Monster toy exhibit isn't just child's play

The University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus becomes a safe haven this weekend for monsters, aliens, and other horrors — and for the people who love them.

A Twin Cities-based organization called Super Monster City has created a show called "America's Monsters, Superheroes and Villains" for the Goldstein Museum of Design displaying 60 years of monster toys. Organizers say it also examines how America has seen itself over the last half-century.

David Barnhill and Stephen Rueff, who have been friends for 45 years, are the minds behind the exhibit.

"We played with a lot of these toys as children," Rueff, who is the show's curator, said. "And we roamed the streets of Dinkytown in the '70s and we went down to the dunes of the Mississippi River and we were blowing up army men with firecrackers."

Barnhill calls himself the "crazed collector" of Super Monster City. He love toys, the boxes they come in, even the instructions, when some assembly is required. He estimates his collection numbers at over 200,000, once you count all the individual soldiers and dinosaurs.

He and Rueff created Super Monster City to bring the collection to the public. "America's Monsters, Superheroes and Villains" is their biggest show so far.

There are aliens who emerged in the early days of the space race, and Hollywood monsters who became a staple of late night TV in the '60s. There are robots, and comic book heroes from DC and Marvel. There's a whole lot of hotrods, including one driven by the villainous rodent Rat Fink.

And of course there are the Star Wars toys.

Barnhill represents the inner eight-year-old in us all, delighted by every new horrible creation on the toy shelves, while Rueff takes a more intellectual approach.

"What we are doing is we are taking this collection of toys and we are putting them in a social-political context," Rueff said.

There are toys from the time of the arms race, in the wake of World War II where the threat of nuclear war cast a pall over everything. Those are the "aliens and monsters and space ships, and science experiments gone awry," Rueff said. "And so you saw toys that reflected that ambivalence about science."

There's a section called "Innocent Monsters," where beings are turned into objects of horror through no fault of their own, echoing a sense of youthful alienation. And there is what Rueff calls "Myths and Legends." In the 1970s, at a time of political fragmentation left by the Nixon resignation and the legacy of Vietnam, Star Wars came to serve a national need, Rueff says.

"And really Star Wars with George Lucas and Joseph Campbell coming together to unify the country behind myths and legends, the heroes journey," he said.

This intellectual approach will no doubt quell doubts from some exhibit visitors who are being dragged along by those of David Barnhill's persuasion.

"It's toys, and it's monsters and it's superheroes!" he grins. "How cool is that?"

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