What Do You Want from Santa?

By Nancy R. Gibbs

Pity the toy industry and its industrial-strength elves. Over the next three weeks parents and grandparents will part with some $5 billion in toy stores across the land. But for the second straight year, America's toymakers have < not brought off the Christmas miracle they once dreamed of: the one new blockbuster toy that every child must have.

In a spirit of caution, the established companies are relying instead on their proven winners. Many are backing away from the high-tech, high-priced offerings of Christmases past, the electronic spaceships, the laser guns, the chatty dolls, stuffed with microprocessors, that weighed roughly as much as the average child. Parents and grandparents could not be more pleased. "Last year I gave my granddaughter a talking doll called Heather that cost $125," says Margaret Simpson, 71. "She was no good whatsoever. My daughter had to take her to the doll hospital for an $85 limbs transplant." The only high- tech toy to flourish is Japan's Nintendo video system, whose U.S. sales could top $1.7 billion this year, making it the No. 1 seller.

Instead, this promises to be the Year of the Classic Toy. Come Christmas morning, living rooms will be spread with some new variations on some old favorites: Lionel trains snaking around the tree, Barbie waving from her red Ferrari, G.I. Joe rappelling from the chimney with care. There will be Lego castles aloft by Christmas dinnertime, cabins carved of Lincoln Logs, and portraits etched on the Etch A Sketch. Even some new hits, like Lewis Galoob's Micro Machines, are souped-up successors to such staples as Matchbox cars. "All these toys have predictable long life," says Peter Harris, president of F.A.O. Schwarz in Manhattan, "while enhancing children's fantasies and imagination."

It takes some magic and luck, and a grasp of that most chimerical substance, a child's imagination, to make an eternal toy. The best of them are infinitely simple and endlessly entertaining. There are nearly 103 million ways, for example, in which six eight-stud Lego bricks of the same color can be joined together. An artist in Colorado has re-created part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling on his Etch A Sketch. A classic toy, says John Brandt, manager of Toys International in Los Angeles, "is something where the child's imagination is the most important thing."

Toy analysts also see some sociology behind the economics. Because baby boomers take their parenting so seriously, there is much murmuring about traditional values. Thus Kenner is pushing its Special Blessings doll, with Velcro hands that clasp and floppy knees that genuflect. The company wanted to develop a doll that "would appeal to a child's image of God as a big, * amorphous friend." Kitchenware is also popular. "I am getting my daughter a set of plastic pots and pans and a little stove and sink, which I also had," says Hillary Adams, 30, mother of Natalie, 2. "But the best are the most solid, basic toys like her wooden blocks, which have enduring value through her different stages of development."

Though children flinch at gifts that are meant to be good for them, it is still true that toys that teach unobtrusively have real staying power. "Children are extraordinarily curious about their environment," says Richard Garvey, vice president of marketing for Lego. "Fad items like Hula Hoops do not engage a child's innate desire to learn." That desire largely accounts for the ubiquitous plastic Lego bricks, which can now be found in 55% of American homes with children under 15. "The best thing about the Lego blocks," says Paul Matthews, 37, father of Paul Chandler Matthews IV, 3, "is that he always builds a whole city, which I think is great. Then he destroys it."

Teaching toys also sell every year because of those pillars of the toy store, the grandparents. If a toy is well made and useful, the grandparents will find it -- in many cases, because they played with it themselves. Crayola crayons debuted in 1903, Lincoln Logs in 1916. "Today grandparents have more time to spend with and on grandchildren than ever before," says Harris. "They are more likely to buy educational and developmental toys, and least likely to be reactive to fad items."

Equally wary of the sensations of Saturday-morning television, parents are turning instead to the icons of their youth. "Parents are buying trains now instead of other electronic toys," notes Daniel Cooney, executive vice president of Lionel Trains. In 1959, Lionel was the biggest toymaker in the land. After years of languishing, the company was bought in 1986 by a Detroit real estate developer and avid collector; this year production and sales increased by 35%. The customers are "baby-boomer fathers who have spent 20 years building careers," says Cooney, "and now they are looking back at their childhood remembering playing with their Lionel trains with their dads."

While grownups are busy becoming children again, children are intent on becoming grownups. In addition to the play pots and pans and stoves that cook, there are plastic telephones and radios. Above all, children are drawn to the "action figures" and fashion dolls, which allow them to invent grownups over whom they have complete control.

The empress of them all is Barbie, eternally 17 but now pushing 30. When she was first introduced in 1959, store owners were dubious. Many feared she was too adult, too shapely and too different to appeal to little girls and their traditional moms. This year she is second only to Nintendo: worldwide sales will top $450 million, up more than 25% from last year. Mattel sells more than 20 million Barbie fashions a year, making it one of the world's largest retailers of women's clothing.

Barbie endures in part because she evolves, as each little girl grows and as each generation changes. She has survived a sexual revolution, an army of imitators and a string of risky career moves and hairstyle changes. There was Barbie the stewardess in 1961, then Barbie the nurse (no mean feat, since 1964 was the first year she could bend her knees) and Barbie the astronaut. She apparently was completing medical school at the time, since this year she emerged as Dr. Barbie. "The toys that become classics are those that help children define themselves as they grow," says Mattel USA president Robert Sansone. "Barbie is a vehicle for rehearsing what little girls will do in later life."

For all the merits of classic toys -- their durability, their simplicity and their imaginative appeal -- the greatest strength may lie not in the child's reaction to them but in the parents'. As mothers and fathers grow ever busier and more pressed for time, they frequently resort to toys that do the parenting for them: the bears that tell bedtime stories, the plastic heroes who teach virtue. For many children, a toy whose nostalgic appeal and sheer pleasure lure parents back into the playroom may be the best present of all.

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York