Toy Fair 2010: Our Favorite Designs for the Young at Heart

There's been some buzz surrounding Toy Fair 2010 (quite literally with this underwhelming Millenium Falcon 'copter), and the New York City event ends today. With an expected 95-percent of the show composed of Madame Alexander dolls and plush playthings for the preschool set, we embarked on a quest to find a handful of unique toys that both kids and parents will love. From robot bugs, to classic LEGOs, to modernist dollhouses, we suddenly wish we were young again.

Areaware

Besides putting out gorgeous products by the likes of Harry Allen (whose creepy pig bank we love), Areaware's Kelly Lamb and Tobias Wong have previously carried a small but excellent line of toy objects. In addition to Ross Munuez's whimsical screen-printed animal pillows, there's designer David Weeks's Wooden Animals series, which includes Ursa the bear and Hanno the gorilla.

Weeks has added three new friends to the Animals collection, including Simus the rhino and Hattie the elephant. Our favorite (and the geekiest) by far, is the Cubebot. Like some kind of primordial transformer, the plain wood bot begins as a cube and unfolds into epic droid dominance. Seriously, we wouldn't want to mess with this guy. But we love his decidedly un-techy form merged with a '50s tin robot aesthetic. Luckily, Cubebot comes in three sizes, allowing you to build the perfect machine army -- totally impervious to the evil forces of magnets.

Brinca Dada

Most of you know about the Barbie Dream House in all of its horrid, abominable pinkness. As parents buying a doll house for the little ones, you may be hard pressed to find a structure that is neither cheap, fuchsia, and plastic nor some kind of antebellum plantation house (which has certain historically bad implications). Thank Gaudí that someone with some architectural taste has come along and revamped the nightmarish structural mutations so often seen in the aisles of Toys R Us.

A new company called Brinca Dada (no Web site just yet) unveiled a modernist masterpiece in the form of the Emerson House, which ought never be shoved into the playroom. This multi-story home features sliding acrylic doors and recessed LED lighting, all powered by solar panels on the roof. Inspired by Richard Neutra's Kaufmann Desert House, Emerson will soon be filled with Brinca Dada's own line of bite-size furniture. But, as the owners told us at Toy Fair, the house is also just the right size for your Vitra mini chairs.

Elite Gudz

While not a toy manufacturer (and unjustly shoved into a dark corner of the show floor), design studio Elite Gudz was commissioned by Toy Fair to create some unique sculptures on site. After displaying an installation of street-art-inspired vintage dress forms at New York Fashion Week this year, Elite Gudz was quickly recruited to do a similar job for the trade show. With featureless, whitewashed, child-sized mannequins in tow, the designers at Elite Gudz set up artistic shop and went to work transforming their oversize dolls into sometimes creepy, sometimes colorful figures.

We didn't have a chance to chronicle the transformation of the mannequins throughout the duration of the show, but art toy blog Tomopop has some excellent galleries of the group's live painting and sculpture. These constituted a unique addition to the majority of staid, commonplace novelties on display this year.

LEGO

What Toy Fair could be complete without LEGO? Partnering with popular film franchises more and more, LEGO announced some nifty sets to come out this year. In celebration of the 30th anniversary of 'The Empire Strikes Back,' LEGO will be releasing some geeky adaptations from Lucas's masterpiece. We can't show you pictures of the whole series just yet, but we were able to snap some pics of a LEGO Wampa lair (complete with Luke dangling upside down in the ice) and a LEGO Han Solo frozen in carbonite.

While we weren't entirely impressed with the new 'Toy Story 3' LEGO line, set to debut with the film, we were mighty floored by the nearly human-sized sculptures of Buzz Lightyear and Woody that sat outside the LEGO booth. Those builders must have oodles of patience.

HEXBUG

We've written about HEXBUG before (and filmed one as it battled a baby), but the Hex has decidedly evolved since then. It's now a rather ferocious little robot that has the ability to scare the hell out of house cats and run faster than a Brooklyn waterbug. The HEXBUG Nano is not much longer than a large paper clip, and looks kind of like the head of a toothbrush. Unlike previous HEXBUGs, the Nano can automatically right itself if it happens to flip over in the course of its manic caroming.

Even more terrifying (in an awesome, mini-bot sort of way) is the new HEXBUG Ant, which rips across surfaces with its six rotating leg-wheels at lightning speed. We saw some "off label" use of the Ant by some of the HEXBUG peeps at Toy Fair; the Ant was placed on its side and spun fast enough to generate electricity. It's neat stuff for kids, as the bots don't seem dangerous enough to put out an eye or choke anyone. Ant is just as good for adults, especially if you want to pull some practical jokes on the entomophobes at your office.

Tags: architecture, areaware, art, brinca dada, BrincaDada, cubebot, david weeks, DavidWeeks, design, elite gudz, EliteGudz, emerson house, EmersonHouse, features, hexbug, lego, star wars, StarWars, the empire strikes back, TheEmpireStrikesBack, top, toy fair 2010, toy story 3, toyfair, ToyFair2010, toys, ToyStory3