rule’s not just about the toys.
It’s about me.
I get tired.
I get overwhelmed.
This world is loud.
So I decided there’s at least one place in my life where I’m going to listen slowly.”

Thank you Ebeneezer.

When I wrote that little rule for him—“one toy per night”—I realized I was also writing something I needed to hear.
We live in a moment where everything is loud and fast and constantly refreshing.
We’re encouraged to skim, to scroll, to move on quickly.
This toy series, for me, is an excuse to do the opposite.
To stop in front of one small object—a doll, a car, a stuffed animal—and say:
“Wait a minute.
Where did you come from?
What did you mean to the kids who loved you?
What do you say about the time and place that made you?”
And then to stay long enough to hear an answer.
If that sounds a little sentimental, it might be.
But I don’t think it’s trivial.
Because the way we treat these small, “unimportant” objects often mirrors the way we treat our own early memories—and even the people in our lives who don’t make headlines.
Taking toys seriously, in the right way, is a rehearsal for taking people seriously. For listening to stories that might otherwise be thrown out.

So that’s what I’ve been building in the background: a kind of audio museum, a night watchman with a sore back and a good heart, a set of toys that are very eager to talk, and a long hallway of history we’ll walk down together.
If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, you’re welcome to come along.
Over the next few episodes, we’ll meet one toy at a time—mostly modern ones in December—and let their stories open up into history, culture, and memory.
If you’d like to do a little homework—not the painful kind, I promise—you might take a moment over the next few days and think about the toy you’d put in our museum.
It might be something you actually still own, tucked into a drawer.
It might be something that vanished decades ago but still shows up in your mind from time to time.
If you feel like sharing that story with me, you’re welcome to do that, too.
I may not be able to include every story in the show, but I promise they’ll shape the way I think about these episodes.

Mostly, I wanted tonight to be a chance to sit with you, quietly, and say:

“Here’s where Celebrate Creativity is heading for a while.

Aquarium from Carnival of the Animals, Composed by Camille Sans-Saen, Performed by the Seattle Youth Orchestra. Source: https://musopen.org/music/1454-the-carnival-of-the-animals/. License: Public Domain (composition) / Creative Commons (recording).