Personally, I always used to go for the dog. My father, if memory serves, was more of a ship man. Other members of the family had their own preferences, I forget which, although I'm fairly sure the iron never saw much action. Nor will it in the future, now that the makers of Monopoly have decided the little tokens that get pushed round the board need to be far more modern. Indeed, Hasbro has followed David Cameron and the Tory Party in the search for "relevance".
And so, the pewter model of the Scottie dog that taught so many children how to be cold-hearted capitalists is out, to be replaced by the Labradoodle, a labrador/poodle hybrid that is such a ridiculous creature it can only be seen on the streets of New York.
The racing car and the old boot face a similar fate, losing the battle of relevancy to the Toyota Prius and the New Balance training shoe. If even those don't tickle your fancy, you can choose to be represented by a miniature cup of Starbucks coffee, or an order of McDonald's fries, or a model of a Motorola Razr mobile phone, which given the trend towards downsizing is probably barely smaller than the phone itself. Hasbro insists the brands now included in the world's best selling-game have not paid for the privilege.
"So much of American pop culture today is represented by products that people use every day," said Mark Blecher, senior vice president for marketing at Hasbro's games unit. "We thought: 'Let's try to get iconography that's much more relevant to people today'."
I'm not sure relevance was ever the reason people choose to play Monopoly. More likely it gave the winner a fleeting and illusory feeling of what it must be like to own the world without having to suffer a conversation with Donald Trump. Fidel Castro felt it was good at instilling the American values of the free market and the Wall Street "get rich quick" mentality that he ordered all sets in Cuba destroyed.
Yet to claim the game never needed to be relevant isn't to say there aren't some interesting changes. Winning $10 in a beauty contest has become winning $100,000 in a reality TV show. Passing "Go" now earns you $2m, rather than $200. And being sent to jail (without passing Go or earning that $2m) is now saved for modern-day Kenneth Lays or Dennis Kozlowskis who commit white-collar crimes such as identity theft and insider trading. Other "Chance" cards offer a $1.5m signing-on bonus for accepting the job of chief executive at a blue-chip investment firm, or having to pay a similar amount after losing a class-action lawsuit. You can follow GlaxoSmithKline in being hit by the IRS for back taxes, or win it all back by selling your football season ticket on eBay.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/09/16/cclife16.xml
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