“OK, OK. Here’s the idea. Kids love dinosaurs. Kids love trains. Picture this: Dinosaur Train. It’s about dinosaurs and trains.”
“Genius, genius. But how ’bout this? How ’bout this. What do the rugrats love more, cars or animals? Can’t decide? Neither can they! So we’ll take the animals and make them into cars. Ellyvan is an elephant van. And Taxi Crab is a crab taxi, get it?”
“Brilliant. Brilliant. But our primary objective is to sell more Legos. We have one billion bricks to offload in the next two weeks. Whaddaya got?”
“Um… Something with karate, no… Ninjas!”
“Tell me more.”
“OK, ninjas. A star ninja. No, no, a pack of ninjas.”
“Go on…”
“They can fight the… Nindroid army.”
“Don’t stop…”
“And they’ll be masters of a new form of Lego martial arts. We’ll call it… (sweeping, visionary arm gestures)— Spinjitsu.”
“Kids will eat that up.”
“Yeah, and karate chop each other uncontrollably.” (Followed by an evil, menacing, Lego laugh of world domination.)
And speaking of world domination, this past week, I found a solution to the Spoon Wars. I went down to my secret domain of treasures, aka the Forbidden Basement, and brought up six different silver spoons from my grandmother’s special silver chest. Two teaspoons, two soup spoons, and two tablespoons.
The boys have been so completely mesmerized by shiny utinsels that they’ve forgotten about the “tall spoon.”
I call it: Spoonjitsu.
