THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (11 page)

The principal fascination of Twister, as may be imagined, lies in the fact that opponents are permitted to go over, under, and around each other on the way to the correct circles. “That’s why Twister had to be seen to be appreciated,” said Mickey Mackay. “To sell it to a talk-show host, we learned to keep our mouths shut and set it up. As soon as one of our models bent over, we made our point.”

While Milton Bradley has continually stressed the “fun” aspect of Twister, it has never been a secret that sex is the chief selling point of the game. Once it caught on, rumors began circulating about Twister swapping soirees in Westchester and nude poolside gropes in Beverly Hills.

Actually, this lubricious element is a trifle exaggerated. Unless you are in peak physical condition, or have unusual preferences, it is rather difficult to concentrate on tactile pleasure when there is a knee in your back and your right leg is twisted counterclockwise to your neck.

Twister is a genuinely innovative game. James J. Shea Jr., president of Milton Bradley, explained why the product is unique: “When we brought it out, Twister was the first game in history to turn the human body into a vital component of play. Other games require chessmen, markers, and so on, but in Twister, the consumer brings the most important playing piece to the contest—himself! ”

The game was brought to Bradley by an outside design firm, and the company bought it. At that time, an independent public-relations agency was making a pitch to Milton Bradley to handle the company’s promotion. Shea decided to give the outfit a chance, so he gave it the Twister campaign. If the firm’s efforts proved successful, the entire Bradley account would be the prize.

The promotion firm assigned Mickey Mackay and Bill Kaufman, who has since become a feature writer for
News-day,
to study the new game and see what could be done with it. It took them all of one day to get Twister on network television.

“We just took it out of the box,” said Miss Mackay, “and played it in the office. Bill and I thought it was a riot, so we immediately called up the Milton Bradley showroom and told one of our models in tights to meet us at NBC. We decided we would try to get Twister on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight
show.”

Carson had often taken comedic potshots at the toy industry by dragging out a tableful of new playthings and fooling around with them. More often than not, the toys he selected wouldn’t work the way the manufacturers planned.

But up to the day that Twister was brought to the NBC studios, Carson had never given air time to a single toy or game.

As soon as Carson’s writers saw Twister in action, however, they promised to try to put it on the show that very night.

When Mickey Mackay heard that, she got on the telephone and notified the Bradley staff of her success. They, in turn, called key wholesale and retail toy buyers and asked them to tune in the talk show that evening.

That night, Carson decided to play Twister himself, and invited one of his guests to be his opponent. The guest— happily for the game—turned out to be Eva Gabor. The future of Twister was assured.

“All of a sudden,” said one toy magazine editor, “the
meaning
of the game became crystal-clear! ”

The following morning, people stampeded toy stores throughout the U.S., demanding “that crazy game I saw on TV last night.” There weren’t nearly enough Twister sets to satisfy the overnight market that had sprung up.

Such a sudden demand for a product nearly always results in a shortage of goods in the toy industry. At Toy Fair, a manufacturer generally shows his buyers a mock-up or prototype of the new plaything. After the volume of orders is recorded, the supplier determines how much material and production time to commit to the item. If the buyers show little interest, few pieces of the new product are produced.

This system breaks down whenever a phenomenon like Twister defies the predictions of the buyers. Because retailers and wholesalers don’t give a vote of confidence to the toy at the time of the Fair, the factory makes only a limited supply. When sudden public demand springs up, everyone is caught short.

Fortunately for the industry, Twister is easy to mass-produce. Bradley’s graphics facilities in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, geared up for rush production, and Twisters were turned out as fast as possible.

The average staple game, according to Milton Bradley, sells about 250,000 pieces in any typical year. In the first year Twister was introduced, the company racked up over three million unit sales.

It wasn’t only the Carson show that did it. Merv Griffin and Steve Allen also loved it, and Philadelphia talk-show host Mike Douglas turned Twister into a basic prop. Any time the show’s tempo started to lag, Douglas would bring out the Twister mat.

The TV breaks Twister got were always unusually long, sometimes more than would be granted a talk-show guest. At six to eight prime-time minutes at a shot, the cost would have been prohibitive if Bradley had paid for the time.

Meanwhile, knock-offs on Twister were numerous. Other firms also developed body-action contests, but none possessed the classic simplicity of the original. One item involved whirling a large propeller between the contestant’s bodies, but the device kept the players at arm’s length—thus losing Twister’s principal advantage.

Twister became a national craze in the mid-sixties, and Mickey Mackay kept it moving with a host of other promotional gimmicks and happenings. There was Eeyore’s Birthday Party in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where more than twenty-six thousand people turned out to play Twister and enjoy a wide variety of other activities.

Then there were the beach parties. Piling four hundred Twister mats into a VW, Miss Mackay rented a small crane for aerial shots and drove to Fort Lauderdale with a photographer and a writer from
Newsday.
The wire services were alerted, as were network and local TV news teams. When the reporters arrived, they saw a mob of laughing, shouting college kids falling all over one another. The story broke across the country and a rash of teenage Twister sales was sparked at every major resort.

Ad agencies and TV set designers were contacted by Miss Mackay, and Twister mats began appearing in series dramas. Children’s shows also turned on to Twister—Metromedia’s 
Wonderama
staged some of the largest Twister playoffs in history.
Playboy
even used a Twister mat for a “Playmate” photo spread—which gave the Milton Bradley staff some anxious moments lest the conservative board chairman see it.

“There were tons of other promotions,” Miss Mackay said, “but promotion alone would never have kept Twister selling like it has year in and year out. With the average TV toy, interest remains just as long as the ads are carried on the tube. But when the item has great intrinsic worth, as does Twister, it becomes a staple.”

Though it is a highly promotional item, Twister has been selling steadily and well for over eight years. One indication of its continued fascination has been the amount of unsolicited media exposure it has received.

Yet handling a Twister can have its bad points for a public-relations official. Once Twister broke into prime-time TV, the Bradley executives expected similar miracles for all the rest of the firm’s games.

“It’s a hard act to follow,” Mickey Mackay groaned.

High in the sky, a trained falcon was flying. Three men watched from below, one with a slingshot in his hand. Loading a piece of meatball in the crotch of the primitive weapon, the man took aim at a point near the hovering bird and fired. The falcon, plummeting, caught the morsel in mid-air.

Two of the men turned eagerly to the other, expecting him to praise the deft bird. But he merely shrugged his shoulders and said, “Where can I get a slingshot like this?”

It was the last straw for Richard P. Knerr and his partner, A. K. “Spud” Melin, who had been hoping to expand their hobby of falcon-training into a business. But the pair was quick to adapt. Admitting that prospects in the falcon business were not bright, they swallowed their disappointment and decided that manufacturing slingshots wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

A quarter of a century after the bird ate the ball, Knerr and Melin are still partners in the Wham-O Manufacturing Company. Wham-0 has established itself as a toy industry “wild man,” producing some of the wackiest merchandise ever sold over American retail counters—the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee, Super Ball, Super Stuff, Zillion Bubbles, Silly String, Monster Bubbles, Slip ’N Slide, Water Wiggle, Super Balloon (sails over a hundred feet), Water Wiennie, and Superelastic-bubbleplastic.

Basically, Wham-O is in the business of making “fad” items, which are normally expected to enjoy a big sale while the novelty lasts, only to be replaced by tomorrow’s craze. But Wham-O seems to have hit on a way to turn short-range toy products into long-time favorites, and a large number of its peculiar products remain in the line each year.

Wham-O is everyone’s dream of what it should be like to spend a lifetime making toys. The Pasadena, California, company has no president because Knerr and Melin don’t believe in being officious. Instead, Knerr is vice-president and treasurer, and Melin is vice-president. At board meetings, the pair take turns chairing the proceedings.

Knerr, with his high forehead, underfed mustache, and wall-to-wall smile, tends to be the spokesman of the two; Melin is lean and sober-looking, with a gift for laconics.

“Experience has shown us,” said Knerr, “that our line is really something different in the toy business. To keep it that way, we must always be on the lookout for new ideas. ‘Something different’ can come from any amateur, whether a housewife or engineer, it doesn’t matter. We keep a real open-door policy for inventors and actively solicit imaginative and offbeat ideas from
all
fields.”

Wham-O bought Super Ball, which bounces six times higher than a rubber ball, from chemist Norman Stingley. While engaged in research on synthetic materials, Stingley had hit upon a highly resilient compound. He took it to his employer and got a release on the rights. The result? Wham-O marketed a ball with 95 percent rebound, and Stingley realized over $170,000 on his “find.”

“Something different” truly is the story of Wham-O. Knerr and Melin first got together in 1946, and tried their luck in the import-export business, working in lumber and other commodities out of Central and South America. Then came a short stint with used cars; next the falcon fiasco; and at last they went into slingshot manufacture.

“We purchased a Sears band saw for seven dollars down and seven dollars a month,” said Knerr, “and started our business in my parents’ garage in Pasadena. I would cut out the slingshots and Spud would sand them. We were not in toys then, you understand, more in the sporting-goods area. And we needed a name for our company. We thought of Fling-O, but that didn’t seem to have as much impact as Wham-O.
That
was the word for our slingshots.”

The company expanded tentatively into other sports areas such as fencing foils and throwing knives. But by 1950, Wham-O was moving into the toy and novelty area with cap guns and pellet guns, as well as navel stoles of genuine mink “for the woman who has everything.” That same year, the company incorporated and moved into slightly larger quarters.

But it was not until six years later that Wham-O ventured into the toy field with a product that grew so popular that it has become an official international sport: the Frisbee.

The basic idea behind the Frisbee is not new. Its roots can be traced to Attic Greece. However, the Wham-O Frisbee embodies far more subtlety of aeronautic design than the antique hurled discus.

Its general shape is that of a perfected pie plate, which has suggested some fanciful theories of its origin. One scholar cites an incident in 1827 in which a Yale student named Frisbee threw a collection plate two hundred feet as a protest against compulsory chapel services. Another guess is that at the turn of the century, a number of students in Bridgeport, Connecticut, took up the informal sport of hurling pie tins from a local bakery, Mother Frisbie’s Pie Factory.

No one seems to know whether any of these stories are true, but they seem to suggest that the contemporary Frisbee was foreshadowed by some kind of similar object. At any rate, it is generally agreed that the modern toy evolved from the efforts of one Fred Morrison, who reportedly saw some Yale students throwing pie plates around and yelling “Frisbee.”

Morrison believed there was sales potential in the idea, so he and his wife began buying batches of cake pans at a quarter per half dozen. They went to a nearby beach and began improving their flying skills, and soon onlookers were buying the pans for a quarter apiece.

Later, Morrison took his toys around to county fairs, where he’d sell “magical string” for a dollar. With the string you could sail the Frisbee, which was “thrown in” as a premium. The “kits” sold well wherever he took them.

Finally, Morrison decided that the world was ready for the Frisbee. He brought it to Wham-O, where engineers developed a few refinements on it. It was changed from metal to plastic, so it couldn’t cut the player’s hand. For the proper balance and an even flight, Wham-O engineers developed a system of ridges to disrupt the flow of air and keep the toy stable.

Part of the appeal of the Frisbee seems to be esthetic. Said Dr. Stancil Johnson, official historian of the International Frisbee Association: “There is something peaceful about a Frisbee.” In flight, there is a moment when the toy looks like a flying saucer, with an apparent purpose of its own. And its smooth graceful flight, when properly thrown, is a plastic metaphor of the free and soaring spirit.

Such transcendental meanings must have inspired the two Berkeley students who recently decided to become part of “ecology and the beauty of time” by playing Frisbee early one morning on the campus—in the nude. A pair of teachers saw them; one thought it was charming spectacle, the other called the cops. But because the culprits’ hearts were pure and their motives poetic, their punishment was tempered with mercy: the boy was to help tend the school’s flowers and grass for a few weeks, while the girl was to assist at a child welfare center for the same period.