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The RMS Titanic sank nearly 100 years ago, and since has become the subject of books, non-fiction and fiction alike, documentaries, movies, cartoons, games, toys, and sadly, even jokes. How long did it take for a large scale tragedy in which so many lives were lost to become the subject of these often inappropriate things? How long will it take for the 9/11 tragedy to also become the subject of such things? It has already become the subject of at least two movies and several television documentaries, which are not in bad taste...yet. How long until there's a 9/11 themed kiddie bounce around, much like there is already a Titanic themed blow up water slide featured every year at my daughter's school field day? It is sad to see that such tragedies can quickly become subjects of popular culture and film, but the sadness, and bad taste, is exactly what this article is about.

The item that sticks out in my mind in the bad taste category is a game I had as a child; one which I enjoyed playing very much, and only when I was an adult did I realize how terribly sad, inappropriate, and down right wrong on a multitude of levels it is. This board game, The Sinking of the Titanic Game by Ideal Toys, featured a revolutionary three part moving game board. Why did it move? Well, the Titanic had to sink, didn't it? The object of the game was to move your piece around the steerage levels of the sinking Titanic and collect two food tokens, two water tokens, and two passengers, then get above deck and get into a lifeboat all before the Titanic sinks. Each time you rolled doubles, if I remember correctly, the ship would sink as you moved the ship piece down one more notch.

Eventually, you would reach your lifeboat and get into the water, hopefully before the Titanic slipped beneath the blue. Then you would ISLAND HOP until the rescue ship popped up. You would hop from island to pretty, sandy, complete with palm trees island, until that rescue ship came up, and then you had to be the first one on the rescue ship in order to win. Although I never realized it at the time, I was a kid after all, island hopping in the tropics until the Carpathia shows up when you were struck by an ICEBERG in the frigid North Atlantic is incredibly ludicrous! I chuckle at this, only because of its ridiculousness.

One more item of note, one which I did not have the pleasure of ever owning but is worth mention here. While vacationing in Disney World, I saw a child with toys in the pool. He had a boat, and two floating icebergs. I thought to myself what is the world coming to when we have Titanic bath toys?

Toys are a part of popular culture, and Titanic toys are no exception. As fun, goofy, and revolutionary as that Titanic game was with its moving parts of the board, it was, and is, in terribly bad taste. Still, movies like James Cameron's Titanic, and these games and toys, exploit tragedies and still make a lot of money. Now why didn't I think to exploit one of these tragedies first?

Learn more about this author, Rebecca Weinstein.
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