witness to the folly of overproduction.”
For new parents who had themselves grown up during the Depression and the war, the fantasy of childhood as consumer paradise exerted a powerful appeal. Browsing through issues of Parents’ magazine from 1950, I came upon an ad campaign for Heinz baby food (“Scientific Cooking Gives Finer Flavor, Color and Texture to Heinz Strained Carrots”). In one Heinz ad targeted at new mothers, cartoon butterflies, fairies, and dolls encircle the photograph of a baby girl. “Wee elfin creatures go riding on butterfly wings,” the copy reads, “dolls speak in a language all their own and something altogether new and wonderful happens everywhere a baby looks ... your child lives in a magic world where everything’s enchanted.” Another ad featuring a baby boy replaces the talking dolls with teddy bears that “come mystically to life.”
Then came television, enchantment in a box. Annual toy sales in America shot from $84 million in 1940 to $1.25 billion in 1960. Peg-and-socket pop beads sold to girls as costume jewelry consumed forty thousand pounds of polyethylene resin per month in 1956. In 1958, hula hoops and Frisbees consumed fifteen million pounds of the stuff. Polystyrene replaced balsa wood as the most popular material for model cars and planes. Plasticized polyvinyl chloride, the material from which the brand-new Barbie doll was made, provided a cheaper, more durable alternative to latex rubber, rendering traditional molded rubber animals and dolls obsolete except in name.
Now take another peek into Ernie’s claw-footed tub. Here are Millais’s wondrous bubbles, and here is the child accompanied by his small, cuddly pet that speaks a language all its own. Here is the antiquated stage set tinged with nostalgia (the wooden post, the claw-footed tub). Ernie is not dressed up in a costume (he’s naked here), but in a way his orange, fuzzy pelt plays the same role as the Blue Boy’s satin suit and the bubble boy’s velvet green one; all three figures wear the colors of make-believe. Only now, in a kind of reversal of Pinocchio’s metamorphosis, and a kind of culmination, the dream child has become a puppet, a toy brought “mystically to life,” who himself plays puppeteer to his squeaky duck, the inanimate fakeness of which makes the puppet seem more real.
Meanwhile, the real flesh-and-blood child, the postmodern child, the Plastic Child has disappeared from view, banished to the other side of the glass screen. There, sprawled on the shag rug, his chin propped on his hands, or slumped into a beanbag chair, he reminds me of John Berger’s zoo animals. “The space which they inhabit is artificial,” Berger writes. “Hence their tendency to bundle towards the edge of it. (Beyond its edges there may be real space.) In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is illusory. Nothing surrounds them except their own lethargy or hyperactivity.”
Not long after PBS first broadcast it, Ernie’s rubber duckie song went to number sixteen on the Billboard charts. Radio stations were playing it, adults were buying it. And unlike the other Sesame Street characters, Ernie’s rubber duck was not trademarked. Producers had picked up the prop at a local dime store, which meant that even as it became a recurring character and a pop music phenomenon, it remained in the public domain, free for the taking, no licensing fees required. In a way, its ascendancy confirms Daniel Boorstin’s observation in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America that in America we have arranged the world so that we do not have to experience it, replacing heroes with celebrities, actions with images—and, one might add, animals with television characters.
But does that mean that if Ernie had gone bathing with a white duck or a green one, our iconic ducks would be white or green? I’m not sure. The threads of chance and meaning are hard to disentangle. On the album cover of the LP single of the song, Ernie, for some reason, is holding a different duck, a calico duck, white with burnt-orange spots. Perhaps there is more to the message in this particular bottle than the medium. Perhaps celebrity alone does not explain the yellowness of the duck.
“Ideals of innocent beauty and the adorable have changed little in a hundred years or more,” the historian Gary Cross writes. “Many today share with the Victorian middle class an attraction to the blond, blue-eyed, clear-skinned, and well-fed child and are appalled by, uninterested in, and even hostile to the dark, dirty, and emaciated child.