Diversion safes are the stuff of childhood dreams for me, when every book, key, or other common item could contain a key or treasure map in its hollowed-out core.
They capture the imagination like nothing else, for what is a child’s creativity but that everyday things ought to be in reality extraordinary?
That secretly, the world is not as it appears.
Such is the suspicion of a child slowly and gradually waking up from childhood, slowly adapting to the likelihood that the world is both more limited – with its guidelines and adults – and much more fantastic – with its secrets and diversion safes – than apparent at first sight, the first sight of childhood.
There’s something intrinsically intriguing about objects that double as something else – or, to put it another way, objects that pretend to be one thing while truly functioning as another.
And so there’s something of the moral lesson in diversion safes, which may demonstrate a child’s fascination with them.
That’s possibly the single biggest reason why the Transformers line of toys and games were such a runaway success.
There had never been anything like it before – robots that would have been quite interesting in themselves, as robots, but to that was added the ability to, well, transform into (generally speaking) some non-robotic object, usually vehicles such as cars and airplanes but occasionally even animals like dinosaurs.
Now isn’t that somehow rather like a diversion safe?
A vehicle that hides a robot, an apparently unthinking vehicle housing in reality artificial intelligence of the most incredible order.
A car, or a plane – or a armed gun, or a radio cassette player (with the cassettes themselves transformable into birds of prey and hunting dogs).
There have been few objects which Japanese toymakers didn’t, origami-like, re-imagine as robots.
And so a safe transforms straight into memories of the Transformers!
