Taking apart the 2010 Fisher Price re-released Music Box Record Player

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1454230585933631488

by fortran77 • 5 years ago

531 201 5 years ago

fortran77• 5 years ago

Part of the value of the original was kids could see and feel how it worked. That made it a fascinating toy. It's all been lost.

smegcicle• 5 years ago

and nowadays you could 3dprint new records for it

Jtsummers5• 5 years ago

I have a music box that uses a paper tape, it was an extra as I was making a gift for a family member and Thinkgeek (long before the Gamestop acquisition) accidentally sent me two. It was actually a lot of fun to make extra songs for it, the toy becomes interactive for the player. Which is a much better thing for kids than something that can only ever play 10 songs, and which they cannot alter in any meaningful sense.

dangle1• 5 years ago

Yeah, this brought back an early memory of my sparkling new brain examining the mechanism of the original version of this toy with my eyes and fingers without any words to describe what I was learning. Just some kind of sense of mastery that I couldn't communicate, but made me feel more confident about my understanding of the world.

It seems pretty cynical to market this in order to appeal to people like me with memories like this, with a huge dimension of the enrichment value stripped away.

tyleo• 5 years ago

I agree, I’d pay a little more for a mechanical version.

If this trend continues even wooden blocks will some day come with batteries :p

johnsonap3• 5 years ago

and will also have bluetooth

handrous2• 5 years ago

I seem to recall looking into wooden blocks for my kids when they were a little younger, and finding not that they need batteries, but the new normal-tier wooden blocks are now kinda shit—small, uneven finish and size consistency isn't good, et c.—and you have to start looking into niche "premium" toys to get good ones.

We got some of those cube ones with the letters and numbers at one point, and they were noticeably smaller and worse-finished than the ones I had as a kid in the 80s, which I'm sure were just the only blocks of that type that some cheap local store had and were probably the same quality as all such blocks on the market at the time, not something special. The newer ones looked very similar in a photo, but were missing lots of textures (kinda, you know, a big deal to babies and early toddlers) and details that mine had, and the paint chipped more easily (probably a thinner coat, I guess, plus probably just lower-quality paint).

We bought our first kid a rolling walker/phone thing with some other features—yeah, electronic crap, but at least this one had a volume setting, unlike many modern ones that are just fixed to "deafen your child" with no other options unless you break out a soldering iron. By ~4 years later, between seeing other people's version of the same thing—same brand and all—they bought a couple years after ours, and seeing newer version at the store when toy shopping, we'd noticed that the "same" product, which looked nearly identical, had had a couple revisions, each one making parts that used to move or be interactive fixed & dormant, and otherwise lowering the quality.

BadCookie• 5 years ago

Exactly right. That’s why I bought an “antique” one on eBay for my young son a few years ago. I had zero desire for the new garbage version. It was maybe twice as expensive, but 100% worth it to me.

DaiPlusPlus2• 5 years ago

kids could see and feel how it worked. That made it a fascinating toy

I assume all of us here on HN are the type-of-person who as a child would have been fascinated about how mechanical and electromechanical toys and gizmos worked - and probably disassembled the thing to our parents' chagrin and figured out how it works (and hopefully put it back together correctly!) and ended the day with a sense of satisfaction from learning something new.

...and then I'm remind myself that we are not like everyone else: I'm still able to vividly remember the things I did with my mechanical/electro toys to see and try to understand how they worked, but that most of the other kids my age didn't: their objective was simply to use the toy as entertainment or make-believe-play or the like - not as an object of curiosity - and they weren't particularly interested in any explanation I'd have for them (it didn't help that I wouldn't have asked them if they wanted to hear my explanation in the first place though... heh)

So for us, this digital-fake of a classic toy is an insult to our imagined younger-selves of the 21st century, but when I think about this ultra-modern toy from the perspective of someone just after something of solely nostalgia value - and a modern-day kid uninterested now (and shall most-likely forever-be uninterested) in how things work then indeed none of what we're griping about here matters - in fact it's the opposite: this 2010 remake is demonstrably tougher and more resilient to damage and wear than the mechanical original despite being superficially the same - given we're in the minority overall (...I think?) then this new design is objectively better as far as moral-utilitarianism is concerned.

...and it's not like Fischer-Price is selling this remake as a toy of interest to kids with a curiosity for things mechanical. They're not being totally dishonest.

Jtsummers5• 5 years ago

It's a tradeoff, though. The loss of explorability means that kids no longer have (with these newer toys) the same opportunity for exercising their curiosity that the older toys permitted. My sister never took our toys apart and reassembled them, that was all on me. With a toy like this one I would have (and probably did, with whatever equivalent I had) taken it apart and seen how the music box worked (the metal tines, the bumps on the record corresponding to notes, etc.). The new version removes that opportunity, taken or not. That is a loss.

ummwhat• 5 years ago

When I was a kid the "toy" to take apart was a disposable camera. The sort you used to buy on vacation and then drop off to have the film developed without getting the camera back. I discovered after charging it that touching the capicator gives a nice electrical shock. I spent a great deal of effort teaching this painful lesson to anyone I could trick into learning it.

The objects of curiosity don't need to be a toy, or even meant for children. Anything that can be disassembled will be disassembled by a curious child.

Too bad it's no longer possible for end users to disassemble mobile phones.

scrollaway• 5 years ago

But play is supposed to be a learning tool. If a toy's only value is "push a button for a predefined thing to happen", there is no opportunity for exploration. Might as well give the toddler an iphone.

I agree with you, "we" are probably not like most people. But taking the opportunity to experiment away is such a huge loss. Giving a kid the opportunity to learn on their own is so important. It's not just the one toy, you need to give them loads of different opportunities like these. They'll pick up on some.

Maybe i never would have experimented with this particular toy as a kid. For me, it was getting a screwdriver and taking old electronics apart (and the challenge of putting them back together and still having them work!) that sparked my curiosity. Plenty of things did not, however... But the point is, i was given opportunities.

johnchristopher• 5 years ago

I assume all of us here on HN are the type-of-person who as a child would have been fascinated about how mechanical and electromechanical toys and gizmos worked - and probably disassembled the thing to our parents' chagrin and figured out how it works (and hopefully put it back together correctly!) and ended the day with a sense of satisfaction from learning something new.

Yeah. But no, that's a stereotype.

I hated my mecano things, it was too hard to play with. I enjoyed storytelling with my LEGOs much more, my creations were just bare bones scaffoldings for the flesh my imagination would put around it.

I still work in IT and tear stuff apart every day.

With that being said it still saddens me they are digitalising full mechanical toys. It's surely rose-tinted glasses but it looked so much cooler.

handrous2• 5 years ago

Lots of great 70s and 80s toys that are still around are terrible. Super soaker? A joke, premium prices and way worse than squirt guns 1/4 the price, which are themselves not as good as early Super Soakers. Tank's not even removable which means it's basically not even the same sort of product at all—I'm sure the gaskets added too much to the production cost. Loopin' Louie? Motor's too weak, and it's lighter, so it doesn't work as well. They even managed to make Hungry Hungry Hippos suck. Rock 'em Sock 'em? Really bad compared to the original (you can find the original at flea markets sometimes—it's so much better, this isn't just nostalgia). The usual approach seems to be to cut vital features, shrink everything 10-30% (it's sometimes hard to tell if you don't have the original to compare it to, but it's really obvious when you do), and make all the plastic paper thin.

I think it's part of most things that aren't computers getting worse over the last few decades. Shit would be double the price if they still "made it like they used to". Even fast-food pizza—Pizza Hut's in fact way worse than it was even in the mid 90s (they've had at least two major reformulations of the sauce, for one thing, getting worse each time), but if you find a different pizza place that makes pizza around 90s PH quality it'll be 50+% more expensive.

But yeah, inflation's only low-single-digits percent a year. LOL sure.

mustacheemperor• 5 years ago

From what I can tell pump to charge water guns like the original super soaker simply don’t exist anymore, only pump to fire. I think you’re right that the gaskets/hardware necessary for the pressure tank add a lot of cost, and I wonder if there’s a liability factor as well. Nothing you can buy today can fire with nearly the same power as a super soaker since there’s no charged pressure tank. I had kind of assumed there’d be some small brand selling “classic” water gun designs but a quick google looks like most people only recommend vintage.

underwater• 5 years ago

Our kids were gifted "Guess Who" (a game which is problematic in a whole host of other ways). I was shocked that it was thin plastic and cardboard. The while thing felt disposable.

I feel that this must be a strategy used on toys that were previously popular. They're not going to return to being the popular must-have item that people will pay a premium for, but there is residual value in the marketing campaign from the 80s. So the toy companies push the build quality as low as they can and milk the last good will from the brand by making it a cheap impulse purchase.

To your larger point, there are still high quality toys around. You just avoid the big Toys R Us style stores and go to an independent or smaller toy story. Plan Toys and Green Toys stick out to me as two brands which felt consistently high quality and were widely available.

quesera• 5 years ago

But yeah, inflation's only low-single-digits percent a year. LOL sure.

Compounded inflation/interest is pretty powerful.

2% compounded over 25 years (to mark your "mid-90s" reference) would be a 64% increase, which lines up with your 50+% pretty directly.

Agreed that Pizza Hut sucks now. I sometimes wonder which has changed -- the me, or the thing. Good to know that at least with Pizza Hut, it's not all in my head.

My personal pet peeve is the plastic playing pieces of board games. Formerly well-weighted and painted, now thin cheap and with a bad sticker. How much can plastic playing pieces actually cost?

I wonder if Monopoly still ships with cast metal pieces...

kcplate• 5 years ago

Someone out there thinks this is better.

diogenescynic• 5 years ago

Probably just cheaper.

Someone1234• 5 years ago

More reliable too. The old music player was far more resilient compared to a non-toy, but still suffered from gunk/grime on both the records and pin.

ginko• 5 years ago

I wonder if this was originally planned to be more like the original with songs mechanically encoded in the disks but they either found the cheap microswitches in the tone arm to not have the right reaction speed or they realized developing the sound generation for the IC took too long/needed a more powerful+expensive micro controller so they went with this instead.

Symbiote2• 5 years ago

I remember playing with the original, although it wasn't mine. A friend must have had it.

It would be interesting to know the cost in 1980, and compare it (with inflation) to the current cost.

mbreese• 5 years ago

That’s a good point. I wonder what kind of tolerances were needed to make the original records? It probably wasn’t terribly tight, but still necessary to make a playable record. Versus a simple microcontroller that can play any number of songs and very limited physical tolerances.

The electric version might actually be cheaper to produce.

Jtsummers5• 5 years ago

"any number of songs" = 10, in this case, and up to 16 but the extra 6 can't be delivered since there's no update mechanism. Versus the original which could play a much larger variety of songs based on the records themselves. Presumably using a music box like mechanism, not a vinyl record style mechanism, which greatly loosens the quality constraints on the records (based on listening to a recording of the original).

mdorazio• 5 years ago

I, too, was very curious about this and was able to find out that when it launched in 1971, the record player was $6.85 [1]. That’s about $46 in today’s money. So I guess the question is how many parents today would pay that much for the “good” version of this toy in comparison to how many will pay $10 less for the fraud version. I’m guessing the business case points strongly toward the latter being revenue maximizing.

[1] https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1971-Sea...

Side note: like others here, I loved the hell out of this thing as a kid and I’m pretty sure we got it as a hand-me-down from my older cousin. It still worked like a champ after many years of abuse.

Aeolun3• 5 years ago

It still worked like a champ after many years of abuse.

Maybe they found this to be a problem, so they made an updated version that is easier to break.

johnsonap3• 5 years ago

God I love foone

polytely• 5 years ago

Yes honestly one of the most entertaining follows on twitter

DaiPlusPlus2• 5 years ago

How does Foone spend so much time on all these "here's something interesting I found, now it's a 12-hour-long deep-dive into something I never thought I could care passionately about" things and still have a job?

Turing's living the dream... (the family name has to be a coincidence, right?)

johnsonap3• 5 years ago

they use they, not he, but they have a lot of followers on ko-fi! https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing

post-it• 5 years ago

Do they have a day job? I thought they lived off their Patreon. They definitely changed their first and last name at some point, I remember a Twitter thread mentioning it.

umvi• 5 years ago

Does foone have a job? I know he has a Patreon.

junon• 5 years ago

And foone hates HN and wishes his tweets would stop being posted here lol.

blamazon• 5 years ago

Summary of stated justifications: [1]

* Foone likes to do tweet storms and not blogs and some people on HN have a "Why isn't this a blog?" sentiment which is bothersome to foone.

* HN scraping bots on twitter mention foone which is bothersome to foone.

* HN community frequently assumes he/him for foone. Foone goes by they/them. This does not seem to bother foone on its own, but HN commenters correcting HN commenters about how foone goes by they/them sometimes leads to grammatical argument about using they as a singular pronoun which is bothersome to foone.

* Generally, discourse beyond "whoops sorry!" about he/him/they/them is bothersome to foone.

* Elements of HN discourse represent larger problems of male-dominant sexism that are trenchant in technology, which are bothersome to foone.

[1] https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924?lang=en

memeboop• 5 years ago

I love the irony of the new toy containing an actual music box inside that isnt used to play the music.

neilv• 5 years ago

Perhaps whatever hapless engineer was tasked with desecrating the Fisher Price toy that might have nudged their own early cognitive development... retreated into a dark sense of humor about it.

gjsman-1000• 5 years ago

My family has had one of these for a few years. I remember studying it and immediately realizing there was no way the discs had any data, and sure enough I felt the pins under the head and could make it play different songs by pushing them in differently.

As for the dial, I remember thinking it felt so music-box-like, but I had no idea it was an actual music box!!

Alas, I never experienced the mechanical version. Such a shame.

bombcar• 5 years ago

Which is amusing because the music box is silenced and only sued for regulating the spin.

I wonder if the original revamp had planned to have it just be a wind up music box and only play one song.

Jtsummers5• 5 years ago

My guess is that the toy in the Twitter thread was the result of a kind of refactor. If you find a recording of the original it has a traditional music box inside which actually plays the songs (you can hear the tinny sound of the metal tines). So they probably took the original, figured out how it worked, replaced the audio generation with speakers and the microcontroller and changed the read head. Since the newer ones apparently use a switch and no spring, that was an intermediate step to the current incarnation.

The first version was an electronic imitation (complete with winding) of the original. Once the winding was rendered unnecessary, you get the current version without that imitation and it loses the tactile component.

euroderf2• 5 years ago

Back in the 60s we had an actual cheap-ass record player for 78s, and the 78s were thick - very thick - like more than an eighth of an inch thick. But these kids' "record players" nowadays? Naaah. A mere shadow. No actual appreciation of retro technology required - or wanted.

mulmen2• 5 years ago

Are you talking about the toy in the thread or actual turntables?

euroderf2• 5 years ago

An actual record player.

smashed• 5 years ago

As an 80's kid I have fond memories of this toy. Being all mechanical you could explore and marvel at it.

I remember trying to get the spin faster/slower, stopping the spring, etc.

Since it required no batteries it was always working, even when you found it at the bottom of toy bin after months/years.

This modern version is a complete scam, especially since the outside look seems absolutely identical to the original. I'd be very disappointed if I bought one for a toddler, only to realize when unboxing it's crap.

By the way, we still have the original toy from my childhood. It's been passed around to relatives, but last I heard, it still works after what must be almost 40 years.

timr• 5 years ago

I also spent many hours futzing with one of these. The music-playing mechanism in the arm was particularly interesting, for some reason. I remember spending time plucking out songs using a screwdriver.

cptskippy• 5 years ago

This modern version is a complete scam

This. It preys upon the childhood memories of parents and grandparents. Literally everything that made the original such a fond memory is gone and what you're left with is a cheap trick that had none of the lasting appeal of the original.

shusaku• 5 years ago

Of course by its very nature selling a kids record player in the age of streaming music is preying on the parents childhood memories.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

This modern version is a complete scam

Applies to pretty much 90% of everything I use and buy. The world is getting shittier by the day.

tobmlt• 5 years ago

This should be a proxy measure for inflation. (If only it was quantifiable so easily…)

Instead of prices going up in this case, quality goes down.

newshorts• 5 years ago

If you’re ever in the market to sell that thing, it sounds like my kids could use the mechanical version…

capableweb• 5 years ago

's been passed around to relatives, but last I heard, it still works after what must be almost 40 years

I think this is the reason for the new version. Fisher Price won't earn any money if the toys never breaks and never have to be replaced, to the detriment of everyone (including the environment) except the stakeholders.

The new version is much more suspicable to breakage and hence, a better chance at profits for the company.

ReactiveJelly2• 5 years ago

Re: vinyl records

Has anyone proven / disproven Benn Jordan's video about why vinyl is basically poisonous?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ

I haven't watched it for a while but the summary is:

- Vinyl records outgas harmful things that you can detect with air quality meters. (VOCs I think)

- You can't dispose of them because they can't be recycled and aren't supposed to go in landfills. So buying new records from new bands violates the "reduce, reuse, recycle" principle

"It's just that it's _so_ lame and uncool to shit on vinyl..."

"This is just my objective opinion based on a whole lotta research... If you're an avid collector whose peepee hurts after watching this video, understand that my peepee hurts a whole lot more."

code_duck• 5 years ago

I’m not sure about records, but it is well established that vinyl flooring emits various toxic compounds. Apparently it’s mostly other ingredients besides the PVC.

https://floortechie.com/is-vinyl-flooring-toxic/

Just search “vinyl off gassing”.

Here’s an EPA pdf purely about vinyl chloride: https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files...

h2odragon• 5 years ago

I will guess your average human emits more hazardous VOCs than a vinyl record.

I'd put this down to "someone thinks something is cool and fun! we have to show them how wrong they are!"

mStreamTeam• 5 years ago

Have any evidence to back that claim up?

And even of its true, reducing VOCs still sounds like a positive goal

nemo4• 5 years ago

I'd recommend you read up a more about vinyl - you really aren't treating a very dangerous material seriously enough. PVCs are highly toxic, and at this point there are many regulations to ban their use in plumbing, consumer goods, and especially toys because they are so poisonous. Vinyl records are a hold-out. They leach high levels of phthalates into the air quite quickly which are highly toxic, far, far more toxic than the typical emissions of your average human.

http://www.safemarkets.org/toxic-chemicals-in-products/pvc/v...

ReactiveJelly2• 5 years ago

I will guess your average human emits more hazardous VOCs than a vinyl record.

As I recall, when Benn did the test, putting the record back in its sleeve caused the air quality to go back to normal.

So whatever VOCs he is emitting, I don't think his meter picked them up.

I'd put this down to "someone thinks something is cool and fun! we have to show them how wrong they are!"

Re-check the part about "how much my peepee hurts". I really want to like vinyls, but I'm never going to buy one if they're basically Forever Chemicals that got grandfathered in by being part of pop culture decades ago. And Benn says in the video that he could stand to make a lot of money if he sold out and had vinyls of his work manufactured.

jolux• 5 years ago

This guy was unable to replicate his result and casts some aspersions on the accuracy of the metering technology, however he did find lead residue on one record: https://youtu.be/gx5B44YeRpY

vincentpants• 5 years ago

Confirmed. Depending on pvc's point in it's lifecycle, it's either offgassing hydrogen chloride which turns into hydrochloric acid when inhaled, all the way to releasing dioxin when incinerated, and dioxin is considered the most congeners. You can get the same effect when burning your pcb. One of the deadliest fires in US history was the MGM Grand fire in Las Vegas and iirc all of the fatalities were due to the fumes from the burning pvc carpet and none were heat related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Grand_fire

jsrcout• 5 years ago

So yeah. The original one required you to crank it up to spin the disc, because spinning the disc was vital to the operation of the original music box.
The modern "classic" one requires you to crank it up, because it won't start playing until you've cranked it up.

Maybe I'm just cranky today. But this quote perfectly encapsulates so much of what's wrong with a lot of modern technology.

xyzal• 5 years ago

cranking it up increases 'engagement', probably

fragmede• 5 years ago

Skeuomorphism is a time honored tradition, eg folders in a filesystem. Users often find its use is annoying, but other times it's a necessary analogy for users to make sense of the UX.

bink2• 5 years ago

This isn't just an artistic decision though. The product gives the impression that it's an actual functioning record player, like the old one.

cabalamat2• 5 years ago

This isn't skeumorphism, it's just fake.

FridayoLeary• 5 years ago

the limits of a design should be when it actively makes an object less functional. Car designers in particular blithely ignore this. This is another good example.

thunderbong• 5 years ago

Better readability -

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1454230585933631488.html

taddevries• 5 years ago

I have to think this is mostly due to modern toy factories and their standard tooling. You'd probably have a hard time finding a factory that could mass produce the old toy because that's just not how toys are made today.

jldl805• 5 years ago

I feel like you're about half correct here. For instance, most of these factories aren't "toy factories" they are "injection molding" or "pcb" or "electronic assembly" factories.

I would invite you to submit any examples of how you think modern toys are made of "mostly" standard tooling... that's not how this works. China has more mold designers, mold makers, and mold shops in many towns than other countries have within their borders.

I do agree with you that the old clockwork motor would be too expensive to manufacture now, but I think you should keep thinking about the rest of your thesis.

dehrmann• 5 years ago

I'm surprised they still make this. Usually kids toys are modeled after what they see adults doing. Some people still have turntables, but it's rare enough that I wasn't expecting there to be much demand for this.

Jtsummers5• 5 years ago

Nostalgia. Parents and grandparents who remember it will buy new toys based on their toys from childhood, regardless of the modern sensibilities.

rootusrootus• 5 years ago

Exactly. A good business always has to remember who the actual customer is. For kids, in many cases the actual customer is mom & dad, so make sure your product is aimed at them. Same with selling software to a business, the customer is management not the engineers who will actually use it.

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

Yeah, the sad fact of baby toys is that they are fundamentally selling to the adults, not to the tots.

The tot phase is pretty fast, so parents don't really seem to get a feel for what is a "good" baby toy in time.

I really wish there would be more general study of this rather than being at the mercy of a sales market that fundamentally doesn't have the baby in mind, mostly just the parents buying the stuff.

But then again, "learning acceleration" in babies is probably bunk anyway.

lofatdairy• 5 years ago

That's a good point. lmao what a weird hauntology. the past generation bought the toy for their children because of its resemblance to everyday items in their lives, and the next generation buys a facsimile for their children for its resemblance to the toy from their childhood. i wonder how many iterations will the chain continue

Freak_NL• 5 years ago

We have a turntable, and our 2½ year old listens to records on it. He's not putting the records on himself just yet of course, but it's nice to have some technology where the physical aspect is so prominent — records have two sides, you have to manually place the needle and stop the turntable after listening, and records hold a specific album.

He'd love a toy like that (the original that is).

On a related note: it's nice that some old records with children's content are actually really good, and often much nicer — slower, more focussed, and with better articulation — than modern content for his demographic. Although I admit that the much-loved audio play about a field mouse visiting her mousy friend who lives in the city to learn all about the sounds in a family's house is a bit… anachronistic. The shower, electrical razor, and hoover are fine, but the typewriter and landline telephone may be a tad confusing, and the baker who hawks his bread at the door hasn't shown up in reality yet (but fast-food delivery is a close-ish thing). His parents both use mechanical keyboards though, so the sound isn't too far-fetched.

People will buy this toy mostly for the nostalgic feeling. I just don't get why Fisherprice didn't just remake the battery-less original though; it would have hit just the right note nowadays. The remake just damages their brand.

golemotron• 5 years ago

That music box record player is a perfect metaphor for distributed supply chains in global manufacturing. In fact, one could say that it is a representation of them.

Bluecobra• 5 years ago

The updated Fisher Price Tape Recorder got a similar treatment, the original played real cassettes but the modern one does not.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Fisher-Price-Classics-Play-Tape-R...

mcphage• 5 years ago

With the original Fisher-Price cash register, the 3 different denominations were of different sizes, so each only fit into its own slot. With their modern remake, the 3 different denominations are all the same size.

That’s the thing about their remakes, all across the board—they look similar to the originals, but lost their a lot of the details and functionality that made them charming. As a Buffalonian I still have a soft spot for Fisher-Price, but these are just disappointing.

kps• 5 years ago

Fisher-Price once made a toy camcorder that used audio cassettes. A 90 minute tape held 11 minutes of video, monochrome 120×90 at 15fps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL2000

Waterluvian• 5 years ago

Mechanical toys can be “screwed with” a lot. Like experimenting with a ton of “what if…”

Electronic toys generally don’t give you much of this.

And I think this really represents a fundamental change in a lot of aspects of life: there’s a specific way to interact with things, prescribed by the maker.

I absolutely loved the quiet weekends as a kid where I could spend hours and hours making ridiculous contraptions by mixing toys and a bit of tape and such.

erik_p• 5 years ago

Glitch musicians would like a word.

Maybe you mean digital. As electronic toys can still be modified/screwed with.

nebula88046• 5 years ago

Just you wait until your mini-moog has a boot process with a required chain of trust that will reject any circuit bending. That'll teach ya :P

IAmGraydon3• 5 years ago

Electronic toys have much more potential for modification. It just takes a more advanced skill set.

krallja• 5 years ago

On sight, I recognize Für Elise on the cylinder.

rrss2• 5 years ago

in case others are interested, I was curious about the original and found a good description the mechanism of the original in the patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3710668A/en.

teddyh• 5 years ago

“This is a toy zombie.”

— https://twitter.com/wangtian/status/1454329529569218566

mhb2• 5 years ago

Not the same, but this "DIY Hand-cranked Music Box Wooden Box + Hole Puncher + Paper Tapes" might appeal in a similar way: https://www.ebay.com/itm/182794446978

pmorici2• 5 years ago

The original Fisher-Price "Record Player" is really a kids version of a Polyphon [0] a type of record like music player that was popular in the late 1800's to early 1900's. You can see some playing on YouTube [1]

I thought it would be interesting to 3D print additional records for the thing. Was super disappointed when I bought one for our daughter last year and found that they had changed it to a digital music player that only uses the records for song selection.

A lot of the modern day versions of the original Fisher-Price toys don't hold up to the originals. For example on the xylophone they replaced the Wood base with plastic and the thing sounds like crap.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphon

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk4zjQshq14

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soQLAvqnTOQ

bink2• 5 years ago

It sucks how cheaply kid's toys are made these days, but there are companies that stand out by making things that last. When my kid was little we bought a lot of Melissa & Doug toys because they were actually made of wood and would survive multiple children.

bluGill• 5 years ago

If you want music toys for kids look to hohner http://hohnerkids.com/. They make a line that are real musical instruments. They tune their xylophone for example.

They are still cheap plastic, but the quality is good enough for real music.

agumonkey4• 5 years ago

These large polyphons sounds superbly full to me. full metal not so compact disc :)

I mean really.. ave maria is a little magical https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu4FWixsUM8

gosh

chadcmulligan• 5 years ago

Found a little talk and play by Wintergatan (the guy who built the musical marble machine) of a polyphon in a museum in The Netherlands

https://youtu.be/LyXY4Bz3PLs

pmorici2• 5 years ago

O yeah, his tours of that museum are really great. The original Fisher Price player worked exactly the same as the one they show in that video with a little gear that coupled the records to the comb.

nebula88046• 5 years ago

Sometimes I feel as if there will be a trend to go back to these amazing mechanical devices as technology consumes more and more of the world. We are already seeing it with the rise of Vinyl and using dumb phones.

allenrb• 5 years ago

Man, this makes my day. I was born during the original production run and, of course, had one of these. Lovely, fun little toy. So when our first child was born and some kind family member bought her one, it put a big smile on my face…

…until I looked closer! Fraud! Deception! And saddest of all, I tried the same thing foone did, knowing that the unused binary codes (maybe not 0000 but surely the other five) were surely hiding a few extra songs. But no, complete and total disappointment. Par for the course.

This thing has survived two young daughters now, but it is utterly devoid of soul.

t0mas882• 5 years ago

They probably skip 0000, 1111 and all single bit ones because those are the most likely codes you get if you press the buttons with a finger?

ineedasername• 5 years ago

It's not that I'm nostalgic for analog, I just don't like the new version because it's basically a fraud. Presenting itself as analog when really it's just a skeuomorphic presentation of a cheap digital music player.

ansible• 5 years ago

And charging more for it because of all the plastic.

This is basically the same kind of chip that is in electronic greeting cards.

It is a shame, because we live in the age of 3D printers, and making your own tunes is now not that hard for the original music player, but the new player itself is now so limited.

randomstring2• 5 years ago

This new version of the Fisher-Price Record Player is heartbreaking. I learned so much from trying to understand how it worked. Concepts like stored energy: experimenting with trying to over-wind, under-wide, a few turns, many turns, slowly adding pressure to the winding knob until it would start playing and try to maintain just enough pressure to play. Physically slowing and speeding up the turntable to change to the tempo. Trying to intentionally misaligning the head to play out of tune. Turning it on it's side, upside down, trying to peek at the teeth on the head and manually play individual notes. All at an age before I could read. That toy was indestructible, because if it weren't I would have torn it down to individual components (just like my very expensive 6 million dollar man action figure, to the great chagrin of my parents). It wouldn't be until much later I'd have to tools to dissemble one, and by then I was taking apart real record plays.

This toy is a good analog for a real record player and with grooves that move a needle and play sound encoded on the disk. Leading to understanding of sound waves.

This new toy is a mix of new and old tech. How can a per-literate child be expected to decipher binary encodings and how they map to individual songs? What deeper understanding of how things work are within the grasp of a child that cannot yet use a screwdriver, wire cutters, and a volt meter?

This new toy is boring. Once you learn how to turn it on, it can have no appeal to a child exposed to much better music players all around them: cell phones, iPads, computers, tvs. This is just a piece of plastic and e-waste destined for the landfill, purchased by some sentimental old timer who has fond memories of the original F-P record player.

pen2l• 5 years ago

As well, the beautiful vulnerability and realness, the imperfections, the notes sometimes slightly flat or sharp because of mechanical aberrations — they were wonderful to observe. The humming sounds of the windings, the realness of it. The tactile dots, the understanding of how they related to musical notes. What a thing it was to behold, an authenticity that the child in us could always appreciate and be impressed and moved by.

agumonkey4• 5 years ago

We're still in the wave of digital purity (and the VR/meta chapter won't help). Come back in 50 years for a reappreciation of analog, complex, fragile and non linear. By this time digital computing will probably be chaotic too.

nodejs_rulez_1• 5 years ago

On the other hand there are things like this:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/upperstory/spintronics-...

Now it will be up-to parents to decide whether they want to bring up an iPhone consumer kid or more of a PC creative kid.

amelius2• 5 years ago

Side note. How is an iPhone not a "personal" computer?

prideout• 5 years ago

The Spintronics video mentions the simulation of resistors, capacitors, batteries...but not logic gates. It doesn't seem to teach the magic of boolean logic at all, which is a bit disappointing. (but not as disappointing as the Fisher Price music player!)

Philip-J-Fry• 5 years ago

That is such an amazing idea. Wish I had kids so I could learn with them!

mhb2• 5 years ago

Or "DIY Hand-cranked Music Box Wooden Box + Hole Puncher + Paper Tapes": https://www.ebay.com/itm/182794446978

tarsinge• 5 years ago

Tinkering with a computer is not the only real creativity, you can also actually use it. GarageBand would have been a dream when I was a child.

AussieWog933• 5 years ago

I honestly don't see these explicitly-teach-your-kids-STEM products solving the problem. They're unaffordable for most parents, they're narrow in scope, and there's a good chance your kid won't even like them.

It reminds me a bit of Oliver's, a fast food chain in Australia. They set up shop at roadhouses along major highways, and market themselves as a healthy alternative to McDonalds or KFC. You look at the menu, though, and it consists of organic acai berries, quinoa, antioxidant-rich kale smoothies and the like. They've hyper-optimised their brand's goal/mission to the point where the product is unapproachable and unaffordable for most consumers.

All we want is chicken and rice, but our choice is between a double bacon cheeseburger or an overpriced organic bliss bowl.

TeMPOraL7• 5 years ago

Yup. I'm pissed by this. And I never even owned a toy like that.

The new toy is just fucking up with kids' development. It literally boils down to a 10-button panel for selecting which song to play. All the things that make it look like a turntable are nonfunctional lies. There's no direct relationship between what disk you have in it, and whether it's turning, because the music isn't even encoded on it in the first place. The disk is just representing two possible states, and the turning is for show.

How did they imagine a kid will process such a toy? How much disappointment will a child feel when they realize, after trying to physically play with the turning disks, that it's just a dummy?

They could've made this toy with a single disk with a motor under it, and 10 buttons to pick songs, and it would be better because it wouldn't lie. It would look like a record player, not pretend to be one. Or perhaps I'm just angry because the old model was an actual record player, so we have a clear example of them having a superior design available (and most likely cheaper to produce), and then choosing to make it worse for re-release.

Anyway, there's a software analogy in here, but I'm not in a mood to be able to write a coherent and short summary of it. Suffice it to say: the continuous dumbing down of software all across the board is sometimes called "Fisher-Pricing the UI". Never before have I felt this term is so apt as I feel now.

wjamesg• 5 years ago

“I'm taking a HN break until the end of year. See you in 2022!” :-)

Aeolun3• 5 years ago

How much disappointment will a child feel when they realize, after trying to physically play with the turning disks, that it's just a dummy?

Absolutely nothing, since they don’t know what to expect. My son has a similar music player from a different brand (more like a diskman) and just accepts that putting in the disk is enough, no need for spinning or anything.

Of course the machine screams “Open!” and “Lets play!” When you open or close the disk cover respectively, so it’s orders of magnitude more satisfying than the fisher price thing (you can try playing with cover open, or rapidly open/close it to see what happens).

nebula88046• 5 years ago

so we have a clear example of them having a superior design available (and most likely cheaper to produce)

This is probably not the case. The blob chip is probably in the pennies. And while I didn't look at the pictures extremely deeply I bet they did part and assembly reduction using the following methodology.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZGWOrDBpg

themdonuts• 5 years ago

I got stuck on the 6 million dollar action figure part and ignored all the rest afterwards. What's the story?

ZiiS• 5 years ago

An action figure of the "six million dollar man" (from a tv show). Though sadly I can't rule out a toy fetching that now adays.

Yuioup• 5 years ago

That's just sickening. I'm disgusted to my core.

pengaru• 5 years ago

One of the worse aspects of growing old is having to watch things previously done well and delivering genuine thoughtful value mutate into illusory branded trash done just well enough to fleece consumers.

nebula88046• 5 years ago

Capitalism at its finest.

russellbeattie4• 5 years ago

why is this a twitter thread? why not a blog?

AndrewDucker• 5 years ago

Because that's how the author chose to write it.

Because that's where the audience they write for is.

Because they prefer Twitter threads to blog posts.

Because they get more readers that way.

(And probably anyone here can come up with some more reasons that might be true if they put their minds to it.)

But mostly, the format someone chooses to make this available in is the least interesting thing about it.

russellbeattie4• 5 years ago

It was a joke.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1454530751475552256

rkagerer• 5 years ago

It's unfortunate, as soon as I saw it was Twitter and waiting for the page to load I left and opted to skip reading this one.

russellbeattie4• 5 years ago

It was a joke.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1454530751475552256

russellbeattie4• 5 years ago

I love that absolutely no one got the joke.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1454530751475552256

Foone is a sociopath who doesn't feel certain words should be used to refer to Foone because they don't like them. In fact no one should talk about Foone ever.

drtz• 5 years ago

I got one of these for my kids around 2014 and was also hugely disappointed. I realized very quickly that it was just a gimmick to lure the Gen-Xers and Millenials who remember these from their childhood.

I, too, was disgusted that it took batteries but you still had to wind the knob, but I was even more offended by the awful staticky sound from the tiny speaker.

Like foone, I also got a kick out of playing with the switches and seeing what happened when you held the disc stil, but I was never curious enough to open it up. I'm glad I didn't, though -- I think the sight of an actual music box would have broken my heart.

codesuki3• 5 years ago

This seems to be a theme. Toy quality going down. There was a tape recorder with mic from fisher price. You could use the mic to record on the tape and keep it around. I thought to buy it for my kids because I had good memories of it, but guess what. They replaced the tape with tiny memory that you have to overwrite all the time. If they at least would have supported some removable memory.

TeMPOraL7• 5 years ago

They replaced the tape with tiny memory that you have to overwrite all the time.

Until that point I fully expected you to say that they replaced the tape with storage on a cloud account. I bet this will happen one day. So many toys are already trying to suck on kids' data and hook up the parents to cloud services (see e.g. toys that feature "extra experiences" that you access by pointing your smartphone camera at them, and looking through the toy maker's app).

codesuki3• 5 years ago

I can totally see that happening. And then it's 'oops we leaked all your kids audio', 'our ml researchers are listing to your kids audio to improve ads that will soon play on your tape recorder', etc.

amelius2• 5 years ago

Skeuomorphism at work ... :(

jaynetics• 5 years ago

I'm not sure how common this is in other countries, but here in Germany we have quite a few "water playgrounds". There are some pumps in the sand, sometimes small aqueducts and the likes, so during summer, the kids can play with water. The pumps used to be real pumps. Now they are electronic. They have a sensor to detect how fast the handle is moving and at a certain speed you'll hear a clicking sound, a valve opens and the water starts flowing.

I think some children will realize how these things work. They might start to find them dumb if they find out that the strenuous repetitive movement is in fact unnecessary. At least to me it feels like a dishonest contraption and I'd prefer if they simply put a button on it.

alisonkisk• 5 years ago

This is how the Wii works too. It tells you to swing the wiimote like a bat or a golf club or a tennis racket or steering wheel, but it works better when you just flick your wrist.

Aeolun3• 5 years ago

I think some children will realize how these things work.

Conversely, I’ve seen some kids play with real pumps and they seem to find it incredibly fun when they realize that more and faster movement brings more water.

Hell, I thought it was fun myself just seeing how fast I could make it go.

neom• 5 years ago

Am I the only one who loves the meme that Foone hates being on the front page and always ends up on the front page? :D

varjag• 5 years ago

If space aliens ever get this as an artefact they'll never make sense out of it.

dejawu• 5 years ago

A friend of mine from engineering school had pretty much this exact idea for a joke record player: Require the user to provide a record and place the needle on it, but then use image-recognition to identify the label/cover art and stream the album while the record spun uselessly.

Seeing someone do this, but unironically and for a real product specifically meant for humans who are actively developing their sense of how the world around the works, feels somewhere between cynical and outright deceptive. It reminds me of the Mechanical Turk (the original one, not the Amazon service): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk - a machine deliberately designed to mislead.

mikepurvis• 5 years ago

Can't seem to find it now, but a while ago there was an art project posted on here that was basically a mock tourist camera where it would use the GPS and IMU to infer your subject, and combine that with time of day info to grab you a top-rated picture off Instagram instead of whatever lousy one you were trying to take yourself.

And here's the inverse of that— a camera that blocks you from taking photos too many other people have taken: https://philippschmitt.com/archive/2018/work/camera-restrict...

MarkusWandel• 5 years ago

There's also the modern version of the See 'n Say. The original one is mechanically brilliant. The new one has much better sound quality and a flip-over semicircle that gives it two full circles of things to point to. Is it better? Hard to say.

On the other hand some modern electronic toys are brilliant. The Leapfrog one with the 8x8 LED array and the light pen is absolutely brilliant in how much play value it gets out of that simple hardware and already feels like a classic.

ddingus• 5 years ago

The new toy is an insult.

I had the old one as a kid and kept it long enough to take it apart and learn so much...

This one has lessons too, but not the same ones. Maybe just as useful, in a dark way.

tekstar• 5 years ago

Vintage Fisher Price toys are an absolute marvel of engineering. We have a few of the "little people" sets - my favorite is still the garage with an elevator that still works, including raising and lowering "stop" gates and a floor that raises on an incline only when the elevator reaches the top and the gate opens. My second favorite is the "sesame street play house" featuring a pathway where the little people can "walk". As you turn a crank the pathway moves slowly forward, and then jerks suddenly back. The result is your toy slowly steps forward, and then the track jerks back too fast for the toy to follow, so the toy "walks" and then goes down the slide. It's just a complete joy to operate.

imgabe2• 5 years ago

This is the kind of content I come to Hacker News for.

bb88• 5 years ago

Funny, then you should know that Foone hates hacker news, mostly because they're appropriating Foone's content to push Hacker News and Y Combinator importance ("stealing links" is how Foone put it).

I highly recommending following Foone on twitter and using the thread unroll app. There's several more years of stuff like this on twitter.

imgabe2• 5 years ago

Followed on Twitter, but that’s unfortunate that they feel that way. “Stealing links” seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how the web works. Websites linking to each other is kind of the whole point.

joshu• 5 years ago

something something baudrillard, especially the music box

IAmGraydon3• 5 years ago

What baffles me is how this could be cheaper to manufacture than the original design. It was literally just music box tines in the head of the arm, and it was plucked by the bumps on the rotating record, just like a music box. This new version even contains a silenced music box! How does this make any kind of sense?

OOPMan• 5 years ago

The future of cargo cults is now!

Taking apart the 2010 Fisher Price re-released Music Box Record Player

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