It cannot be denied that the new Smart Cycle from Fisher-Price lacks a couple of those defining features that it commonly lifts one’s heart to see on a child’s bike, namely, wheels. This, and the fact that it plugs into a television set, enabling the coddled young rider to traverse a variety of simulated terrains without leaving the sitting room, or even the spot, mean that the toy has had a mound of scorn heaped upon it even before its scheduled arrival in shops, at the end of this month. Only yesterday, an unimpressed correspondent to this newspaper suggested that it was a machine designed “to enable fat kids to watch dross”, which is some distance, I suspect, from what it will say on the box.
Poor old Fisher-Price, which, in an age of under-exercise, is only trying, as a spokesperson plaintively explained, “to encourage children to get up off the sofa”. And even if that means travelling just two feet across the carpet before coming to rest astride a lump of plastic with no wheels, it’s surely something.
In any case, the activity proposed by the Smart Cycle doesn’t seem a million miles, by bike or otherwise, from the activity engaged in by countless adults, entirely unburdened by conscience, on static cycles in front of flat-screen televisions in gyms. In fact, in terms of mental stimulus, the Smart Cycle may edge it. The adults tend to be watching Matthew Wright’s The Wright Stuff on Five, whereas the children on board the Smart Cycle will be (according to Fisher-Price) learning about numbers and letters.
Also, nowhere, that I am aware of, has Fisher Price insisted that the Smart Cycle should replace conventional cycling for toddlers, of the kind carried out in parks and playgrounds and requiring wheels. It’s probably just meant to be something else to do on a wet day other than watch LazyTown again.
But these days, the hair-trigger reaction is nearly always to ask whether things are good or bad for children, when they may, in fact, be neither good nor bad, but merely games. It’s hard to see how a toy manufacturer could ever launch anything and win outright in such a climate. Bear in mind, too, that it will only take one child to go over the handlebars of its Smart Cycle before the toy finds itself at the centre of a punitive health and safety scare.
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A shadowy development far more worthy of our concern, surely, is the slow but steady creep of physical activity into the hitherto fundamentally effort-free world of computer gaming. First there was the Eye-Toy, which called upon its players to jiggle about in front of a prototype webcam. Then there was the Nintendo Wii, with its wave-around wand, a system so woefully in defiance of the history of the form that it asks its players to stand up. And now the Smart Cycle. Was it for this that a generation laid down its spare time, and bodies, in front of Pong and Tetris?