Imaginext™ Deep Sea Diver
Fisher-Price Imaginext™ Deep Sea Diver (2002)
This toy squid is perplexing. It accurately has eight arms and two club-ended feeding tentacles (the detail which these kinds of replicas get wrong more often than not), but
instead of extending forward from the front of the head and encircling the mouth, the arms are arranged along the middle of the body like the legs of an insect. Adding insult to injury, the feeding tentacles trail behind it like some kind of double tail.
It has a beak, which is good, but the horizontal orientation combined with the forward-facing eyes give its head an ant-like quality. Speaking of the eyes, the illustration shows hourglass pupils, like an octopus. This is wrong for a squid, but it’s also oddly specific—as if the designer had a visual reference for the eyes, but just winged the rest of the figure without much thought.
Seriously, was the design of this toy dictated over the phone or something? Had the designer seen a squid one time, perhaps while high, and figured he remembered it well enough? Did he then get distracted by a picture of a spider half-way through?
I don’t want to rag on the Fisher-Price Imaginext line too much, since it recently has produced a couple of cool (and more accurate) cephalopod toys…but those will be the subject of future posts.
Tags: Fisher-Price, Imaginext, squid
