"The more complex the mind..."

In the 80s someone I knew read that people lose imagination and the capacity to play (in the most childlike sense of the word, like with toys) as they mature, because part of the physical maturation process of the brain is actual closing off of some of the synaptic or neural pathways.

I remember the last time I played. I was about fourteen, so about 1974. I had a dozen or more of a collection of hard plastic posable cartoon character dolls (I suppose today they'd be called "action figures") that an outfit called R. Dakin put out; a superficial websearch shows they were acquired by Applause in 1995. These dolls were seven to ten inches tall. I had mostly Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera characters - I think I only ever saw Disney Dakins at Disneyland, and I never had many - but I also had Kool Kat and the Pink Panther and a mouse in a yellow turtleneck sweater whose cartoons I've never seen and whose name I don't recall. This day I cast them as myself and my friends from junior high school. Smaller, cuter characters like Tweety Bird were cast as girls regardless of intrinsic gender (though there were some intrinsic females in my collection, e.g. Wilma and Pebbles Flintstone). I was the Pink Panther. Barry was the turtlenecked mouse, Chuck was Kool Kat, Bruce was Huckleberry Hound, Dan was Yogi Bear, Lisa was Tweety, either Barb or Holly was Sylvester and the other may have been Bugs Bunny... We all lived together split up among houses in a Hundred Acre Wood style place staged in my bedroom (I'd had the master bedroom since scarfmom and scarfdad had split up). We all fell victim to some sort of mind control plot, but whenever a really good song would come on the radio one of us would break free. For Bruce/Huckleberry it was Smokin' in the Boys' Room (just because I liked the song, not because of anything I knew or suspected about Bruce). It must have gone on for an hour to a whole afternoon but this's all I remember now. After that Jackie Paper came no more. The toys themselves will have been destroyed in a storage locker fire in the 80s if scarfmom even still had them as late as that.

I've got animation capability back after ten years and I can't think what I'd like to do with it.