THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (13 page)

As one advertising executive remarked, any set of guidelines probably sounds reasonable in principle. It is the interpretation that often goes awry. Because the NAB has been criticized by the toy industry for the way it implements its TV code, the agency announced a new set of principles early in 1971 to further “interpret” the manner in which Code Authority editors reviewed toy commercials.

The new principles consisted of five cautions:

1.    Use of fantasy, stock film, and animation must be confined to the first third of the advertisement (which normally means the first ten seconds). No children or toy may appear in this portion.

2.    Endorsements by celebrities are not allowed.

3.    Superiority claims are not permitted, nor are competitive comparisons.

4.    Camera and audio technology may not overglamorize the toy or distort its play value.

5.    The last five seconds of the commercial must be a “frozen” shot of the actual product as purchased.

Toymakers and advertising officials complained that these proposals were impossibly restrictive from both practical and artistic points of view. But though the rulings on endorsements and competitive comparisons seem unnecessarily harsh, in general these amplifications have only further improved the commercials that the child views on today’s television.

Toymen have had justifiable complaints, however, in their relationship with the NAB. For one thing, the Code Authority guidelines apply only to the toy industry; other children’s products—cereal, candy, etc.—are exempt from review. This double standard has rightly incensed many toymen. In the 1970 Toy Fair issue of
Toys and Novelties,
Bob Steiner (then of Kenner) argued that, besides toys, the only industries regulated by NAB guidelines were liquor and certain drugs. Many a time, he wrote, toy advertisers must burn with anger at seeing a glamorous nontoy ad using techniques forbidden them on the same program in which they’d bought time.

As late as mid-1972, it was easy to note this bias. By tuning in to
Captain Kangaroo
on several mornings and watching a few Saturday children’s shows, I saw a number of well-behaved, NAB-regulated toy ads. But in the same programs, children were subjected to commercials for Kellogg’s Sugar Pops, Pals Vitamins, Hershey’s Instant, Flintstone Vitamins, and Lucky Charms, all using blatant appeals to one-upmanship, promises of unattainable strength, and technical effects impossible to achieve on restricted toy ads.

But what was worse, some of these products were also using appeals that toymakers have long been castigated for— though they haven’t used them in at least half a decade. One

Pals commercial exhorted kids to “join the Pals club” (social exclusion) while another pushed the reward of imminent strength. Similarly, a Sugar Pops ad implied that the child who ate the cereal would become as strong as a rodeo rider.

Clearly, the NAB should develop guidelines for
all
children’s advertising, and, as of this writing, there is unofficial evidence that, under pressure from ACT, the agency may finally do just that.

It is amazing that toy ads on TV have been able to survive this one-sided advertising posture of the broadcast industry. Yet a comparison of today’s toy commercials with those of a few years ago indicates that toy ads have considerably improved. The vogue in toy spots a few Christmases back was shouting and tinny music, making children look like mindless imitations of the teenage culture. As of this writing (and perhaps in contrast to nontoy ads for children), toy commercials are much more serene and understated. Emphasis is on the actual product in real play situations—one of the benefits of the NAB guidelines.

However, this improvement is far from universal. There are still toy ads that alienate adults by their oversold methods of getting children’s attention. Worst of all, some commercials still treat kids like mindless “get-me-one-too” parrots. To be fair, many of the shows are just as guilty as the commercials when it comes to talking down to children.

“It is a sad comment on the so-called creative people in the children’s TV field,” said Bob Keeshan, “but many do not respect the intelligence and taste of the child. Children are seldom shown realistically on television, whether in commercials or on the shows themselves. How can they be when such toymakers and ad men, individuals whose business
is
children, do not know, like, or understand the child?”

This treatment of children as loud, cocky peer-followers was the most distressing feature I observed on the toy ads I watched while researching this book. Though ACT and the NAB censor the worst kinds of advertising claim abuses, there seems to be no consideration of artistic taste.

One of the worst toy commercials I have ever seen was Hasbro’s ad for World of Love, a fashion doll family. To be fair to the media men involved, the product itself involves an embarrassingly calculated marketing scheme.

The quartet of girl dolls are named Love, Peace, Flower, and Soul, and are costumed to represent, respectively, a hippie, a red-white-and-blue conservative, a “flower child,” and a black girl with a natural hairdo. On the commercial, four girls yammer with terrible diction about love, peace, flower, and soul. Naturally, the agency got appropriate children to match the toy stereotypes. One can imagine a Madison Avenue executive saying, “Now we’ll get a hippie-type for
that
market, a black girl for
that
market . . .”

“They do it, they do it!” said Keeshan. “The adman comes on talking in creative terms, but then he turns right around and works on the calculated ways to move the product off the shelves. I’ve seen the Hasbro commercial, and I’ve wondered about it because Hasbro also has one of the finest commercials on TV: Inchworm. It’s an entirely different type of ad.”

Inchworm, a large riding toy made by Hasbro for its Romper Room line, is featured in a lovely, understated commercial which simply shows the product being ridden by youngsters who are obviously having fun. Could it be that Hasbro’s agency understands and respects the preschooler, but is on less sure ground with the older child?

Such a failure to understand the postkindergarten, preteen child is not limited to the toymaker and agency executive; it is all too obvious in much of today’s supposed youth entertainment. On one
Wonderama
program, for instance, two teams had to run a relay race which hinged on the correct identification of sound effects. Nonspecific sounds were easily named, but when music by Paul Simon, the Jackson Five, and other rock stars was played, the children were completely confused. Somebody on the technical crew obviously equated the musical tastes of young children with the teenager’s. As the staff must have found out that morning, it does not pay to lump all children together homogeneously.

This is a lesson that some toy advertisers are beginning to take to heart. The sooner the remaining advertisers turn thumbs down on hard sell and talking down to the child, the quicker the toy industry will achieve the image it is seeking.

“One thing is for sure,” Keeshan noted. “I think the total advertising industry is under attack by the consumer movement. This will involve the cereal people and everyone else when it comes to children’s TV commercials. We are in for a period of great change.”

Spurred by the NAB, ACT, and other pressure groups to keep its ads honest and fair, the toy business is ahead of the game in the area of its commercials. But the public is not yet fully convinced.

There is still plenty of housecleaning to do.

Scrabble is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the American game business. One day it was a mildly popular “highbrow” pastime. Then suddenly it turned into a national craze which has yet to die down.

Like Monopoly, Scrabble is a product of the Depression, but the word game had to wait until 1952 to be recognized as the classic it is. And whereas Monopoly creator Charles B. Darrow came up with his game as a way for people to forget their troubles, the inventor of Scrabble deliberately set out to make a game that would save his family from poverty.

The year was 1931. Alfred Mosher Butts, a rather scholarly-looking architect, was out of work. He and his wife, Nina, were having trouble making ends meet.

“There I was, out of a job, needing something to do,” said Butts. “I happened to be a games buff, and I got the notion that I could invent a successful game. Nothing else occupied my time, so I decided to give it a whirl.”

After giving considerable thought to the project, Butts came to the conclusion that there were just three basic varieties of board games: games with numbers, which he considered to include dice and cards; games in which players moved men around the board, like chess and checkers; and word games like anagrams, in which the letters of familiar words are scrambled, or cryptograms, in which the player must decipher messages written in code.

The smallest number of manufactured games seemed to fall into the last category—which was fortunate for Butts, who had long been a devotee of anagrams and cryptograms. He knew that anagrams involve no letter distribution, while cryptograms do; and from these facts came a new kind of game format.

Letter distribution, as Butts thought of it, refers to the frequency with which different letters occur in English words. He saw that a “Z” or a “Q” appears less often than an “E” or a “T.” Deciding to assign point values to letters according to their scarcity of occurrence, Butts arrived at scores by counting up the number of times the letters of the alphabet appeared on the front pages of local newspapers.

Butts first applied his findings in a variation of anagrams in which the letters carried point values. But after playing the new game, he decided more experimentation was in order. “I had to admit that it was not too interesting a game,” Butts sighed.

His next idea was to put the game on a board resembling a crossword puzzle, so that words would have to link up with others already on the board. This topographical feature appealed to Butts as an architect.

“After that, I got still another notion,” he said. “If I added premium squares, the physical play would increase in sophistication. Words and letters placed on these squares would increase in value, and the pattern of laying down words became even more crucial.”

This evolutionary process took Butts until about 1935. By then, he’d resumed work as an architect and was no longer under pressure to sell the game quickly. Throughout its development, Butts had no name for his brainchild; he merely called the game “it.”

The first game sets fashioned by the inventor used blueprints for boards, and he settled on one hundred letter tiles in each set because he sawed them himself and more would have been too arduous. At first, he used Cribbage boards for scoring (an idea later adapted in today’s Deluxe Scrabble edition) and Mah Jongg racks to hold letters. Butts soon replaced the racks with a stock molding from a local lumber yard, which is still used in the standard Scrabble set.

Butts submitted “it” to all the major game makers, but they all refused politely, saying that the game was too “highbrow.” He continued to play his game with his wife and a small circle of friends, many of whom requested and received their own sets.

It wasn’t until 1948, more than a decade after the game’s birth, that any serious attempt was made to manufacture it privately. One of Butts’s close friends, James Brunot, a prominent social worker and one-time executive director of the President’s War Relief Control, had often played the “intellectual word game” and thought it might offer a nice opportunity to earn some money for himself and his wife. Their ambition was to leave city life and operate “a quiet little business in the country.” He suggested to Butts that they might do a moderate business by manufacturing and distributing the game themselves.

Butts agreed. The first task the new partners faced was to come up with a catchy title for the still unnamed game. They put their heads together and “brainstormed” a large number of possibilities, one of which was Scrabble. According to their dictionary, “scrabble” was a verb meaning “to scratch, scrape or paw with the hands or feet.” Butts and Brunot thought the word suggested the “digging” for letters that takes place in their game. They sent a list of suggestions to a patent-attorney firm, which wrote back that Scrabble was one of the few names on their list that had not been patented for a game. “It” was christened Scrabble.

Brunot’s first assembly plant was in his own living room in the small town of Newtown, Connecticut, some seventy-five miles north of Manhattan. Buying the components from different manufacturers, Brunot and his wife started putting

Scrabble games together. In their first year of operation, they made and sold 2251 games and were out of pocket about $450.

That was in 1949. Eventually moving to larger quarters in what used to be a little red schoolhouse, Brunot christened his company Production and Marketing Corp. One early customer sniffed in derision at such a grandiose-sounding firm located in such unimpressive surroundings.

“We were having considerable difficulty getting Scrabble into retail outlets,” said Brunot. “A few personal contacts enabled us to place it here and there, but our early sales were primarily by direct mail. One of the first things we did was to send a couple of hundred games to friends who had played it while A1 Butts was developing it. We were brash enough to include order blanks in each set.”

The first edition of Scrabble consisted of 1000 games. Brunot never expected it to become very big, partly because his small firm was unable to sink very much money into advertising. For four years, the sales of Scrabble were nothing to raise eyebrows about, even though a moderate increase was recorded each season. In 1949, about 2500 sets were sold. The following year, the tally was 4800; and in 1951, just under 9000. The steady increase indicated that some word-of-mouth recommendation was in operation, but the slow progress was discouraging to Brunot.

By 1952, he was just about ready to call it quits. Working in the one-room schoolhouse, the Brunots and one associate turned out an average of sixteen Scrabble sets a day—enough to satisfy the demand. With the assembly and stamping of the wooden tiles proceeding at a rate of about twelve sets per hour, the tiny plant was in production for less than an hour and a half each day.