“Projecting Play: The Give-a-Show Projector and Children’s Audiovisual Media Toys of the Twentieth Century,”
Since the popularization of the commercial magic lantern and the inception of cinema in the nineteenth century, the toy industry has mirrored developments in audiovisual media through the production of toy versions of popular entertainment technologies. Despite the material and technological similarities shared with their adult-sized counterparts, early media toys were differentiated on the market by their pejorative status as “only” or “merely” children’s playthings. However, these objects were often not just mock-ups of their “real” counterparts designed for adults, but functional versions of these technologies (albeit often scaled down for smaller users). Toy magic lanterns and cinematographs of the early twentieth century gave way to perpetually changing combinations of audiovisual dispositives in the mid-twentieth century, during which time the children’s market was saturated with a range of toy projectors and phonographs.
Using Kenner’s Give-a-Show projector, originally introduced in 1960, as a core case study, this chapter considers the mid-twentieth century playscape of children’s audiovisual media toys. It traces out both the undergirding technological configurations that facilitated the mass production of toy projectors, phonographs, and related playthings, as well as consider the play patterns that these toys encouraged. Changes across various models of the Give-a-Show, such as the integration of phonographic capabilities and later, the audiocassette, help chart a historical narrative about the strategies employed to keep the threat of obsolescence at bay. Conversely, components shared in common across models of the projector, such as the incandescent light bulb, reveal toymakers’ reliance on adjacent technologies and their assumed longevity. Drawing upon media archaeology scholarship and material culture methods, the chapter further puts hands-on analysis into dialogue with the work of contemporary communities of collectors and historians to consider the extent to which these changing technological components, in turn, may have changed children’s informal cultures of performance, exhibition, and display associated with these toys.