5 Questionable Inductees to the National Toy Hall of Fame

5 Ball

See what I mean? Unmistakably dog-coded. In 2009, they snuck “Ball” onto this hallowed list alongside Big Wheel and Nintendo Game Boy. At first, when I saw they had written two chunky paragraphs about the concept of “Ball,” I laughed. But soon fear shot through my body as I realized: that was the exact task ahead of me. 

Sure, they cover a brief history of the ball — ancient Mesoamericans, inflated pig bladders, the 1908 banger “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” — but where’s the spice? Where’s the sizzle? 

The National Toy Hall of Fame has the perfect answer: accidental innuendo. They use the words “ball play” more liberally than about 75 percent of the content ever published on Cracked, including what we call “The Genital Years.” The Museum of Play assures the reader that:

• “Ball play of every kind is pervasive.” 
• “History abounds with stories and evidence of ball play.” 
• “Literature and culture are full of references to people playing with balls. And it is appropriate.” 

And in case you haven’t yet gotten your rocks off, don’t worry: “Ball play is here to stay.”

4 Blanket

2011 was a huge year for entertainment. LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” dropped, audiences flocked to see Jack and Jill in theaters and the National Toy Hall of Fame inducted the dollhouse, Hot Wheels and the blanket. 

The museum’s prose expertly links the utilitarian origins of the wooly mammoth-fur blanket to the appearances it makes on the modern-day iPad kid’s daily schedule: a king’s robe, a hero’s cape, an essential prop for the aspiring magician or puppeteer. It’s easy to assume the curator forgot they had a third essay due that day, looked around the room in a panic and nominated the first thing they saw. But if that’s the case, they absolutely nailed it. Despite my fully cooked frontal lobe and the option to go do hard drugs instead, I, a grown adult, am inspired to make a blanket fort in my own dismal studio apartment.

3 Cardboard Box

Okay, so this is more traditionally cat territory. But we know Odie loves to steal Garfield’s little cardboard bed, so maybe dogs secretly yearn for the box. However you want to justify it, the cardboard box was the first “toy of the imagination” to find itself in this vaunted hall of renown in 2006. You can just hear the needle scratch on Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” when “Cardboard Box” was announced alongside Candy Land and Jack-in-the-Box.

The induction essay tells a compelling history of the cardboard box: the invention of cardboard in China in the 1600s, a sequel to “paper” almost two millennia in the making; its use as a hat storage device in the early 1800s; how it took American ingenuity to mass-produce the first “really efficient cardboard box” in 1879, sparking a wildfire of creativity among the youth of the planet. 

As the museum went to town describing the different vehicles and structures children love to make with cardboard boxes, I felt my brain switching gears from wanting to make fun of their prose to wondering how much Lowes sells cardboard boxes for (less than three bucks a pop!).

2 Stick

We’re about one degree of separation from The Ren & Stimpy Show’s Log commercial here, but the museum makes a compelling argument for the stick being “the world’s oldest toy” and “the original building blocks for creative play.” It was added back in 2008 (alongside the baby doll and the skateboard), and followers of the stick would only grow more emboldened over the next decade and a half — there are thousands of Hashtag StickNation posts on TikTok alone.

Kids use sticks to invent weapons of war, to help them go off trail at Cub Scout camp and get poison ivy, and to tempt childhood obesity by turning a sprig of dogwood into a bouquet of roasted marshmallows. 

Sticks, man. Can’t beat ‘em.

1 Sand

It sounds crazy, but historically and sociologically, sand is an absolute banger. It’s a no-brainer for this list, and frankly, I’m surprised it took until 2021 to make the cut. Early photographs show people goofing around at the beach, burying one another and wishcasting genitals on their friends and neighbors. Earlier still, newspaper articles from the early 1800s mention sand castles and sand sculpture contests. But sand was the flashpoint for one of the most important sociological developments in American history: the playground.

Physician Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska was on vacation in Germany in 1885 when she noticed an emerging trend there: big ol’ piles of dirt meant to lure kids, which they more elegantly called “sand gardens.” When she returned to Boston, she dumped her own hulking mound of dry dirt on a chapel yard, and let the local kids go nuts on it. It became immediately clear that sandboxes were a perfect way to keep kids occupied and away from the danger of the streets. Those sandboxes were soon complemented with slides, jungle gyms and other obstacles, and eventually largely replaced with the cheaper, less ringworm-friendly woodchip. 

But until they vacuum up all the sand on the beach, kids will always play in their disease-ridden dirt piles.