THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (12 page)

At the annual Frisbee meet at Copper Harbor, Michigan, forty U.S. teams, cheered by three thousand spectators, compete at Guts Frisbee, a frightening skill-and-courage game in which the opposing teams stand only fifteen feet apart while tossing the saucer as fast as possible to one another. When hurled by an expert, Frisbees have attained speeds as high as ninety miles per hour.

The popularity of the Frisbee has never been greater than in the past few years. The International Frisbee Association currently numbers some seventy thousand members. There is even a canine corps—thousands of dogs that have been trained to catch Frisbees.

On Broadway, a particularly impressive Frisbee demonstration took place during the finale of the popular musical
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
While the entire cast played a variety of sports and games, two expert Frisbee players tossed the toy across the stage over the heads of the first row of spectators. Then, climbing a pair of ladders, the two stood at opposite ends of the theater balcony and zoomed the Frisbee back and forth over the heads of half the audience— despite the old theatrical dictum which holds that a stage prop must never be thrown lest it land in some spectator’s lap.

Today, Wham-O turns out Frisbees in various sizes and models, from “mini” to professional tournament versions. There seems no end in sight to the growth of the Frisbee’s market—and yet, when the company first brought it out, it was almost stifled in its infancy.

The toy that almost ruined the Frisbee’s career was another Wham-O product, the Hula Hoop. Demand for the plastic hoops grew so heavy that Frisbee production had to be cut back; and later, when the Hula Hoop fad suddenly died, it almost put the whole company out of business.

Like the boomerang, the wallaby, and “Waltzing Matilda,” the Hula Hoop is an import from Australia. Its originator is Alex Tolmer, owner of a “down under” toy manufacturing company that marketed a bamboo exercise ring a few years ago.

Wham-O heard about the device, got in touch with Tolmer for the rights, then made a wooden prototype and took it out to West Coast beaches. At first nobody at Wham-O could figure out how it worked, but finally one of the engineers got into the swing of it. The company decided to try out the item as a new toy, changing its material to the less expensive plastic.

The Hula Hoop was brought out in 1958 with little advertising support. It didn’t matter—the word-of-mouth publicity was immense, and retailers began clamoring for more of them.

Anyone who remembers the late nineteen-fifties knows the epidemic proportions of the Hula Hoop craze. Children on every block swung the colorful circles around their waists; young parents worked themselves into a frenzy; teenagers whirled hoops at public beaches and picnic grounds. On TV, the hoop appeared on game shows and danced in musical numbers.

The clamor for Hula Hoops forced the firm to shortchange practically everything else in the line, including Frisbees. At first, the company turned out about twenty thousand hoops a day, which wasn’t anywhere near the demand. Competitors began churning out knock-offs; at the peak of the craze, about forty manufacturers had ersatz Hula Hoops. They came in all sizes, many too big or too small to spin properly.

“There is a surprising degree of research involved in making an item as simple as a Hula Hoop,” Wham-O’s vice president of marketing, Bob Payne, explained. “The weighting is quite important in making it work. We also learned that there is a range—between approximately thirty to forty inches in diameter—which is correct for an average-size person making an average exertion. It took us a while to get a patent on the size range of our Hula Hoop, but we were successful in stopping knock-offs in our size range.”

Hula Hoop contests sprang up all over the United States, many of them covered by national TV networks. One champion “hooper” managed to spin fourteen hoops simultaneously about his arms, legs, waist, and chest. A boy in Boston kept a single hoop whizzing around his belly for four hours— even though one of his arms was in a cast.

The initial appeal of the Hula Hoop for the onlooker was visual. Featured in a dance routine on the Dinah Shore show, it became a familiar prop for entertainers. The spectacle of so many people from coast to coast engaged in violent hip-twirling must have had its advantages for Wham-O.

But the firm never tried to sell the sexy aspect of the toy in its advertising. Instead, Wham-O played up the exercise theme—which led a few doctors to warn their patients against wrenching their backs while whirling hoops. However, Wham-O says it never received any serious complaints of that sort.

Yet hip-grinding was and still is an integral part of Hula Hoop operation, and Wham-O would be the last to discount the additional glamour that sex must have lent to the product. Ironically, according to Bob Payne, it was the Hula Hoop that softened some of the bluenosery on early television.

“It was the toy that made public gyrations acceptable.” he said, “Out of it came the twist and all the other rock dances—or at least the ability to show those dances on the tube. Before the hoop came along,
The Ed Sullivan Show
never showed the original bump-and-grinder, Elvis Presley, below the waist. It was only after the Hula Hoop craze swept the country that Sullivan suddenly decided it would be all right for the camera to dip below Elvis’s belt line.”

It has been estimated that Americans bought more than 70 million Hula Hoops and similar knock-offs during the great initial mania for the toy. Then, just as Wham-O was granted its protective patent, the rampage came to a screeching halt.

With tons of raw material on order and massive quantities of hoops being shipped out, the company found the orders simply stopped. There was no warning; one day everybody wanted Hula Hoops, and the next day, demand was zero.

Wham-O, which found itself stuck with thousands of Hoops, learned a marketing lesson the hard way: a staple item sells year after year in reliable, if modest quantities; though a fad item may rack up impressive sales for a short period, the minute some new gewgaw dazzles the public eye, the ex-champion faces a swift and ignominious demise.

In 1965, Wham-O decided to market Hula Hoop once more, this time with ball bearings inside to make noise while the toy turned. The result: Shoop Shoop Hula Hoop, which still remains in the company’s line. Sales on the new hoop are nowhere near those of the first craze. But they are now substantial enough to keep Hula Hoops selling year after year. The fad item has turned into a staple.

This seems to be the secret of the Wham-O product line. Even though the nutty-sounding toys give the impression of being here today and gone tomorrow, they all share a family relationship with toys that have been traditional throughout history. Hula Hoops? Frisbees? Play hoops and discuses. Super Ball? Just a jazzed-up playball. Super Stuff? A freeform kind of modeling clay.

Still, Wham-O toys seem to have one quality which sets them apart from any others: magic.

“We don’t exactly know what we mean by this,” laughed Rich Knerr, “but we think we know when we see it.
Sometimes.
” Yet even when Wham-O comes out with a dud, it’s still like no one else’s. What other manufacturer would try to make a buck selling fake rocks or a product called Instant Fish?

Magic. Maybe that’s the word for this unconventional company that keeps young corporately and individually by turning out offbeat, oddball, and (sometimes) just-plain-silly—but always fun—toys.

Vehement objections to children’s TV advertising have been lodged by a Boston-based consumer organization called Action for Children’s Television (ACT). In statements to the press, meetings with manufacturers, and petitions to the Federal Communications Commission, ACT has attacked the very idea of directing advertising at children. It maintains that children do not have the sophistication or experience to evaluate promotional appeals and make valid buying judgments based on advertisements.

In 1970, ACT petitioned all television stations to carry a minimum of fourteen hours of children’s noncommercial programs every week. ACT stressed the need to design shows for different levels of understanding according to age groups: two- to five-year-olds; six- to nine-year-olds; and ten- to twelve-year-olds.

But mainly, ACT has campaigned to eliminate sponsorship of children’s programs on TV—no commercials, and especially no huckstering of toys or other products or services by the hosts of children’s shows. (ACT especially objected to
Romper Room,
calling it a protracted commercial with the sponsor’s toys promoted by the presiding “teacher.”)

Evelyn Sarson, the executive director of ACT, has blamed TV commercials for causing children to distrust figures of authority in general. She feels (as noted in the February 1972 issue of
Fortune)
that the exaggerated claims of TV ads eventually create a “credibility gap” among children about what grown-ups tell them.

Bob Keeshan, producer and portrayer of CBS-TV’s
Captain Kangaroo,
believes that this contention contradicts ACT’s basic posture. Either children cannot properly judge the claims made on TV, or else they are becoming cynically critical of them. “But ACT can’t have it both ways,” he asserts.

The Toy Manufacturers of America (TMA) took issue with ACT’s proposal to end commercial sponsorship of children’s programs on several counts. It felt that the loss of advertising revenues would force networks to seek government aid in order to improve kids’ programing quality, and that it was “completely illogical to ban commercials from shows children watch, since they are exposed to commercials on others.” The TMA feared that prohibition of commercialism in one segment of a medium would set a precedent for further media censorship and control by government. “Children are, in fact, consumers,” the group stated, “amply protected as a special audience by the safeguards of the TV guidelines to which [toymakers] adhere.”

Some manufacturers believe that ACT deliberately set its goals impossibly high so that some practical and beneficial progress could be made in compromise. And certainly, the efforts of this and other consumer groups have made network and ad agency executives think twice about future children’s programs and commercials. One of the most beneficial effects of such citizen lobbies has been a cutback in the number of violent cartoon shows on weekend mornings.

ACT also succeeded in getting some advertisers to change the style of their commercials to eliminate the more insidious tendencies. Hasbro, for one, reportedly eased off the product-pushing done by
Romper Room
teachers. In Boston, ACT succeeded in restoring
Captain Kangaroo
to its full hour after one station cut it by half to make room for a less-esteemed
Bozo the Clown
program.

The impact of ACT, according to Bob Keeshan, has indeed been generally beneficial to the advertiser in helping to improve the quality of toy commercials. “As far as the basic concept of advertising to the child is concerned,” he said, “I cannot see that there is anything morally wrong with it. Yes, there have been and are abuses—let us correct them with a surgeon’s knife, and not with an ax.

“Psychologically damaging toys are still being advertised, as well as some that are not supportive of child needs. I would crusade for positive-value toys and toys that fill real play needs. But when Evelyn Sarson talks about no advertising at all, one must remember she grew up in England; she formerly served as a journalist for the Manchester
Guardian
and the Reuters news agency. In some parts of Britain, TV is less prevalent than it is in America, and there is also a government-supported station. When she derides advertising, I do believe that, in
her
viewpoint, it is evil. I just want to know how we are supposed to fund children’s shows without sponsors. Tell me, and there won’t be any more commercials on
Captain Kangaroo!”

The TMA assertion that toy commercials are strictly regulated “by the safeguards of the TV guidelines” to which toymakers adhere is justified. Most protesting consumers do not realize that today’s toy commercials are, in fact, so carefully edited by the media that toy and ad officials complain there is no room for creativity at all.

Proposed toy commercials are developed by means of a visual outline known as a storyboard—a large artist-drawn cartoon strip depicting the principal “visuals” and all the dialogue that will go into the advertisement. In this form, the commercial is reviewed by editors of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). Using a series of highly restrictive guidelines, the NAB editors blue-pencil anything they don’t approve of in the suggested “spot.” Once a commercial gets storyboard sanction, the agency can go ahead and film it. But the completed commercial must also be viewed by the NAB, and even if the editor bought the storyboard plan, he may still shake his head when the final ad is screened. This could mean thousands of dollars down the drain for the manufacturer.

Although the Code Authority (the official name of the NAB reviewing group) has no legal means of enforcing its decisions on networks and local stations, its rulings do enjoy the status of “word from on high.” NAB subscribers (about three fourths of the nation’s TV outlets) pay for the work of the Code Authority. So when an ad is condemned by NAB editors, member stations almost invariably stay away from that piece of film.

The Code Authority uses four key criteria to evaluate toy commercials. It frowns upon
overglamorization;
the product should be set in an average American setting such as a back yard or middle-class living room, and five-dollar toys cannot be shown in $1 million Hollywood homes. It analyzes the commercial’s handling of
social appeal;
a child shown playing with the product must not appear socially superior to those without it. It checks each ad for
factual representation;
the toy must be shown as it will come when bought, and accessories that do not come with initial purchase must be so specified. And, finally, the authority looks for
accuracy of representation;
the performance of the toy must be genuinely portrayed, and not misrepresented.