Toy Boy

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Target has taken an eccentric toymaker's vision and turned it into a product line. While Kirk says he and an assistant have done "thousands and thousands" of drawings for possible products, Target is manufacturing and delivering merchandise in just three areas: clothes, furniture and gardening appliances. Of these, the gardening tools (including watering cans, stepping stones, sprinklers and kneepads) look the most irresistible, perhaps because they constitute the least exploited category.

It might help things along that a Miss Spider TV special will run on Nickelodeon at the end of March and that Callaway and Kirk are also developing a TV series based on both Miss Spider and Nova the robot. On the other hand, the territory they're entering is not unpopulated. Rolie Polie Olie, a geometric tyke who lives on a robotic planet and who, like Nova, is a computer-generated image, is already on the Disney Channel, and his catchy theme song is lodged in the junior set's hearts. (Callaway doesn't see it as a threat, in part because Miss Spider's eyes are bigger: "That's the lesson Walt Disney taught us big eyes.")

As for Kirk, he's happy to have come full circle, to be back making something again. And he isn't worried that grownup marketing concerns will make it difficult for him to summon his inner boy. "For me, it's more of an effort getting out of the place where I think like a child," he says. Financial maturity has its upside too: more pocket money to blow on robots, other toys and old woodworking tools on eBay. Not to mention the freedom to create more fantasy worlds. After all, what's the fun in growing up if you can't play with your toys whenever you want?