Custamies Cars!!

I never thought I’d be admitting to this, but we had kind of a good time at Toys R Us the other day. I’d been invited to a promotional event for a line of Ridemakerz cars based on the Cars 2 movie coming out this week, and I don’t know, it was a Saturday, it was the summer, it seemed sort of like it might be fun, so we went, me and my little family.

We took the train into the city, and walked over to Times Square, to the mothership Toys R Us, the one with the indoor ferris wheel – which we had to navigate past, been there, done that, thank you very much. Once upstairs, the girl forgot that I said no ferris wheel when they handed her a VIP pass with her name on it. We each got to pick a chassis, and then headed off to tables covered with hubcaps, wheels, pipes, “engines”, spoilers. Shiny! Rubber! Chrome! Flames! The Ridemakerz cars are fun – they’re sort of the big splashy plastic American rendition of the sleek refined Euro-style wooden Automoblox, and you can mix and match bits to your heart’s content. I picked the steely blue Finn McMissile, for the color, only because they didn’t have any Citroëns. I totally would have picked a Citroën, if they’d had one. I've always wanted a Deux Chevaux.

After we built our cars, and had a hotdog, we wandered through the store, managing to get out without spending any money. (I know. I say no a lot. She has enough stuff.) (I did stop and take a picture of a Norman Foster building made out of Legos, because I am an occasional architecture geek and because I knew two people who needed to see that someone was rendering Foster's Hearst Building in Legos.)

When we eventually got home, the girl took all of the cars apart and sorted all the bits out on the coffee table. Then she figured out how to make some VIP passes of her own with Kid Pix – am I raising a graphic designer? Finally, she invited a friend over – to recreate the pick and choose, make your own event. No hot dogs. Just hot rods.

And honestly? It's a good toy if you can play with it your own way. Maybe she's going to be an event planner, not a graphic designer. Or both. Or something. Stay tuned for a story about worms.