n books and movies from The Nutcracker to The Velveteen Rabbit to Winnie-the-Pooh (and in more recent years Toy Story), children have always been fascinated by the idea that their toys could come to life. After all, the ability to pretend that Baby Alive was really a living, breathing baby, or that King Zor was a living, roaring dinosaur, added a new dimension to play. Well, starting in the mid-1950s, improvements in battery technology finally made it possible—and affordable—to actually breathe life into an inanimate toy.
In the science and engineering-obsessed years after World War II, robots and robotics captured the imagination of adults and children—and in turn, the attention of toy makers. (The term “robot” comes from the 1920 play R.U.R. by Carl Capek, in which an army of factory-made artificial people rises up to extinguish the human race.) Early robots such as Mr. Machine, the marching wind-up robot invented by Marvin Glass in 1960, used friction, or primitive wind-up motors. The next generation of robotic toys, however, used batteries—including King Zor, the rampaging dinosaur, Big Loo, the robot with flashing eyes you could switch on and off, and Teddy Ruxpin, the storytelling bear. Batteries even powered board games such as Operation and Fascination, the electric maze race game. However, these toys were clunky, took a lot of battery power (it took four C batteries just to get Teddy talking), and the juice didn’t last long. Even into the 1970s, just a few hours of play could drain the batteries, and a toy left unattended for a while was likely to be damaged by leaking batteries.
In 1978, however, Milton Bradley opened a new frontier in electronic toys with Simon, one of the first games where the game play was controlled by a computer chip, and suddenly there was a whole new market—and need for—batteries. The basic pull string of a Chatty Cathy, wind-up mechanisms, or even a child’s push suddenly seemed very simplistic as new levels of mechanical magic were powered by the relatively new alkaline batteries.
In today’s world, where three-year-olds play on iPads and robots are powered by smaller and smaller microchips, it’s easy to forget that it once took a handful of batteries to get a toy to have some rudimentary movements or even light up. And there was always the chance that your batteries would run out while you were playing and you had to pilfer them from another battery-operated appliance in order to keep the action going. Still, as cool as today’s high-tech toys are (and as mad as Dad would get when he would find out that—yet again—there were no batteries in the flashlight), back in the day, there were few things more thrilling than the simple delight of flipping a switch and watching a toy come miraculously to life. It was a kind of magic kids had never experienced before.
illed as “the modern take-apart robot with a personality,” Mr. Machine was one of the first humanoid robots—a mechanical best friend. Boys who came of age in the 1960s will perhaps remember the thrill of cranking the giant key attached to his back, then marveling as he marched, arms swinging, across the rec room floor. This marvel was designed by Marvin Glass, who went on to become one of the most influential toy designers of the baby boom generation, and it was his first breakthrough hit—after about eleven patient years in the industry. Legend has it that Glass got the idea for Mr. Machine after his wife, in an argument, accused him of being a human machine.
Glass, who had an impressive mastery of mechanics and an uncanny ability to make them work in mass-produced, relatively inexpensive plastic playthings, would go on to create some of the most beloved toys of the twentieth century, including Mystery Date, Time Bomb, Lite-Brite, Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, Operation, Tip It, Toss Across, and many more.
With gears and cranks that could be seen through his transparent body, Mr. Machine delighted the emerging generation of hobbyists, tinkerers, and science geeks who were fascinated by anything robotic. Featuring an arm-swinging walk, a chomping mouth, a dinging bell, and a siren that rang every fifteen seconds, Mr. Machine was very high-tech indeed for his time.
The popularity of Mr. Machine is in many ways an early example of the power of what we now call viral advertising. In 1960, as Saturday morning television was nearing the peak of its influence, kids everywhere could be heard marching around singing the infectious jingle:
… the greatest toy you’ve ever seen.
And his name is Mr. Machine.
(It was so effective that Ideal put an image of Mr. Machine in all of its advertising and on many of its other toy packages over the next several years. Along with the oval Ideal logo, he became inextricably associated with the company.) Parents succumbed to the advertising as well—perhaps to get the kids to stop singing—and Mr. Machine marched into homes nationwide.
Despite the fact that Mr. Machine was a goofy-looking robot, Ideal promoted him as “educational,” which made him a little more palatable for parents. (This is a time-honored strategy that seems to work on every generation.) What could kids learn from Mr. Machine? Well, how about engineering? Yeah, that’s it. You could take Mr. Machine apart and put him back together again and learn everything there was to know about gears and machinery. Unfortunately, as those who owned one will recall, getting him back together again wasn’t always as easy as it sounded, and it was more a lesson in frustration than engineering. Fortunately for parents, Mr. Machine came fully assembled, and for the most part kids really wanted to just turn the key and watch him on his merry march.
Mr. Machine had a good run for a couple of years and then marched off into oblivion. At the height of the toy’s popularity, Ideal also created a basic board game that used miniature Mr. Machine figures, but this had a limited life.
In 1977, Ideal reissued Mr. Machine in a version that could no longer be disassembled (to appease safety advocates), but he never caught on. Robots had taken on a much more sophisticated mien by that time, and the fact that “the modern take-apart robot,” was no longer either modern or able to be taken apart kind of spoiled the fun.
Today, an original Mr. Machine is a treasured find for a small but avid group of collectors, but for many others he is just a happy memory of a simpler time.
ing Zor, the rampaging dinosaur, would seem quaint by today’s standards, and the one-minute commercial that made him a sensation looks downright dull compared to today’s amped-up toy ads.
Nonetheless, King Zor was a marvel of mechanical engineering at the time. The blue-green battery-operated dinosaur was thirty-one inches long and was one of the first toys that could actively engage in battle with kids.
To bring King Zor to life, kids loaded up the launcher on his back with five yellow plastic balls (or “missiles” in Zor’s lingo), turned him on, and watched him jerk randomly around. If he bumped into an obstacle with his protruding forked tongue, he would back up and turn a different direction. While the commercial said he was on a “rampage,” said rampage was more in the kids’ imagination, as Zor was actually fairly benign. However, the intrepid dinosaur hunter could fire suction cup darts from the spring-loaded gun—included with the toy—at King Zor, and if a dart connected with the disc on his tail, King Zor would turn and shoot his missiles at his attacker.
Marvin Glass designed King Zor as a follow-up to his successful Mr. Machine, but Zor didn’t sell as well as Mr. Machine (partially because Mr. Machine appealed to both boys and girls, while—at least in 1962—dinosaur hunting was strictly for boys). As with Mr. Machine, Ideal hoped to launch a character and introduced a Zor board game, but ultimately, Zor lumbered toward extinction after only one season.
f ever there was a toy that tried to do everything that would appeal to boys, it was this three-foot-tall shiny green, red, and gold robot from the toy maker Marx. It was feature-packed from the top of its bullet-shaped head to the wheeled base that stood in for his toes.
Starting at the top, kids could look—and pretend to take aim at targets—through the scope at the top of his head. They could switch his glowing red eyes on or off. They could talk into the mouthpiece on the back of his head and hear their words in a robotic voice, or get him to say one of ten different phrases with the turn of a crank. His armored chest held two suction cup darts that could be fired from behind. His back was even equipped with a metal tab that could be used as a Morse code clicker (complete with a label for decoding the code).
He had a whistle kids could blow and a bell, and his left arm, which was fixed to his side at a ninety-degree angle, could fire small red balls. His right arm swung freely and had a trigger-operated hand with which Big Loo could pick up objects when he bent at the waist. His left foot held a spring-loaded rocket launcher, and if you turned him over, you would find a compass in his base. Oh, and he squirted water out of his navel.
Kids got all of this for $9.99, which was a lot of money in 1963, but for one glorious holiday season, boys everywhere deemed him worth every penny.
Big Loo is mostly found in toy museums today. Occasionally one that survived the active play (as you can imagine, Big Loo tended to take quite a beating) will crop up in an online auction. A toy in good working condition can fetch more than $1,000, and the bidding can get very lively. But for most boomers who had Big Loo—or who envied the friend who had him—the memory will have to suffice.
n the early 1960s, battery-operated games were still a novelty. Then, in 1965, came Operation. The construction was simple. The basic game board was a sheet of cardboard with metal-edged holes cut into it. Sounds thrilling, right? But here’s what made it fun: The board was a picture of a patient on a table, and the holes held body parts that needed to be operated on. The “operation” consisted of removing these small plastic body parts from the holes using a pair of attached tweezers. But if the tweezers touched the side of the holes for even a millisecond, the game buzzed loudly, and the patient’s nose lit up. Fail.
Of course, this was all in good fun, and the whimsical operations included removing a tiny wrench from the patient’s ankle (wrenched ankle), a small piece of bread from the patient’s stomach (the breadbasket), and so forth. From the funny bone to the spare ribs to the butterflies in the stomach to the charley horse (the puns just kept on coming) each piece had a different shape and a different point value. On each turn players drew cards to see what operation they would perform, and if they did it successfully, they kept the plastic piece and the points.
The game was always challenging for little kids, as it required a steady hand and good coordination, but it was also hilarious when the operations didn’t go quite as planned.
Operation proved to be a major hit, and it quickly became both a classic and a kitsch item, inspiring T-shirts, minigames, and much more.
Many different versions have been introduced over the years, including tie-ins based on popular characters such as Shrek, Spider-Man, Toy Story, Iron Man, Lightning McQueen, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Homer Simpson.
But while there have been many patients to grace the operating table, the original character, now called “Cavity Sam,” is a pop culture icon.
s sophisticated as computers are today, it may be hard to believe that there was a time when a “computer-controlled game” could capture the imagination of the culture. But that’s what happened when Milton Bradley launched Simon in 1978. The Apple II and Tandy’s TRS-80 were only a year old, and the home computer was in its infancy, as was electronic gaming: The Atari 2600 had just made its debut in 1977. This was the brief moment in our culture during which comparatively few people owned computers, yet everyone was fascinated by them, so a handheld game run by a computer was about as exciting as it got. It was, quite literally, a game changer.
As jaw dropping as this technology was at the time, however, the play itself was nothing new. It was classic, in fact. The game took its name from the classic kids’ game Simon Says, and it was a simple memory game. In fact, Simon’s simplicity was part of the secret of its success. Simply mimic the pattern of the flashing lights and sounds until you forget which comes next.
People watched in wonder as the game changed up the patterns and speeds, amping up the challenge with each round. Like the best games, it was easy to play and fun to play over and over, since it was different every time it was played.
Simon not only ushered in the era of electronic games, it made memory games popular again. It wasn’t long before any game with any kind of memory element—and there were a lot of them that followed—was described as a Simon-type game. (They had previously been called Concentration-type games, after the TV show and home game in the 1960s and early ’70s.)
Milton Bradley capitalized on the success of the game by introducing the multiplayer Super Simon, which allowed head-to-head competition, and Pocket Simon, for play on the go. As electronics got smaller and smaller, there were even miniature keychain versions.
Today Simon is still made in a variety of versions, and Basic Fun is reintroducing the original for 2013. Still, like many other electronic games of a simpler era, it now is also an app, a computer game, and an online multiplayer challenge. It just goes to show that while technology is always changing, play patterns stay largely the same.
ver since there have been dolls and stuffed animals, kids have imagined having conversations with them. These best friends are so real to so many kids, it’s no wonder they wish they would be able to come to life.
In 1985, that wish came true when Worlds of Wonder introduced Teddy Ruxpin, the first talking storytelling teddy bear.
People had never seen anything like it, and the sensation Teddy caused was epic. He became the bestselling toy of 1985 and 1986. There had been other toys that had incorporated audiocassettes before, but Teddy was especially cool because his eyes and mouth actually moved as the cassette tape in his back played.
He was the next best thing to real, and he caused as much of a stir as the original teddy bear had caused eighty-two years before. Kids didn’t even care that Teddy wasn’t exactly huggable (his sweatshirt covered a very large and very hard tape recorder—one that took four C batteries, no less). They just loved his stories, which quickly became so popular they inspired his own TV series and an entire line of licensed products.
Teddy Ruxpin made Worlds of Wonder shareholders very rich. However, some bad financial moves ultimately caused the company to collapse with the stock market crash of 1987—and Worlds of Wonder went under. Teddy was acquired by Hasbro and later by Yes! Entertainment, but he was never quite the same.
As recently as 2005, there have been efforts to bring Teddy Ruxpin out of hibernation, but none has ever taken hold. Still, that hasn’t stopped his original fans from keeping the memories alive. Today there is a sizable Teddy Ruxpin collectible market, and there are legions of websites devoted to keeping Teddy telling stories.
Today, it’s hard to find a toy that doesn’t talk, but people who will always love Teddy Ruxpin will never forget the sheer joy of the first time they asked the bear to “tell me a story”—and he did.
