Sunday, July 17, 2016

Teletubbies return with a vengeance

The waiting is the hardest part
Newark, NJ
July 2016
If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you may be familiar with Po*. She's the littlest of the four Teletubby characters that a few years back dominated the children's television landscape.

I've had this particular Po figurine since our eldest son was a toddler. She's a Happy Meal toy that like so many other Happy Meal toys ended up stuck behind the sofa amid a cloud of dust bunnies and forgotten socks. Once it was clear that our little guy no longer wanted her, I rescued her from her furniture-ish purgatory, and she's been hanging from my camera bag ever since.

Over the years, she's been everywhere with me. I still shoot her in airports, and she still makes strangers smile - which in this day and age seems more important that ever. Yes, she's tattered at the edges and her red has faded a bit. But for a tiny toy that was absent-mindedly tossed into the fast food bag alongside a box of mid-sized McNuggets, she's had an outsized influence on more lives than we could have ever imagined.

Isn't it strange how things become icons to us?

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* Here's a quick peek at all the places she's been:

2 comments:

Tabor said...

What a cool idea!

sage said...

A nice mento of your child's childhood, but I was glad my daughter didn't care much for Teletubbies--she loved Barney and Clifford. I was almost thinking your post was going to be about the Pokomon craze.