Part of the value of the original was kids could see and feel how it worked. That made it a fascinating toy. It's all been lost.
I think it's part of most things that aren't computers getting worse over the last few decades. Shit would be double the price if they still "made it like they used to". Even fast-food pizza—Pizza Hut's in fact way worse than it was even in the mid 90s (they've had at least two major reformulations of the sauce, for one thing, getting worse each time), but if you find a different pizza place that makes pizza around 90s PH quality it'll be 50+% more expensive.
But yeah, inflation's only low-single-digits percent a year. LOL sure.
I feel that this must be a strategy used on toys that were previously popular. They're not going to return to being the popular must-have item that people will pay a premium for, but there is residual value in the marketing campaign from the 80s. So the toy companies push the build quality as low as they can and milk the last good will from the brand by making it a cheap impulse purchase.
To your larger point, there are still high quality toys around. You just avoid the big Toys R Us style stores and go to an independent or smaller toy story. Plan Toys and Green Toys stick out to me as two brands which felt consistently high quality and were widely available.
Compounded inflation/interest is pretty powerful.
2% compounded over 25 years (to mark your "mid-90s" reference) would be a 64% increase, which lines up with your 50+% pretty directly.
Agreed that Pizza Hut sucks now. I sometimes wonder which has changed -- the me, or the thing. Good to know that at least with Pizza Hut, it's not all in my head.
My personal pet peeve is the plastic playing pieces of board games. Formerly well-weighted and painted, now thin cheap and with a bad sticker. How much can plastic playing pieces actually cost?
I wonder if Monopoly still ships with cast metal pieces...
It seems pretty cynical to market this in order to appeal to people like me with memories like this, with a huge dimension of the enrichment value stripped away.
I assume all of us here on HN are the type-of-person who as a child would have been fascinated about how mechanical and electromechanical toys and gizmos worked - and probably disassembled the thing to our parents' chagrin and figured out how it works (and hopefully put it back together correctly!) and ended the day with a sense of satisfaction from learning something new.
...and then I'm remind myself that we are not like everyone else: I'm still able to vividly remember the things I did with my mechanical/electro toys to see and try to understand how they worked, but that most of the other kids my age didn't: their objective was simply to use the toy as entertainment or make-believe-play or the like - not as an object of curiosity - and they weren't particularly interested in any explanation I'd have for them (it didn't help that I wouldn't have asked them if they wanted to hear my explanation in the first place though... heh)
So for us, this digital-fake of a classic toy is an insult to our imagined younger-selves of the 21st century, but when I think about this ultra-modern toy from the perspective of someone just after something of solely nostalgia value - and a modern-day kid uninterested now (and shall most-likely forever-be uninterested) in how things work then indeed none of what we're griping about here matters - in fact it's the opposite: this 2010 remake is demonstrably tougher and more resilient to damage and wear than the mechanical original despite being superficially the same - given we're in the minority overall (...I think?) then this new design is objectively better as far as moral-utilitarianism is concerned.
...and it's not like Fischer-Price is selling this remake as a toy of interest to kids with a curiosity for things mechanical. They're not being totally dishonest.
I agree with you, "we" are probably not like most people. But taking the opportunity to experiment away is such a huge loss. Giving a kid the opportunity to learn on their own is so important. It's not just the one toy, you need to give them loads of different opportunities like these. They'll pick up on some.
Maybe i never would have experimented with this particular toy as a kid. For me, it was getting a screwdriver and taking old electronics apart (and the challenge of putting them back together and still having them work!) that sparked my curiosity. Plenty of things did not, however... But the point is, i was given opportunities.
Yeah. But no, that's a stereotype.
I hated my mecano things, it was too hard to play with. I enjoyed storytelling with my LEGOs much more, my creations were just bare bones scaffoldings for the flesh my imagination would put around it.
I still work in IT and tear stuff apart every day.
With that being said it still saddens me they are digitalising full mechanical toys. It's surely rose-tinted glasses but it looked so much cooler.
The objects of curiosity don't need to be a toy, or even meant for children. Anything that can be disassembled will be disassembled by a curious child.
Too bad it's no longer possible for end users to disassemble mobile phones.
If this trend continues even wooden blocks will some day come with batteries :p
We got some of those cube ones with the letters and numbers at one point, and they were noticeably smaller and worse-finished than the ones I had as a kid in the 80s, which I'm sure were just the only blocks of that type that some cheap local store had and were probably the same quality as all such blocks on the market at the time, not something special. The newer ones looked very similar in a photo, but were missing lots of textures (kinda, you know, a big deal to babies and early toddlers) and details that mine had, and the paint chipped more easily (probably a thinner coat, I guess, plus probably just lower-quality paint).
We bought our first kid a rolling walker/phone thing with some other features—yeah, electronic crap, but at least this one had a volume setting, unlike many modern ones that are just fixed to "deafen your child" with no other options unless you break out a soldering iron. By ~4 years later, between seeing other people's version of the same thing—same brand and all—they bought a couple years after ours, and seeing newer version at the store when toy shopping, we'd noticed that the "same" product, which looked nearly identical, had had a couple revisions, each one making parts that used to move or be interactive fixed & dormant, and otherwise lowering the quality.