The mechanics of Play pretend.
You know, I think that one of the reasons stuff like bakugan, beyblade, hell even skylanders and arguably ben 10 were so popular in their era is thanks of the focus of depicting it's main gimmick as mysterous artifact merges of these supernatural powers within a mechanical doohickey that has a physical way to be operated.
If you look at a bakugan in your hand and you can see how it works where it opens, the first step is a physical understanding on how it works in real life, and the next part is left to your imagination. It introduces a device that correlates those two things, and to put it simply, there's a reason why one can consider it "Rad as hell" both first hand as a kid, and retroactively as an adult.
image taken from this video
These all kinda introduce a ritual to "activate" that supernatural power these pieces of plastic are asking you to imagine them having.
Throw the bakugan, the bakugan handles the mechanics they need to Open up you handle imagining it as a cool ass dragon emerging from it.
Let the bayblade "rip" through its mechanism, and as they clash you can imagine a winged horse emerging and fighting it out.
Push the button, the dial pops up, select one of these misterious alien siluettes by spinning the dial, Slam it, and you bet the kid who bought that toy omnitrix is gonna pretend to be Fourams or whoever ther favorite is.
Skylanders is weird in this sense, since it has the mechanism, but instead of leaving it to the imagination it outright shows on screen how the toy ahem "came to life". While it does make really cool the whole process of placing the skylander on the portal and them arriving in the game, it all feels very magical. Altough their medium can make them feel pretty robotic at times.
What you can see here is a physical, real and mechanical interaction with the toy, being used to justify an imaginative, supernatural and fictional effect that is given to them. Just how a kid will need to take a stick before they can imagine having a magic wand in their hands, these toys focus on that aspect as a way to bring to life their own ideas into the playground.
I feel this is partly a reason why this type of toy had a bigger sucess in general. Give a kid a toy that has tons of very specific features like "the toy talks" or "the toy walks on its own" and probably they will get tired of it sooner rather than later. Give a kid a toy that has some specific actions wich let them imagine the effect and how they use that effect and little by little the kid has imagined their whole game by themselves.
Even in the case of skylanders where the toys do talk, walk and have their own powers the kid can have the console represent for them. That activation process, specially with how well the portal cutscenes are represented with its sound design, goes a long way to inmerse that kid within that game world. The portal of power is a completely different beast than the NFC reader for amiibos for example, cause skylanders while products at their core, have had effort put into selling the idea through a "play pretend" approach.
All in all, parts of my infancy were pretty defined by this style of toys, specially ben 10 and to a lesser extent bakugan. As somewhat of a digital artist nowadays a lot of the motivations that i have for drawing were developed in that stage. I see drawing in a sense of a sort of evolution to that play pretend, what once we imagined as children, be it your own custom ben 10 alien, or bakugan or the like, now i have the power to bring those ideas to life and more importantly, share them with others they way i imagined them.
