11 Toy Lines We Want To See On ‘The Toys That Made Us’
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One of the most pleasurable shows on Netflix is documentary series The Toys That Made Us. Each episode delves deep into the history and lore of a classic toy franchise, reminding us why they were special in the first place and dropping science that even true geeks didn’t know. The third season just dropped, with an episode featuring friend-of-Geek Aubrey Sitterson on WWF wrestling toys, and it got us fantasizing about other toy lines we’d kill to see the show tackle. Here’s our list.
Trolls
When a toy crosses over into the popular consciousness at large, nobody really knows what will happen. The story of Troll dolls would be a great lens to examine that curious phenomenon. First carved in 1959 by Danish fisherman Thomas Dam because he couldn’t afford to buy his daughter a Christmas present, the frizzy hair atop the figure was made from sheep’s wool. Their popularity quickly swept through Europe and to the United States, where they were a major fad in the mid-60s. After the fad died out is when things really get interesting, with multiple companies trying to update the concept with varying results. After the success of their animated movie based on the franchise, DreamWorks now owns the Trolls intellectual property outright.
Beanie Babies
Some million-dollar ideas are genius. And some are so stupid that they become genius. The second one applies to H. Ty Warner, the businessman who decided to just not put so much stuffing in his Beanie Babies. Warner introduced the first nine stuffed animals 1993, but it wasn’t until a few years later that they began to spark a massive speculator frenzy that would see people putting massive amounts of money into “rare” Beanie Babies. Deliberately limited production runs and regular “retiring” kept this secondary market going in some interesting ways, with at one point Beanie Babies representing 10% of all sales on eBay.
Pogs
Perhaps the least likely toy fad in recent memory, Pogs didn’t have anything fancy or high-tech going for them. In fact, they were about as simple as a “toy” could be – just a cardboard circle with some printing on both sides. But for a few brief, fevered years, the toy – which was originally a free giveaway from a Hawaiian juice company – absolutely captivated the public’s imagination. Based on the classic game of milk caps, where kids would stack cardboard disks and whip a heavier piece at them to scatter them, keeping the ones that landed face up, Pogs burned brightly and briefly in the mid-1990s
Chogokin
We all know that Japan is home to some of the greatest toys of all time, but a really cool episode would head back to the early 1970s and really get deep into how all those amazing robots came to be. Named after a fictional metal from Go Nagai’s legendary Mazinger Z manga, Chogokin was appropriated by toymaker Popy for their heavy, detailed line of die-cast metal robots. These things were head and shoulders above anything coming from American toymakers at the time, and the models that got imported became stuff like Mattel’s Shogun Warriors, which itself spawned a tie-in Marvel comic. The advent of ABS and PVC plastic ended the era of metal robot toys, but a new wave of collector-focused Chogokin has hit the market in recent years to recapture their titanic spirit.
Happy Meal Toys
For an entire generation, a trip to McDonalds meant getting your meal in a cardboard suitcase that came with a special toy treat. The Happy Meal was rolled out nationwide in 1979, with the first batch of toys including a stencil, a top or a character-shaped eraser. Companies soon learned that the cardboard burger box was an irresistible vector into the brains of children, and it wasn’t long before movies, TV shows, and more were creating toy giveaways specifically for McDonalds’ underage customers. There’s a thriving aftermarket in McDonalds toys for collectors as well, with the hardcore sets numbering in the thousands.
Marvel / Toy Biz
Action figure superheroes aren’t anything new, and the show has touched on them in passing once or twice, but what would really make for a dynamite episode is a deep dive into the bizarre financial machinations that brought Toy Biz from Marvel licensee to owner of the company. Originally founded in Canada as Charan Toys, the company was bought by notorious corporate raider Ike Perlmutter in 1990. A few years later, they acquired the “master license” for the entire Marvel universe and dominated shelves with figures. When the speculator crash threatened to tank Marvel at the end of the decade, it was Toy Biz who swept in and merged with Marvel Comics to become Marvel Entertainment. The company ceased to make anything in 2006 when Hasbro paid $205 million for a five year Marvel license.
Koosh
Scott Stillinger was having a hell of a time teaching his kids to play catch in the mid-80s, and his engineer’s brain found a solution that would launch an empire. Starting with a box of rubber bands, he crafted a ball that could be caught and thrown easily but wouldn’t bounce, and Koosh was born. He and his brother-in-law both quit their job to sell his invention, and Stillinger built a machine to make the balls in his barn. They hit retail in 1987 and by the next year it was a best-seller. They didn’t spend a dime on advertising, instead depending on stores to give them impulse-buying endcap space near registers to drive sales. Archie even published a four-issue “Koosh Kins” series, and by the time they sold the company in 1994 to Russ Berrie and Co. they were manufacturing 50 different products.
Rubik’s Cube
One of the most iconic toys of all time was an unlikely success in the 1980s, and it was invented completely by accident. Architect Ernő Rubik was trying to develop a mechanism by which the faces of a cube could be transposed, and it wasn’t until he accidentally scrambled up his prototype that he realized solving it could be challenging and fun. The Cube was brought to the United States by toy company Ideal and was quickly selling in the tens of millions. It inspired an entire cottage industry of books on how to solve it, as well as a tie-in Saturday morning cartoon on ABC. A horde of imitators and derivatives followed, a few even developed by Rubik. And with the patent lapsed, Chinese companies are making bigger and more complex cubes up to 22 squares across.
Dungeons & Dragons
There’s obvious synergy with Netflix hit Stranger Things here, and that show is one of many factors that have brought our beloved D&D back to the spotlight. The tabletop role-playing game was a direct descendant of more tactics-oriented fantasy miniature systems, but Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson filled out the systems to make play sessions more about the exploits of individual heroes instead of swarming armies. Add in a rich and robust fantasy setting that liberally borrowed from the classics and you have a genre-defining game that has grown and changed in some surprising ways over the last 45 years, with some drama behind the scenes to keep the show interesting.
Laser Tag
The technology behind 80s toy fad Laser Tag came from a very unexpected place – the U.S. Army. In the late 1970s, they developed the MILES system for training soldiers. Weapons fired infrared beams that were detected by special electronic targets, allowing trainees to feel the flow of combat without any bullet wounds. In 1979, to capitalize on the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Milton Bradley released “Electronic Phaser Guns” that worked on the same principles. That toy sold OK, but it opened the floodgates for a boom of other laser tag products throughout the decade. The evolution of the technology is fascinating, as well as the machinations behind Photon and other dedicated laser tag facilities that cropped up at the same time.
Tamagotchi
In the late 1990s, you weren’t anybody if you didn’t spend a significant chunk of your day taking care of a virtual pet. Created by Japanese manufacturer Bandai, Tamagotchi were self-contained electronics vaguely shaped like eggs. Inside one, trapped by the matrix of an LCD screen, was a helpless animal that relied on you to feed it, bathe it, and clean up its feces. If you didn’t pay enough attention to your Tamagotchi it would die, causing many schools to ban the things because they were too disruptive. Soon the market was choked with a panoply of knock-offs and the “virtual pet” became a thriving toy genre that continues to this day.