Toy Stories

Toy: Barrel of Monkeys

Debut: 1965, in Minneapolis
Creator: Jack Elias
Jack Elias was a freelance artist when Lakeside Signs and Toys hired him in 1964 on his promise that he was an expert drafter who could draw beer signs. He couldn’t, but he learned quickly—over a weekend. A few months later, Elias pitched a game to company bigwigs hoping to lure Anheuser–Busch as a client. “Why don’t we make a little beer barrel with a game in it that can be dumped out and played on a bar?” asked Elias. He heated up the wings on some little plastic eagles—the Anheuser–Busch logo—so they would bend and hook to each other. He felt brilliant and flew to St. Louis to meet a company buyer. He got August Busch III instead. As Elias demonstrated the game, Augie Busch slammed his fist down and said, “You’ve bastardized my family insignia!” Back in Minneapolis, company head Zelman Levine assured Elias he still had his job, but Elias spent the weekend circling want ads while watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with his family. On the show, Marlin Perkins held a monkey. The monkey linked its long arm with another monkey’s long arm and Elias’s wife said, “That’s it!” It really was “it!” Elias became head of research and development for Lakeside, a position he held until Hasbro bought the company in the mid-1970s. Save for tweaks in color, Barrel of Monkeys’ design remains almost exactly as Elias invented it forty-four years ago, proving that old hyperbolic axiom: A barrel of monkeys is way more entertaining than just one or two.

Toy: Cootie

Debut: 1949, in Robbinsdale
Creator: W. H. “Herb” Schaper
Robbinsdale postal employee Herb Schaper liked fishing, whittling, and kids. He carved a wooden fishing lure and thought it was cute—too cute to catch fish, probably. In 1949, with $75 start-up money, he turned it into a game called Cootie. First produced on the front porch of Schaper’s mother’s house in Robbinsdale and assembled by his mother’s friends, Cootie was sold exclusively at Dayton’s— 5,000 by the end of its first holiday season. Other retailers signed on, and by 1952, more than a million Cootie games had been sold. W.H. Schaper Manufacturing moved off the porch and into the suburbs of Plymouth and Lakeville, where toys and games—including the preschool standards Ants in the Pants and Don’t Break the Ice—were made until 1986. It’s hard to understand the buzz this bug made, especially since the original Cootie had an unnerving curlicue proboscis. Most likely, the original Cootie outbreak was partly due to the fact that kids are curious about bugs and eager to handle ones that can’t bite them. It was also partly due to the material the insects were made of: brightly colored plastic. “Plastic games were just coming around,” toy expert Tim Walsh says. “Back then, Cootie was like an iPod.”

Toy: Groovy Girl

Debut: 1998, in London and Edina, raised in Minneapolis
Creator: Manhattan Toy, in partnership with a London–based design firm
The Groovy Girl is an exercise in contrasts—hip, progressive notions about a powerful sisterhood wrapped in the floppy nostalgia of a rag doll. And does she ever work it. Since her debut ten years ago, Groovy Girl has gone from just four dolls with distinct looks and personalities to thirty-eight girl dolls, two boy dolls, dolls in three different sizes, pets, and furniture. Oh, and she’s got a busload of clothes—probably a biodiesel bus—because, hey, Groovy Girl may be socially conscious, but she still looks fabulous. Fabulous. Not sexy. Great care has been taken to make sure that Groovy Girl remains doll-shaped, thereby presenting a neutral body image to her live girlfriends. Her modest-yet-plush body, funky yarn hair, and refreshing lack of lip liner have earned her the respect of parents. Groovy Girl exists because Minneapolis–based Manhattan Toy determined it had been too long since the rag doll had been updated—even the famous Raggedy Ann has worn the same basic face for 100 years. “It was the beginning of girl power,” says Mike Klein of Manhattan Toy. A design partner in London created a prototype that Manhattan Toy liked, but it was deemed “too British.” She was given better clothes, better hair, and became, in a word, groovier. A year after her debut, the United States Women’s Soccer Team won the World Cup. Coincidence? Groovy Girl thinks not, but she’s got way too much tact to say so.

Toy: Twister

Debut: 1966, in St. Paul
Creator: Reyn Guyer and team
While working at his father’s promotion and design business on University and Fairview in St. Paul trying to come up with a back-to-school promotion for Johnson Wax, Reyn Guyer came up with an highly interactive in-store game: The customers were the pieces. Guyer thought it would have mass appeal for adults and kids and took it to 3M. It was rejected, but Guyer’s father indulged him—and financed the development of the idea. A year and a half later, Reyn and his team showed the refined game to Milton Bradley executives, who bought it after they played it at the office and thought it was simple and fun. A little too much fun. Sears—whose mammoth Christmas catalog was the toy maker’s version of Broadway—pulled out as a buyer. Sears deemed the game “too risqué.” Milton Bradley dropped the game too. But divine intervention—in the form of Eva Gabor—saved the game from obscurity. A month after Milton Bradley canned it, Gabor played Twister with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. The audience roared as Johnny tried to avoid touching a very enthusiastic Gabor while she was on all fours. The next morning, Americans lined up to grab games still left on the shelves. And Reyn Guyer was immediately out of the promotions business. Guyer started Winsor Concepts in a warehouse off of Highway 280 and Hennepin Avenue—and invented a little foam ball called Nerf a few years later.

Toy: Nerf

Debut: 1969, St. Paul
Creator: Reyn Guyer and team at Winsor Concepts
You’d think Milton Bradley would have given Reyn Guyer the keys to the toy factory after Twister. But when his team went to Milton Bradley with a new line—several games based on a four-and-a-quarter-inch polyether foam ball—the company passed. Parker Brothers didn’t, but it did drop the game concepts to focus on the ball. Like Guyer, Parker Brothers recognized that the simple lightweight sphere would allow kids to safely break that little rule of moms’ about not throwing balls in the house. It was marketed as the “world’s first official indoor ball”—its box touting the glowing promise, You can’t hurt babies or old people. More than 4 million Nerfs were sold its first year. Next came the Nerfoop, which still hangs over the doors of grown men’s offices everywhere, followed by the Nerf football, which got added throwing heft—and totally banned from the house. Things really started to bounce, says Guyer, when “we realized there were a lot of things you could do with foam. We didn’t develop all the ideas. A lot of other inventors did too.” Today Hasbro licenses hundreds of Nerf products, from pens to Playstation 2 controllers. Not to mention hundreds of Nerf weapons, which have spawned a subculture of Nerf warriors—“Nerfers”—who war with each other and rival “clans.” Seems Nerf isn’t just a ball. It may also be a way of life.

Toy: Gumby and Pokey

Debut: The Claymation character Gumby debuted on the Howdy Doody Show in 1956; the toys, in 1965 in Minneapolis
Creator: The characters were created by California animator Art Clokey; the toys, by Lakeside Signs and Toys
Gumby creator Art Clokey once told an interviewer, “Hippies always got Gumby. They could see he was an honest expression right from my heart.” But it was Lakeside Signs and Toys that got the exclusive licensing rights to make Gumby in 1965, using styrene that allowed the toy to move just like the Claymation star. There was nothing special about the material. It was just straight vinyl. Similar “bendies” by other companies had been around for years. But Lakeside advanced the concept by putting a wire inside the toy so it would hold a pose. With that innovation, bendies became a Lakeside specialty. The company made a bendy Batman, a bendy Popeye, even a bendy Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke. But it was Gumby and Pokey that propelled Lakeside from being a maker of beer signs and the occasional toy to a complete toy-inventing and -manufacturing house. In the 1960s, nine assembly lines ran 24-7 at the plant at I–494 and France. They made a million of them a year in its heyday. Lakeside’s bendy technology was later refined after one of Director of Research and Development Jack Elias’s five children used Gumby as a teething ring. To make it safe even if a kid bit its head off, he came up with the idea of making the wire a loop. One day Hubert Humphery came into the office with company head Zelman Levine, and Levine told him, ‘We’re making Gumby and Pokey safer.’ Two years later, Elias was a member of Richard Nixon’s Consumer Products Safety Commission. Thereby securing Minnesota’s role in bringing the hippie Gumby and conservative Nixon together for the sake of the children.

Toy: Tonka Trucks

Debut: 1947, in Mound
Creators: Lynn Baker, Russell Wenkstern, and Charlie Groschen
In 1946, somewhere on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, a car salesman had lunch with a sheet metal guy doing business in an old Mound elementary school. Lynn Baker, the used-car salesman, and two partners bought the sheet metal company. They renamed it Mound Metalcraft and planned to make garden tools. Of course, garden tools in Minnesota are a seasonal item. Luckily, Baker and his associates also got the dies for a toy steam shovel in the purchase. They made one, as well as a crane, hoping they could keep their company alive until after the frost. Three years later, they had thirteen trucks and the gardening business was dead and buried. Then in walked Russell Wenkstern, a former industrial arts and science teacher, and Tonka Toys was born. Baker and Wenkstern wanted to make toy trucks with the durability frugal parents wanted and the extreme realism boys went nuts for. They electrically charged the paint so it would stick to metal better and not chip off and developed a process that enabled one elaborate die to handle eight stages of tooling. Even Honeywell and Dupont studied the Tonka innovations. The resulting trucks were so real that companies commissioned Tonka for 18:1 scale replicas. They were so durable, Tonka made a commercial, dropping a real truck and a Tonka truck off a 400-foot cliff. The real truck ended up a mass of twisted metal. The Tonka truck? Unscathed. By the 1990s, Tonka was the largest-volume manufacturer of any vehicle in the world. Today, the Mighty Tonka Dump Truck still fronts Hasbro’s Tonka brand, continuously begging rough-and-tumble kids to put whatever they’ve got—dirt, kittens, their own knees, their sisters—into the truck’s bed and roll it all down the road.