Dream Small, Poor People!

So I was at Giant Tiger recently, because of my love of cheap jeans and large cats, and I happened to notice something odd in the discount toy section. There, among the remaindered Superman Returns dollars and the various low-rent attempts to catch up with Yu-Gi-Oh, there were three examples of what can only be called bootleg board games. Games that took the basic concept of a popular title, and tried to profit from it while avoiding a law suit.

What's so interesting about these three games is the insight they give us into the minds of the people making them, and how they're meant to inform the dreams and aspirations of the (presumably lower-class) children who play them.

So while it's perfectly acceptable for kids to fantasize about joining the navy-

Or perhaps identifying someone in a police lineup-

Being a doctor is, sadly, out of their reach. No, when it comes to the bootleg version of 'Operation', children of poor people can only dream of-

Salvage. Not even being a mechanic, which is a skilled, vital profession, and could easily have been the subject of the game - Junkyard Jalopy asks players to fantasize about being scrapyard workers, employed to remove salvagable parts from a wrecked cars, so they can be resold later.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, if anyone wants to surprise me for my half-birthday, I would appreciate a Deluxe Kitchen Machine.