Twenty years ago, bathtime wouldn’t have been much fun without Bart, Barbie and Darth Vader. The story of the golden age of bath toys is a real soap opera
There is a tall black cabinet in London filled with 150 bottles and 300 unblinking eyes. It’s always strange seeing part of your childhood in a museum, but I never expected to be reminded of my mortality by a yellow plastic bottle moulded into the spikes of Bart Simpson’s head. “I had that! On the edge of my bathtub 20 years ago!” I thought earlier this year as I stared into the display of character-shaped bubble bath bottles at the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill. The display is just one part of the museum’s journey through time, a pitstop between 80s magazines and 00s snacks. Soaking in the rotundity of Super Mario’s belly, the bloom of Aladdin’s plastic pants and the shiny red point of Pingu’s beak, I couldn’t remember which of the bottles I’d had and which I simply coveted – but I realised they were once everywhere, and now they’re nowhere to be seen.
At the turn of the millennium we were (unknowingly) in the middle of the bubble bath boom. Characters in every show, film and video game were brought to life as hollow novelty figurines that were decapitated to reveal a foaming mixture within. It’s impossible to overstate the scale of the thing: there was the Mask, Quasimodo, Barbie, the Little Mermaid, Fred Flintstone and Raymond Briggs’s Snowman (as well as every other man possible – Bat, Action, Spider, He). Who was behind this moment in pop culture history? Why was it the golden age of the bath toy? What made the bubble burst? It all starts with Robert Beecham.
