My current book project looks at Orientalism in American toy culture at the turn from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. Its primary objects of analysis are Japanese dolls, imports from Japan that were often imagined as Japanese American immigrants by the children who played with them. However, in researching this topic, I soon came upon another, much stranger artifact of interest: a toy called the Billiken doll. At first, this doll struck me as profoundly bizarre. It […]
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Pinball Playfields: A Flippin’ Fun Time, Part II
Pinball Playfields has a machine for everyone, and there’s always fun to be had. Part I highlighted a number of older machines, classics in their own rite. Part II contains a series of more modern machines, many of them from the exhibit’s generous sponsor, the Stern Pinball Company.
The Lord of the Rings
One Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them, one Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness, bind them. The epic fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s […]
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Ditch the “Ladies’ Guide to Football” and Get in the Game
A recent addition to The Strong museum’s collection got me thinking about how gender intersects with professional football and what’s changed (or hasn’t) since the mid-1960s.
The item that caught my eye was a 1966 promotional booklet from Birds Eye frozen foods. Titled “Ladies’ Guide to Football,ʺ It’s filled with pop-art illustrations, the rules of the game, recommended stadium attire, and recipes requiring Birds Eye products (of course). The booklet was “dedicated to those women for whom autumn Sunday afternoons are […]
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The Laserdisc Playland: Atari’s Lost Arcade Game
By Andrew Borman
When Ars Technica journalist Matt Paprocki discovered a lost Atari laserdisc title Playland, I decided to dive into the Atari Coin-Op Division corporate records at The Strong to see if we could learn more about the game, and who worked on it.
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Randomly Generated Artifact: 106.387
I usually write blogs because I’m interested in a subject. Perhaps it’s a new collection that came into The Strong museum, such as when we preserved the Skylanders collection or a new group of materials arrived from the estate of Ralph Baer. Or sometimes it’s a subject that piques my interest because it’s in the news but I also think that there’s a larger historical context that is being missed—that’s why I wrote about how violence is an inherent part […]
I Wanna Hold Your Hand(held Game)
Finally, an area where Millennials and Gen Z have an advantage: both generations have consistently had access to gaming on the go. From the Nintendo Game Boy to Tamagotchis to smartphones, if you needed to kill some time before meeting your friends (or wanted to ignore your siblings on a long car trip with the family), you could grab a portable gaming device from your backpack and voilà—instant entertainment. Our Gen X comrades remember when this wasn’t always the case. […]
Exploring Military Cards and Comics
During and following World War II, children across the United States used their pocket money to collect trading cards that depicted the activities of the U.S. military in a variety of times and places, both current conflicts such as the Pacific Theater in World War II or the Korean War of 1950–1953, and historical ones, such as the Mexican-American War and the American Revolutionary War. Although many cards showed lurid and violent conflict, much of this kind of action was […]
Pinball Playfields: A Flippin’ Good Time
Pinball is a game that dates back nearly a century, with many companies in the industry rising and falling and designers creating icons of the ever-evolving superstar of non-digital gaming. The Strong museum’s Pinball Playfields exhibit showcases some of the finest machines that the industry has ever seen and, while this is by no means a complete collection, there’s no doubt that these machines are icons in their own right.
Dancing Dolls
Take a step back in time to the oft romanticized […]
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The First Female Video Game Designer
How did you spend the summer after your high school graduation? Though that was a few more years ago than I care to enumerate, some memories spring to the forefront of my mind: feeling anxious and excited about starting college in the fall; working long hours at a family entertainment center (where I was occasionally costumed as a giant mouse…); and spending those last, warm evenings having fun with my hometown friends. I was certainly not doing anything groundbreaking—pretty much […]