TOYLAND
The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry
Sidney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus
Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990
39 pp., $19.95, hardcover
THE STORY OF AMERICAN TOYS
From the Puritans to the Present
Richard O'Brien
New York: Abbeville Press, 1990
252 pp., $49.95, illustrated, hardcover
Haply your eye shall light upon some toy
You have desire to purchase
---Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
“He who dies with the most toys wins.” This may be the battle cry of sparring children, despots, and an occasional financier, but not of the toy industry. Experienced hands in the toy world know that most new products in this $12 billion-a-year industry will not survive more than a season or two on the shelves of toy stores.
Yet incredibly enough, a new startup company recently provided the No. 1 hit toy two Christmas seasons in a row. In 1985, its first year of business, Worlds of Wonder (WOW) produced a talking bear named Teddy Ruxpin. WOW reaped $8 million in profits on sales of $93 million. Sales tripled in WOW's second year, led by the success of Lazer Tag, a game in which opponents shoot infrared beams of light at each other, a la Star Trek. The company generated $ 18 million in profits, but went on in the next three quarters to lose nearly $ 18 million in profits, but went on in the next three quarters to lose nearly $ 183 million on sales of $110 million. In December 1987, WOW declared bankruptcy. Such extreme volatility, while still rather unusual in the cyclical toy industry, no longer shocks veteran “toycoons.”
Toyland: The High-stakes Game of the Toy Industry, by Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus, should be required reading for anyone currently employed in “toyland” or considering a career in the toy industry. For the rest of us, it is an astute, richly informative, and amply entertaining book. Securely grounded in thorough research, the authors of Toyland are at once shrewd, sensible, and humorous. The book's epigraph, an excerpt from the instructions of the board game Payday, sets the tone of Toyland: “When the last player has completed his final month of play, each player totals his cash (after all bills have been paid) and adds his savings or subtracts his loans. The player having the greatest total is the winner. If all players are in debt, the player who is least in debit is the winner!”
Between descriptions, anecdotes, and analyses of the toy industry, Toyland tracks the development of one toy - Hasbro's Dino- Riders - from conception through finished product. Although narrated with the dramatics of a whodunit mystery, these chapters are ultimately not as riveting as the sections on G.I. Joe, renowned industry marketers, opportunistic inventors, and recent trends in the toy industry. Just the range of successful toys (like Kenner's 1973 hit, Baby Alive, a doll that ate “solids” and defecated poopoo gel) and unsuccessful products (among
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