Birthday Debate

Someone questioned me recently on the noticeable increase in stories we've done in the past few months spotlighting toy industry anniversaries, like the Mary Meyer piece in January, the Hot Wheels article in our February issue, and the Wham-O interview last fall. This month, you'll see we've done a few more—on Ohio Art's centennial and Learning Express' 20th. And there'll probably be more in the coming months after that; there are a lot of anniversaries out there. Even a cursory glance of our Toy Fair product preview section last month shows a wealth of anniversary-related lines due out in 2008, from the likes of Lego for its iconic brick, to Play Along's Cabbage Patch Dolls and continuing push for Care Bears plush, Madame Alexander dolls, Cadaco's Tripoley game, and Hasbro's Easy-Bake Oven and My Little Pony toys, to name just a few.

We do such stories for several reasons, but the primary one is because, in a business with so much product turnover from year to year, we think it's worth noting the success stories the toy industry has managed to maintain long term. More crucially, we think it's important to show what the people currently responsible for those successes are doing to keep such legacy products alive. That brands like Hot Wheels and Matchbox still exist—and continue to lead their market segments in sales—despite the generations of competing products that have been thrown against them, all to little or transitory effect, means that there's some valuable lesson in their survival that all marketers of toys, games and other here-today, gone-tomorrow children's entertainment products should be paying attention to.

This year, I predict that anniversary-related products will not only continue to attract long-time fans eager to snap up the latest “deluxed” version of their favorite board game, but that they'll also attract more parents than they might have previously. Nostalgia marketing is nothing new in the toy business. It seems like reviving lines on their retro '80s appeal has been going on now for longer than the actual '80s did. But whereas in the recent past it's been my impression that repackaged versions of “original” Star Wars or G.I. Joe action figures, for example, most often succeeded by managing to convince 30-somethings to buy toys anew that they owned 20 years prior, I'm expecting that in today's world of recall-induced paranoia, we may see parents believing that the toys they knew from their own childhoods will be safer bets than something unfamiliar, the thinking being: 'I played with lots of Hot Wheels cars. I didn't grow a second head, so they must be safe.' Of course, lots of people probably said that about Barbie until last August, so I'll admit it's not a fool-proof argument.

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Speaking of anniversaries, this month is the first anniversary of our last feature story on outdoor toys—and the editorial it inspired (“Actively Looking,” March 2007), the one in which I went off on specialty toy retailers for not stocking enough toys that gets kids active, compared to the big box retailers full of bicycles and other items that make mom's command to “go outside and play!” much more of a treat than a chore. Well, I'm glad to say that coming out of last month's Toy Fair, there are what look to be more get-active toys coming to market this year than I can remember ever seeing in a single year. So no matter how shelf-space challenged your store might be, there's something for you out there to help get kids to burn off a few extra calories. At Toy Fair, everywhere you looked someone had figured out another way to incorporate a pedometer into a plaything or was coming to market with their own version of a Hullabaloo-style, move-it-or-lose-it game.

Lastly, I'd like to point out that there's one more anniversary of note this year that we haven't published a story about: our own. I'm happy to report that Playthings just turned 105. On behalf of everyone who's worked at this magazine since its debut in 1903, thank you for your continued support.

Happy birthday to us!