Well, it's official. After a month of passionate debate and fierce competition among supporters of various factions, Monopoly enthusiasts have given the boot to the "iron" token and have chosen a "cat" token as its replacement. Hasbro's "Save Your Token" contest ended at midnight on February 6, leaving some voters jubiliant, some disappointed, and some...confused. In an interview with ABC News, Jonathan Berkowitz, vice president of marketing for Hasbro Gaming, said that, while the company was pleased by all of the excitement and interest in the contest (votes poured in from such disparate places as Liechtenstein, Dijibouti, and Guam), he and others at Hasbro were surprised by how close the "shoe" token came to being ousted.
"The shoe was surprising to all of us because there's definitely a large fan base out there for shoes," he said.
The shoe's inclusion in the "bottom three" may have been a surprise to Hasbro, but we doubt that anyone at the company so much as raised an eyebrow when the "wheelbarrow" token narrowly escaped passing "go" forever. Not that we have anything against wheelbarrows in general, or their use as game tokens, but, like the ultimately doomed iron token, the wheelbarrow has never really had the same "oomph" as its compatriots: the hat, the race car, the thimble, the battleship, and...of course...the Scottie dog. And while a Monopoly player's preference for one token over another is of course a completely subjective matter, we can't imagine anyone sitting down to play a game of Monopoly and declaring, "Dibs on either the iron or the wheelbarrow!" Even the thimble...that humble, unglamorous symbol of a mundane household task...has a certain aesthetic quality lacking in the iron and the wheelbarrow.
Perhaps that's what it all comes down to in the end. Aesthetics. When playing a game which requires adults to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting around a table and pushing tiny tokens back and forth across a board, the process becomes infinitely more enjoyable if the tiny token has some substance to it. In a word, the iron and the wheelbarrow are simply too spindly. And no matter how much fake money you manage to amass during the game, or how many properties, houses, and hotels you can afford to buy, it's hard to feel like a real business tycoon when your presence in the game is represented by a dinky little iron or wheelbarrow.
Which brings us to the newest member of the Monopoly universe: the cat token. If there was uncertainty as to which of the original tokens would ultimately get the ax, there was never a moment's doubt regarding which of the new tokens would find its way onto Boardwalk. Of the four other contenders on Hasbro's "new token ballot"...a guitar, a diamond ring, a helicopter, and a robot...the only one that ever had even a ghost of a chance to shut out the cat was the robot. What makes us so all-fired sure about that? Well, as before, it's simply a matter of aesthetics.
What does a guitar have to do with real estate? Or a helicopter? And while diamond rings might seem ritzy enough for a game like Monopoly, the token just looks awkward. Which leaves us with the cat and the robot. But the robot, while undeniably cute, just looks out of place in a game like Monopoly, which, for all of its enduring appeal, is essentially a game whose values are rooted in America's early 20th-century past. What does a robot have to do with any of that? But a cat...well, not only is the cat right up there with the Scottie dog when it comes to aesthetic appeal, voting it in as the newest member of the Monopoly token hiearchy must have felt like a personal vindication for all of the cat loving Monopoly enthusiasts who have had to listen to people go on and on about the Scottie dog all these years. The Scottie dog may still be the most popular token on the Monopoly game board...for now...but the advent of the cat may be just the shake up that the old pooch and its cardboard world need after resting so long on their collective laurels.
Of course, none of this will really affect the Monopoly universe in any real way. Iron's out, kitty's in, roll the dice, let the game begin! But it's not often that a game like Monopoly manages to make headlines. The fact that it has, simply because the company that manufactures it decided it was time to jettison an old token in favor of a new one, says something about what Monopoly represents. And what
does it represent? Well, we would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the past, and our desire to preserve our connection to it, even as we make room for something new...something different...but something whose time has come.
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