A look at the awful playtime trinkets you’re forced to keep in your house until you can finally buy your kid a phone.
The Toy
Playhut, made by the aptly named Basic Fun, which filed for bankruptcy a year ago.
The Slogan
“Twist, pop and play with Playhut!”
The Product
A $25 play tent lovingly festooned with your child’s pre-determined favorite IP property. Yes, they come in Paw Patrol. You must not have kids if you’re thick enough to ask that question.
What It’s Made Out Of
All huts are made out of discarded chicken wire and a polymer fabric that’s roughly 15 percent stronger than a Bounty towel. They make the average Fanatics jersey feel like it’s made out of 500-thread Egyptian cotton. When you buy a Playhut, it comes with one opening flap. It will not end its lifespan with that many.
Playhut also offers fold-up tunnels, which are made of the same material as those colorful romper-room parachutes. Unlike the tents, these tunnels are indestructible. You could patch up a moon lander using a swatch from one. Warning: you, the adult, will NOT fit inside this tunnel. I had to learn that lesson the hard way. The jaws of life were on standby.
Noise Factor
Blessedly, zero. To be clear, the toy is silent. As for your children when they’re playing with one, I offer no reassurances.
Battery Factor
No batteries required. A miracle.
Review
For kids who are too lazy to build a fort out of couch cushions, there is Playhut. In my career as parent, I have owned a Disney Princess Playhut, a Thomas the Tank Engine Playhut (shaped like a train), a Playhut tunnel, a Paw Patrol Playhut, and a Paw Patrol bed tent. All of them provided incredible value for the dollar, with the exception of the bed tent. The second I have to negotiate with all four corners of any mattress, I become red and pissed. Also, my son liked sleeping in that tent for roughly 10 minutes before asking me to unhook it. Horrible. I think I threw it into a nearby river after that.
As for the other Playhuts, my kids were imaginative enough to incorporate them into a couch cushion tent, complete with blanket floors, a tunnel entrance, and Beanie Baby residents. They set one side of the tunnel on the basement couch in order to create a slide-in entrance. Unfortunately, because they were too young to perceive design flaws, they provided no extra support under the tunnel from the couch down to the fort. THUNK. Dad had to scrounge up a handful of emergency pillows to fortify the tunnel slide.
Once your child builds a fort of such elaborate design, you the parent are never allowed to disassemble it. Little Johnny spent all afternoon building his shitty little mousetrap; he’s not gonna let you tear it down just because “it’s bedtime,” or because “hey, there’s no fucking room to walk down here.” Desecrate your child’s brutalist masterpiece and the tears will come down in sheets. It falls on the tougher parent (mom) to ignore those tears and wipe that fort clean from the landscape. Mom is the original DOGE.
And yes, I’ve had a lot of basic fun hiding with my kids inside a Playhut, pretending we’re in a real castle (a very small one) and keeping extra quiet to see if anyone else in the house knows where we’re hiding. But you didn’t come here for shiny happy memories. You came here for harsh truths, so here’s the harshest one of all: Once you unfold a Playhut, you will NEVER be able to re-fold it. Ever have to un-kink a Slinky? OK, well imagine that, except now the Slinky is three feet tall and has a giant Cinderella tablecloth scotch-taped to it.
When I think about my time as an early parent, I think about the hours of my life that I wasted trying to put one of these pieces of shit away by contorting it into strange, ovoid shapes not dissimilar to Pluto’s orbital path. Halfway into folding up any Playhut, I inevitably gave up and left it half-packed, with the full Marshall side of it still popping out the top of the storage bag, like the world’s shittiest jack-in-the-box. Then I tried to wedge the whole mess behind a toy shelf, and the corner of that shelf snagged on the hut wall and gouged a yard-long tear in it. Fuck a duck.
After a while, I gave up and left the hut in the center of my basement, where it turned into a permanent piece of furniture. When you have kids, you spend most of your time shouting, “Who the fuck left this here?” A Playhut is engineered to inspire this question on a daily basis. Even when you know who left that Playhut in the center of your playroom, you’ll still ask the question out loud anyway. How did this shitty house get into my better house, and what’s to be done about it? The answer is nothing. You just have to wait until either the kid gets bored of the Playhut, or it simply decomposes like a roll of toilet paper left out in the forest. I have no idea if we still own our Playhuts, and I have no interest in finding out.
But at least it doesn’t require batteries.
