after the second world war as society became ever more affluent and new technology and materials (plastics) for toy manufacture became available, toys became cheap and ubiquitous in households across the western world. among the more well known products of the 1950s there was the danish company lego's line of colourful interlocking plastic brick construction sets, rubik's cube, mr. potato head, the barbie doll and action man. today there are computerized dolls that can recognize and identify objects, the voice of their owner, and choose among hundreds of pre-programmed phrases with which to respond. the materials that toys are made from have changed, what toys can do has changed, but the fact that children play with toys has not.