Ryan Vlastelica: How 'The Indian In The Cupboard' addresses race issues

Growing up, I loved Lynne Reid Banks’ The Indian In The Cupboard series, because of what I viewed as its analytical approach to magic. When Omri, the young boy at the center of the tale, realizes he can bring his toys to life through the use of a magic key, he reacts the way any kid would: He experiments.

Or so I remembered. In actuality, Omri learns the rules fairly quickly (lock a toy in a container once to bring it to life, lock it a second time to send it back; only plastic items turn real), but once he does, he’s more than content to stick with his initial discovery, a 2-inch-tall Iroquois man named Little Bear. While he grants his friend Patrick his own living toy—a drunken, cowardly cowboy named Boone—he’s otherwise adamant that they not abuse the power or let harm come to them. So rather than going on small-scale adventures, à la Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, or having Omri somehow save his new friend, à la E.T. (though Frank Oz’s 1995 adaptation of Cupboard was scripted by E.T. writer Melissa Mathison), the boy spends most of his time learning.

That is the real story of The Indian In The Cupboard (1980) and its sequels, one I didn’t appreciate until adulthood. More than anything else, the first book is about stereotypes and the importance and difficulty of being able to look past them. To a surprising degree, it’s an elaborate parable about race, and not a particularly subtle one. The toys start out defined by their labels—“the cowboy,” “the Indian,” and all the baggage those entail—and things are tense until they learn to see past the labels, to view each other as people.