I was browsing through American Way (American Airlines’ inflight magazine) the other day. You know the type of publication – chock full of stories touting travel destinations and high-tech toys for grownups. Well, right there on its pages, I ran into an item that dredged up memories strong enough to (almost literally) smell: Play-Doh turns 50 this year. 
Even though I certainly had my day with the Hasbro classic (and the bane of carpet-loving moms everywhere), what I remember most about Play-Doh is this: When I was younger and much, much poorer, I was fretting over what I could afford to buy my three-year-old son (who’s 15 this year) for a Christmas gift. As luck would have it, I hit a yard sale and struck a bonanza – a gigantic box of Play-Doh molding and extruding toys for five bucks.
All I had to supply was Play-Doh, which might’ve set me back another $3. Honest, that was one of the best gifts he ever got. We played with that stuff for YEARS, and I had the destroyed rec room carpet to prove it.
A few classic toys (like Play-Doh) are pretty much what you and I remember. Others survived only after undergoing such drastic changes as to be almost unrecognizable. (Twister, which turns 40 this year, is issued in a classic version, as well as in updated DVD and CD versions. Hasbro brought back its wood Tinkertoys after foisting all-plastic ones upon my son and other kids of the 1990s; these bore faint resemblance to the Tinkertoys my brothers and I played with – and threw at one another – when we were children.)
At any rate, toys have an interesting place in the world of business and entertainment these days. I was at the theater the other day waiting for the start of the latest in the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise. (Remember, these fantastically successful movies and all their related merchandise are based on a Disney theme-park ride that opened in the 1960s!) Suddenly the screen was lit with the preview for a live-action Transformers movie (coming in 2007 and produced by Steven Spielberg for DreamWorks SKG), based on the popular animated TV show, comic books, and Hasbro toys that were launched in the 1980s. (They also spawned a full-length animated movie in 1986.)
In fact, the Transformers – along with Mattel’s Masters of the Universe (aka He-Man) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (whose action figures are made by Playmates) – were among the earliest and most successful intrinsic pairings of entertainment and toy marketing. (Time in 1985 credited Strawberry Shortcake – a product of Namco Bandai — as being the very first to use this marketing strategy successfully.) Sometimes the chicken-or-egg question was totally appropriate: The cartoon shows were created as a means to sell action figures. Or was it the other way around?
The trend had fully taken root by the 1990s, when the Power Rangers (now owned by Disney, but with ties to Namco Bandai) morphed their way into mighty marketing history.
If you’re thinking all of this is child’s play, think again. The Transformers – those Autobots (Hooray, Optimus Prime!) and Decepticons (Boo, Megatron!) — that so bewitched kids in the ‘80s are credited with helping Hasbro to its first $1 billion sales year.
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