TOY FADS

The Federal Communications Commission used to have a rule banning children’s TV shows based on existing commercial characters or toys. The reasoning was that kids are impressionable, and such TV shows would just be long ads. But in 1982, the FCC repealed the ruling. Result: TV shows designed to sell toys…lots of toys.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

Description: Radioactive ooze turns four pet turtles into human-size crime-fighting, pizza-eating, jive-talking teens named Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello.

A Fad Is Born! In 1984, cartoonists Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman self-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a violent but darkly funny comic book. They printed 50,000 copies, all of which sold out in a few weeks. After that, the comic was published regularly for two years but garnered little interest beyond comic-book fans.

In 1986, advertising executive Mark Freedman discovered the comic and bought the rights from Laird and Eastman, figuring the Turtles could be a cultural phenomenon if they were marketed to kids, rather than older comic-book collectors. A newer, more kid-friendly comic was introduced, along with a TV cartoon series and lots and lots of Ninja Turtle toys.

Freedman was right: In 1989, $250 million worth of toys were sold; in 1990, a live-action movie earned $140 million; and in 1991, a Burger King promotion sold 200,000 Turtle videos per week. But all fads are destined to die. Sales plummeted in 1992, and the cartoon was canceled. A grittier, back-to-basics comic book was released, but it bombed. New cartoons and new toys were released in 2003, but they flopped too. But the fad is hardly a failure; since 1984, the Ninja Turtles have generated $6 billion in revenue, and that’s not even counting what the 2014 feature film will bring in.

TRANSFORMERS

Description: Giant robots that can “transform” into vehicles crash-land on Earth from outer space, and wage battle for “energon” cubes.

A Fad Is Born! In 1982, Hasbro Toys scoured the world for toys on which they could base cartoons, which they could then use to sell more toys. They bought the rights to three Japanese toy lines: Takara Toys’ Car Robots and Micro Change, and Bandai’s Machine Men. The toys were all die-cast metal robots that, with a few twists and turns, became toy planes, cars, or other objects.

Nearly 20 million of these toys had been sold around the world—but would they sell in the United States? Industry insiders predicted that Hasbro’s Transformers would flop—complicated Japanese toys were untested and parents would balk at paying $10 for a toy car, they said. But the insiders were wrong.

Kids loved the strange new toys and action-packed cartoon. (It didn’t hurt that kids could figure out how to make the toys “transform,” while their parents couldn’t.) By the end of 1985, $380 million worth of Transformers had been sold. Sales and interest declined after that, but various versions of the show have been on the air since 1985 and related toys still sell well. The success of Transformers helped make Hasbro the second-largest toymaker in the world. And the feature film series was one of the most successful movie franchises of the early 2000s.

MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS

Description: With the help of huge robot dinosaurs, six teenagers use ninja skills to fight giant monsters sent to Earth by an evil witch who lives in a dumpster on the Moon.

A Fad Is Born! The most popular kids show and toy line of the 1990s is an unlikely success story. In 1986, TV producer Haim Saban had an idea: Take footage of the robot dinosaurs from the Japanese action show Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger (Dinosaur Squadron Beast Ranger) and combine it with newly shot scenes of American teenagers. The special effects from the Japanese show were cheap and sloppy, mixing miniature models, marionettes, and stuntmen in rubber suits. It took Saban seven years to sell it to a network, but Fox finally agreed to air it. Good move. It was an instant hit in the fall of 1993, becoming the #1 kids’ show on TV. Bandai was contracted to make toys based on the teenagers and robots, but didn’t anticipate the high demand. How high? Twelve million toys were sold in 1993. By 1996 the show had exhausted all the available Kyoryu footage, so it had to start stealing from other Japanese shows. Now, each fall, Power Rangers changes its entire premise and cast. New heroes, monsters, robots, villains—and toys—are introduced. To date, Bandai has sold over 160 million Power Ranger toys.

SHMOOS

Description: In 1948, cartoonist Al Capp added a new character to his L’il Abner comic strip: the shmoo, a strange creature, described as “a cross between Casper the Friendly Ghost and a misshapen dinosaur.” In Capp’s comic-strip world, the shmoos were as much a part of the food supply as they were a part of the story line: They laid eggs, produced butter, and gave milk in glass bottles. If you broiled them, they turned into steak; if you boiled them, they turned into chicken.

A Fad Is Born! And if you made a toy out of them, manufacturers learned in the late 1940s, they sold by the millions. Companies made fortunes selling shmoo ashtrays, clocks, piggy banks, pencil sharpeners, clothing, candy, and even shmoo meat products. By 1950, more than $25 million worth of shmoo items had been sold, yet for some reason, Capp decided to write the characters out of the story line. He created a “shmooicide squad” that gunned down every single shmoo in the strip, and the fad died out soon after that.

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