Brand / toys Mexico City
In May 2011, JWT made an extreme data visualization move with the launch of BrandToys, an online platform that generates “playful visualizations of the personality and online buzz of brands” in the form of cartoonish toys. The toys’ silhouettes and features vary in relation to social media data from SocialMention and info from the Millward Brown’s BrandZ survey. Users can do side-by-side comparisons, share findings, and get the toys rendered in 3D printing by Sculpteo.
I was thinking about brand and Brandtoys when I entered MUJAM (Museo del Juguete Antigui de México), the Museum of Antique Toys in Mexico City, which I visited recently on a friends’ recommendation. Since 1955, Roberto Shimizu, the museum’s Japanese, DF-born curator, has been “keeping, not collecting,” thousands of toys from the stationery and toy store his family ran for decades around the corner.
MUJAM is in the business of preserving cheap, plastic, “uncollectible” toys, specifically those that are Mexican-made (these days almost all Mexican toys are made in China). To Shimizu, the museum’s location in Colonia Doctores, a working-class neighborhood full of funeral parlors and chop shops, is crucial – the museum is a repository for disposables in a disposable part of the city. On the top floor, there’s the entire line of Mexican Barbie and her boyfriend Riccardo (Ken sounded “too foreign”); downstairs, the Mexican manufactures and wild display cases that include a gutted electric reactor and Twin Towers replica. “Mexican toys are naive,” Shimizu explains. “Now we call them outsider art, or Art Brut.” Freed from the constraints of American choking-hazard regulations, the tiny parts and precise detailing on the Mexican toys are awesome.
The main floor holds the international goods. “German toys are perfect replicas. German toys are designed – no, devised. Look at this, a perfect stove, a toy for parents. But this funny talking monkey? Japanese toys, they have a dream.” The museum is a special foreign prism for global/American brand culture, a chance to see the ways little kids in Mexico handled Coca Cola, Ronald McDonald, the Hulk, and UFOs among German model cars and Luchadores.
Haven’t toys always been a kind of data visualization? Ever since Disney stuffed Mickey and Hess sold its first toy truck, toys have operated at the nexus of consumer marketing and daily play. But MUJAM shows how these brand currents cross international lines, getting reshuffled and remixed in the process. For example, the museum is packed with Batman, but not always in his intended configuration: in the gift shop I bought a set of 12 tiny, evil plastic superheroes from the 80s, arms held out at the sides like Vegas showgirls, with plastic capes and pasted-on Batman heads.
Noticing my admiration for a particular Star Wars alien, Shimizu explains that it’s the Mexican rip-off of the American original. He tells me, gravely, that it’s “rarer than the collectible version,” since all the others in the Mexican series have been lost or thrown away.
Though perhaps not as rigorous (or objective) as the JWT variety, playthings are brand at its most crucially lighthearted. We better look out for the data in our trash!
(Emily Segal)
Photo courtesy of flickr