Lite-Brite

Have you ever thought "man, if only my 4 year olds hideous artwork could be lit up like a neon sign"? If so, then perhaps Lite Brite was the toy for you.

I actually owned a Lite Brite, but mine was a hand me down and it came from my father, who rarely managed to afford his own clothes let alone toys for a child he barely ever saw when he wasn't in jail, so my opinion on it might not be exactly valid because I didn't get to play with it much, nor did it have all the pieces, as far as I can remember. But still, I do have a memory of sitting and playing with one, and...in all fairness...I like the Lite Brite. But I also like colored lights. I've had fat bulbed christmas lights strung up in my bedroom for years now, I had lava lamps growing up and I've always found the lights on a car dashboard to be particularly soothing for some reason. Neon lights especially though. I'm an enormous fan of neon lights. Part of that is the artist in me, but the other part is, once again, I find them oddly comforting. I don't know why, so don't ask, I just do.

So in theory, the Lite Bright is a great toy for me. Plus, as a little girl with enormous artistic interests, any toy that allowed me to make something out of it as a big winner in my book. Perhaps this is because most of those kinds of toys, like the Etch-A-Sketch or the Spirograph, were downright dumb and didn't actually let you accomplish whatever you wanted. But a Lite Brite was basically just a big ol' neon sign you could make into anything. It really gave you creative freedom in a visual manner. The toy was invented by a man named Joseph Mr. Burck, of whom I can find almost no other information on. I did manage to scrounge up the fact that he was the senior designer and toy inventor at Marvin Glass & Associates. That company, by the way, is a big time toy maker.

Mavin Glass (and all his relative associates, apparently), was a toy design and engineering firm based in Chicago. Marvin Glass - and his aforementioned associates, I guess - actually wound up creating some of the most successful toys and games of the twentieth century, including Rock Em Sock Em Robots, Mouse Trap, Operation, Simon, and the ever famous Evel Knieval stunt cycle, along with this toy we're discussing right now. That's a pretty solid resume, if I may say so myself. In fact, we have Mr. Glass to thank for licensing Eddy Goldfarbs novelty talking teeth item back in 1949. Yeah. This guy was a pretty damn big deal. So, when Burck came along in the mid 60s, he brought with him an array of ideas, many of which wound up being the companies hottest items. These two were unstoppable together. Burck holds 10 US patents for items developed by MGA. That's pretty good, man.

Lite Brite was licensed to, a surprise to nobody at this point, Hasbro, and eventually named one of the top 100 toys of all time by Time Magazine. In fact, my timing for this post couldn't have been any better, as Lite Brite is currently a finalist for the class of 2020 inductions into the National Toy Hall of Fame.

It's a pretty easy toy to understand and use, which is likely part of what helped it success. Anything that's capable of being understood by anyone of any age range is going to have a wider market to sell to. You simply punch multi colored translucent plastic pegs through opaque black paper, and using a standard light bulb, the light is blocked by the paper except where the pegs conduct the light. This gives the pegs a visual appearance not unlike that of LED's. And of course there's multiple versions, including a 3d one because there's a fucking 3d version of everything now whether anyone wants it or not, but nothing in my mind really beats the classic.

As I said, I only have very faint memories of playing with it, but I do remember it. Sitting at my uncles table with the lights in the kitchen off and plopping these little pegs into the board to create whatever image I wanted. Lite Brite came with templates you could follow, much like Connect The Dots, but where's the fun in making a picture someone has already made, right? I wanted to create, and so I did. And while there's been knock offs and copycats, none have really ever managed to capture that same sort of beautiful otherworldly almost ethereal aesthetic that the pegs with Lite Brite managed to capture. It's just...sort of....beautiful, in its own way. Plus I'm willing to bet it saved a lot of money for parents who didn't want to either buy reams of paper for their kids to destroy or pay for the repairs when their kids colored on the walls. The only downside of course is that whatever you make is temporary, unless you decide to never remove the pegs, or you take a picture maybe. But as a kid, everything is temporary. Only as an adult do people seem to yearn for object permanence. As a kid, perhaps because of my autism, I yearned for object permanence myself, but that's a different story for another day, and probably another blog.

Lite Brite is a classic, no question about it. Partially because it's just a really simple and unique idea, and partially because there's also not really anything else like it.