It’s not clear why I was such a big fan of Lassie. I don’t think we had our own collie yet, and we didn’t have a TV for another 5 or 6 years. So why was I so enthralled with Lassie that my mother would buy a copy of the Lassie Game and sit down to play it with me on the living room floor?

There we were, excited about a new board game, and we opened it up, unfolded the board, looked at the parts, and tried to figure out the directions.  Not sure if I was reading yet, but between me and my mother we got the idea.

And then, within a few minutes, our delight in this new toy dissolved into a sense of shame and embarrassment. And that sense was so deep and defined that I still remember it vividly, and many the related thoughts.

The game was incredibly stupid: you were supposed to work your figure around the board along a colorful path, and along that path were a number of rubber balloon-like shapes, about 2 inches tall. And you were supposed to take your playing piece and hit the rubber thingy in order for it to make a noise. A noise that might somehow remind somebody of a dog bark.

The two of us bravely attempted to play this game, and to smush the rubbery things to get the sound to come out. But both of us were quickly overcome with a clear and powerful understanding that this game was terrible, that this game was not made by people who loved Lassie, not by people who loved games, but rather the invention of some executives somewhere who wanted or needed to cash in on the Lassie craze by creating and selling a game with the Lassie name on it.

What they came up was a limp and weak attempt at a game, but my mother paid very hard-earned cash for it, and we sat down with it and were, for perhaps a half hour, stooges of the empty-hearted corporate creeps that created and sold this degrading experience.

And even at 5 or 6 years old it was absolutely clear to me that this stupid game and the shame we felt for falling for it, was the output of corporate types, in the city somewhere. The same kind of people that, for money, would create and sell you anything awful thing that would make money: colored fizzy sugar water, plastic toys that never worked, and all the other crap we would see in the drugstore, toy store, and supermarket.

My parents were deeply left-wing and already had a hatred for a certain breed of capitalist who were not building cars, planes, or anything of value; just packaging and selling any crap that would bring in a dime.

And somehow my poor mother got pulled in by the Lassie Game. And I don’t think we even talked about it; we just sat there feeling stupid. We stuck the game away somewhere and never opened it or looked at it again.

My deeply-held feeling that this awful game was the product of empty-hearted men was not induced by my left wing parents – it was just obvious to me sitting sadly on the living room floor. Over time more and more evidence showed up that in addition to real stuff, good games like Scrabble and Monopoly, there was a river of garbage being invented in those executive rooms and being sold to anybody dumb enough to buy them.

I can still feel the sense of shame I felt as that little boy, sitting there trying to make sense of a game that was nothing but packaged garbage.  I can still feel that shame and it still makes me angry at the Mad Men who put that over on us.

The Lassie Game is one reason I am not a fan of the Star War movies. I feel like they became nothing but a vehicle for selling toys to kids. The toys are probably not as pathetic as The Lassie Game but are also dreamed up by executive who want to cash in on something to make money, regardless of the effect on children.

(By the way, there were many versions of the Lassie game, and I suspect they were not all as bad as the one we picked. In fact, I think that the image I used above was not the one we hated; it was just the closest I could find.)