An interesting article on the timelessness of toys, even though it doesn't mention Transformers. Amused by the citation of He-Man as a timeless toy in light of its current success - for most of the past few decades, He-Man has been the epitome of a has-been brand (I believe that title has now been passed to G.I. Joe).

https://thewalrus.ca/how-do-you-make-the-perfect-toy/

How Do You Make the Perfect Toy?
Fads come and go, but how to create a toy that stands the test of time is the billion-dollar question

BY MATTHEW BRAGA
ILLUSTRATION BY HUDSON CHRISTIE
Updated 11:11, Sep. 8, 2022 | Published 16:30, Sep. 6, 2022

MIFRAH ABID’S eight-year-old son, Moosa, loves The Avengers. He’s obsessed with his Iron Man action figure and can talk at length about its many suits. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Tooba, meanwhile, went through a Roblox phase, playing a video game that’s all the rage with kids her age. But, early in the pandemic, when everyone was spending more time together at home, Abid went looking for something the whole family could enjoy. “[Millennial parents] don’t know about new toys,” said Abid, who lives in Kitchener, Ontario, and is host and producer of the interview podcast Across Her Table, which focuses on women with immigrant roots. “We were like, ‘Let’s go back to what we know.’” She thought back to her own childhood, to those old games the family played while crowded around the table—Monopoly, Pictionary, Uno. She decided to try to introduce them to her kids. Now Moosa and Tooba love them too.

It was a similar story for Robert Lee and his two daughters. Allie is six, Annie is four, and they both love all things Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig, and Baby Shark. But, for Christmas two years ago, their mother bought them a Lite-Brite and a Spirograph—simple art toys invented back in the ’60s that she remembered from her own early years. These weren’t the toys that Lee’s daughters typically saw in the YouTube videos they watched. They didn’t have flashy advertising campaigns or tie-in television shows, meaning the kids would never think to ask for them on their own. But Allie and Annie loved playing with them all the same.

Kids get older, and fads come and go. But some toys persist, almost stubbornly—artifacts passing from one generation to the next. In the toy business, these products are considered “classics.” It’s an amorphous category filled with all sorts of games and toys that have just a few things in common: namely, they are survivors in an industry where trends rule all. The Rubik’s Cube is, in many ways, the perfect example of a classic toy. More than 450 million are estimated to have been sold since 1978, with up to tens of millions of units still moving in a year. Etch A Sketch (180 million sold since 1960), Lego, Potato Head, Barbie, and, of course, Play-Doh are classics too. These toys are instantly recognizable but rarely advertised. They’re often low tech or analog. In fact, in a world full of screens, their tactility is increasingly part of the draw. Often, classic toys encourage what academics say is high-quality play, like problem solving or imaginative thinking. And, as some experts have found, such toys are highly nostalgic—conjuring warm, fuzzy memories in the parents who do the buying. This is how toys turn into tradition.

In 2016, Jane Eva Baxter published an article in the International Journal of Play that considered the role of nostalgia in keeping two particular items alive: the rotary-style Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone and wearable Mickey Mouse ears. Toys, she wrote, are often thought of as tools of preparation. It’s the reason parents buy Lego (to encourage creativity and cognitive thinking) or dolls (to simulate caregiving). It’s why most daycares and kindergarten classes have colourful blocks with the alphabet printed on the sides: to teach, to set kids up for future success.

But learning and development can’t be the only reason certain toys stick around, wrote Baxter, who is chair of the anthropology department at Chicago’s DePaul University and an archaeologist and historian of childhood. After all, here were two items—a rotary phone and mouse ears—that have persisted despite having no clear connection with the present. “The emotional connection adults have to this iconic toy has kept it in the marketplace despite the fact that a rotary-dial landline phone is technologically irrelevant for children today,” Baxter wrote. The same could be said of Mickey Mouse ears. The toy hasn’t appeared on TV as much in recent years, is no longer featured prominently in Disney’s theme parks, and is based on a character who is “increasingly peripheral to the Disney brand.”

Speaking from her home in Chicago, Baxter explains that parents, not toy producers, were the ones driving these sales. “There is this nostalgic element of either wanting to share something from their own childhood or give something that they felt they lacked in their childhood, because they think it will be good,” Baxter says. Especially now, in a largely digital world, there is something about these analog toys “that parents see as desirable for their children [and] that we find desirable for ourselves.” In fact, when Fisher-Price tried to modernize its iconic toy phone by removing the rotary dial, there was a consumer revolt, and sales fell. Nostalgia, Baxter concluded, is what keeps certain toys alive.

If you’re Toronto-based Spin Master, one of the largest toy makers in the world, nostalgia is also good for business. Founded in 1994 by two recent graduates from Western University, Spin Master quickly made a name for itself creating playground fads. One early success was 1997’s Air Hogs, a pump-powered, hand-thrown plane that could fly the length of a football field on nothing more than pressurized air. Then there was Bakugan, a 2007 mania centred on battling creatures from another dimension (think a mash-up of Pokémon, Transformers, and Yu-Gi-Oh), which involved an anime series, collectible trading cards, transforming toys, and a board game.

And, of course, there’s Paw Patrol. Created in 2013, Spin Master’s star franchise follows the adventures of a group of rescue dogs and their leader, a human boy named Ryder. Paw Patrol has spanned nine TV seasons, a Hollywood film (the second is now on the way), and, most importantly, a sprawling line of toys, merchandise, and games. The brand practically prints money for Spin Master, which today is worth around $4.4 billion and has 2,000 employees spread across nearly twenty countries.

But the company learned an important lesson from Bakugan, which had generated more than $1 billion in toy sales by 2014, before its popularity started to wane: what goes up eventually comes down, especially when it comes to fickle young audiences. That’s where the classic toys come in. Having one of these brands in your portfolio is every sales department’s dream. They practically sell themselves.

Beginning in 2013, Spin Master went on a spree of acquiring classic toy brands. It started with the century-old British construction toy Meccano (also known as Erector), which allows kids to build models by joining metal strips and plates with nuts and bolts. Then, in 2015, the company paid more than $50 million (US) for Cardinal Industries, one of the oldest manufacturers of chess sets and other traditional board games in the US. It bought Etch A Sketch in 2016. Plush maker Gund, founded in 1898, was snatched up for nearly $80 million (US) in 2018. And, three years later, Spin Master closed on Rubik’s Cube for about $50 million (US). Spin Master, like a Hungry Hungry Hippo, has been gobbling up many of the oldest and most-loved toys in North America with gusto and learning lessons along the way about what products stand the test of time.

Most toys burn hot, bright, and fast, making Paw Patrol’s nine-year reign something of an anomaly. But, eventually, even Paw Patrol will fade. So why is it that some toys don’t? Many companies are trying to figure out the answer to this question, because as great as it is to invent the must-have toy of the season, it’s even better to create one that kids will be playing with 100 years from now.

IN A CONNECTICUT CLASSROOM, a wooden-block monolith rises from the floor. The tower is flanked by two small children on a mission to make it taller. But there’s a problem: there are no more long blocks left on the shelf. The children have used them all. One of the boys looks around, and after a moment of deep thought, a look of recognition spreads across his face. You can almost see the light bulb flash. He takes two smaller blocks and connects them together. Now, “this is a long one,” the boy says, triumphant. Problem solved; the tower grows.

The precocious boys were being filmed by researchers at Eastern Connecticut State University’s Center for Early Childhood Education. They were part of a long-term study of preschool children called TIMPANI, or Toys That Inspire Mindful Play and Nurture Imagination. From 2010 to 2019, TIMPANI researchers put kids together in rooms and observed how they interacted—with toys and with one another. A generation of kids built whimsical Duplo houses and elaborate marble runs. They pretended to run stores, bakeries, and ice cream shops, with all the requisite props. Simple toys proved especially popular, the researchers found, and those old-timey blocks, cars, people, and shapes seemed to yield the most imaginative play. Julia DeLapp, the centre’s director, says that while there’s been lots of research on how children play and how play affects a child’s development, less attention has been paid to the toys themselves. What kinds of toys encourage the most creativity, imagination, problem solving, or collaboration? What, specifically, makes a kid gravitate toward one toy over another? DeLapp and her colleagues had their suspicions, but they decided to test them out—and for good reason. “I think that children’s earliest experiences with play influence them for the rest of their lives,” she says.

On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 5:49:46 PM UTC-6, Codigo Postal wrote:

> An interesting article on the timelessness of toys, even though it doesn't mention Transformers. Amused by the citation of He-Man as a timeless toy in light of its current success - for most of the past few decades, He-Man has been the epitome of a has-been brand (I believe that title has now been passed to G.I. Joe).

People *remember* He-Man as being a big deal. Even to the point where it was coloring adult perception well after it was no longer a big-time brand. Witness the Ghostbusters 2 film where kids erroneously go crazy over He-Man even though it definitely wasn't a big deal by 1989.

All it takes, honestly, is one good holiday season to cement a toy into the annals of history. If your product manages to make it as the hot Christmas toy even once, then you're basically golden forever. It's like that somehow gives manufacturers the right to just keep doing variations on a theme, forever and ever. Toys like hula hoops and yo-yos are still in every toy store today as a result of that.

Transformers fills a niche because they're actually three things—they're action figures, they're toy cars, and they're also puzzles. They appeal to a more intellectual consumer who wants to be challenged, as opposed to a very young child who just wants two muscle men with swords to smash into each other. I think it's the perfect triumverate. If you took away one of those three things, the formula wouldn't work. Like, if Transformers were all cars that turned into planes, it would be kind of cool from an engineering perspective, but you'd lose the action figure aspect. If they were all robots who turned into chairs and tables and refrigerators, you lose the exciting vehicle fantasy aspect. There's a limited market for Transformers figures that can't turn into cars and are therefore not puzzles, but those are nostalgia-based and media-driven. People have an existing love for the characters and that's the only way they work. I guarantee if they invented all-new characters to sell as part of Super7's Transformers Ultimates line or Hasbro's R.E.D. series, they would not sell.

I'm really not sure what happened with G.I. Joe. I know they're trying to tap into the 6" scale collector market, but that seems like a mistake because it removes the vehicle play, which was a key element of the original toy line. But then, Star Wars was also originally a smaller scale figure, and they've made the transition to six-inch collector figures without the need for lots and lots of vehicles. So, I really don't get it. I guess the space fantasy is just more inherently enticing than the military fantasy, which is pretty much grounded in reality. G.I. Joe pivots towards science fiction sometimes, but it's still predominantly military-themed and that just doesn't seem to resonate with people right now.

Zob (maybe they need to mutate Snake-Eyes into a turtle ninja or something?)