Toy A in the battle for holiday-season supremacy is a wooden replica of a standard garden slug. You can pick it up, you can put it on a table. “This is not a hot-hot item,” says Jessica Waxman, a well-groomed woman who stands before the slugs with order pad poised. “It’s a steady item. There is a bookstore on Nantucket that purchases quite a few of these.”
Toy B is the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes action figures from Mattel. Like a lot of items from the big companies, these are “supported” by a cartoon show of the same name. At the toy fair, the Tomatoes had their own area where an actor dressed as a mad scientist and an actress in yellow hotpants performed a skit. “You don’t think that tomato would want to eat me?” she gasped. Several in the audience snickered. Perhaps the champagne they’d consumed at the “wedding” of actors portraying Barbie’s friends Alan and Midge - or the experience of removing Midge’s garter - had made them giddy.
It wasn’t just the marketing methods that were tried and true. With a recession settling in, and Nintendo about to launch a 16-bit system that will allow for more complex games, many toymakers seemed frightened almost to the point of immobility. Hasbro’s Go-Go My Walking Pup will be followed by Yo-Yo My Walking Kitty. In a similar creative leap, Sqwish Ball has given way to Jr. Sqwish Ball. Because Barbie has stayed hot, we have Kenner’s Miss America collection, as well as Shani. These Mattel dolls have “authentic” African-American features, three shades of skin darkness - and, significantly, more than a few black predecessors who have sold well for the company in the past.
“What looks like innovation is often just a paint job,” says Jack Friedman, president of a company called Toy Headquarters. Friedman is introducing a line of Vanilla Ice items - Nintendo games, a “rap microphone” and posable figures - but he wasn’t talking about those, or what a cynic might see as their heartthrob-of-a-different-color relationship to Mattel’s new M. C. Hammer dolls. Rather, he was referring to the Persian Gulf War toys that some companies have rushed out. One firm is trying to trademark Desert Storm - which could mean that the government owes Diversified Specialists, Inc., of Houston, four cents for every sortie we’ve flown so far. President Bush, in any event, ought to check this company out. Their helicopters have “bump ’n’ go mystery action”; ours don’t.
