A History Of The Ball Pit!
” So put down your phone and just savour the moment. “
A History Of The Ball Pit!
Over the past several years, ball pits have made a huge comeback. They were a huge part of any indoor children’s playground in the 1980s and ’90s, and you can now find adults taking selfies in vast pools of colourful plastic balls at Instagram-friendly pop-up museums and bars, on boats, and even in offices in New York, Philadelphia, London, Sydney, Mexico City, and beyond. YouTube is full of videos of people filling their living rooms with plastic balls— amusing themselves as well as their dogs. Zoos in Houston and Denver have made ball pits for their mongooses; the Indianapolis Zoo created one for its meerkats.
The invention of the ball pit (or “ball crawl,” as it was first called) is widely attributed to Eric McMillan. Born in England and an industrial designer by training, McMillan moved to Canada and worked as an exhibition designer for Expo ’67 in Montreal. In 1971, he was appointed chief designer of Ontario Place, one of the world’s first entertainment centres including an IMAX theatre!
The Children’s Village was created, a massive playground unlike any other, where children could climb huge rope nets and soft pyramids, crawl through hanging tunnels, and jump on an enormous air mattress. “The Children’s Village opened in July 1972, and it was an amazing success,” McMillan writes. “People loved it, and it quickly became the top attraction at Ontario Place.
Now that the children of the ’90s have kids of their own, they are diving straight back into the ballots themselves, and modern parenting styles often show a love for safe indoor soft play spaces!
So next time you dive into a ball pit and position yourself for the perfect selfie, take a minute to appreciate the fact that what you’re doing should have no purpose. It is its own reward, complete fun in its own right. So, put down your phone and just savour the moment.
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Ball Pits In Pop Culture!
In the Johnny Bravo episode "Johnny Meets Donny Osmond," Donny pushes Johnny into a fast-food ball pit, where he comes across a young boy who claims to have been there since the age of five. In the Rugrats episode "Piggy's Pizza Palace", the Rugrats jump on a costumed pig named Piggy as an act of revenge to get Angelica's tickets back. It causes the ball pit structure to split right open, and all of the balls fall out all over the restaurant.
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