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| 1967.12.14 Auburn NY Citizen-Advertiser Page 11 |
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| 1967.12.14 Auburn NY Citizen-Advertiser Page 11 "Toy Sales Hit Billion" by Lindsay Van Gelder |
Toy Sales Hit Billion
EDITOR'S NOTE: The toy business is a billion dollar business and booming each year. This is the first of three dispatches taking a look at sales and at the new toys that will fill 1967 Christmas stockings.)
By LINDSY VAN GELDER
NEW YORK (UPI) - Up, up and up. This is the picture of the toy sales increase each year.
The Toy Manufacturers of the U.S.A. Inc., estimate that the big push of Christmastime sales will shove the totals, at wholesale, for 1967 to $1.531 billion, compared with 1966's 1.420 billion. The gain is about eight per cent.
On the basis of these figures, consider what a boom the toy business has seen since World War II. In 1947, the industry says that sales were $308 million. The total jumped to the $1 billion mark first in 1962. There are various reasons for the boom - the more affluent families and more disposable income. And, there are more children.
At the trade fair in New York last summer, manufacturers agreed that no one "fad" toy was apt to capture a big hunk of the market this year. Rather, the staples would continue to rack up the majority of sales.
Despite the overwhelming return to the staples, however, many of the 1967 Christmas playthings are definitely - and sometimes frighteningly - modern.
"We live in a sophisticated world today." explained Merrill Hassenfeld, president of Hasbro Toys. It's not just the children. Today's bride cooks television dinners and her husband rides to work on 100-mile-an-hour trains. How can we blame the children for reflecting the sophistication in their choice of toys?"
Toys Sophisticated
Doughboy Industries, for example, advertises its plastic punching bags as "an outlet for the youngsters in these trying days of the cold war ande the struggle in Vietnam, where some of them have young fathers in uniform."
Alabe Crafts, Inc., advertises "a poverty program of your own with Poverty Pup, the dog that puts the 'bite' on your friends" The pup, a canine piggy-bank, barks and emerges from his doghouse when a coin is placed in his food dish.
Many of the new games are similarly patterned after real life. "Campaign," manufactured by the Campaign Game Co., Inc., has as its object the collection of sufficient electoral votes to be elected President of the United States. Hasbro's "The Newlywed Game" includes in its question cards the unchildlike query: "Have you ever suspected your husband of making eyes at another woman?"
Wiff 'n Proof, manufacturers of "The Propaganda Game," note that "propaganda is used to make us accept questionable points of view, to make us vote for men who may be unfit for public office, and to make us buy products which are useless and sometimes even dangerous."
They advertise their own product, however, as "the game that's driving people reasonable."
Perhaps the most grotesque of the modern games is Campaign's "The Big Funeral," which bills itself as "a crazy game for the mildly insane." Players participate in a kind of necrophiliac Monopoly, accumulating up to $50,000 worth of hearses ("Cool wakes for frozen stiffs"), coffins ("Group rate coffins - Economical Six Pack") and status symbols "Have a virus named after your loved one"). The manufacturers promise both immortality ("Throw wild funeral parties while still alive!") and revenge ("Make your friends look cheap and send them to Slob Hill in an orange crate coffin!") all the while maintaining that the game is "in a very humorous vein," not sick at all.
War Toy Debate
It is the war toys, however which arouse the greatest parental indignation. In New York, a group called the Parents for Responsibility in the Toy Industry awards a "Dove of Good Practice" seal to stores refusing to sell war toys. California parents' groups have made pilgrimages to build symbolic sand castles. Some parents simply refuse to buy the militaristic type of toys for their children.
Mrs. Min Horowitz, president of the Toy Manufacturers, denies that parental protests have had any effect on the sales of war and spy toys.
"We don't think war toys are harmful." she explained. "We feel that the child is aware of anything that is a realistic fact of life. Since war is real, the war toys can serve to rid a child of aggression and hostility, rather than create it."
Dr. Evelyn Mason, associate professor of psychology at Western Washington State College also feels that "we don't endorse the war aspects of play, but boys are going to play at war anyway. If we want to get rid of war play, we should get rid of war."
One of the most successful war toys in recent years is Hasbro's "G.I. Joe" - the modern adaptation of the age-old toy soldier.
This year, Joe - as a soldier, sailor, marine and pilot - will talk when his dog tag is pulled, giving appropriate military commands such as "Enemy fighters 12 o'clock high," "Take the jeep and get some ammo" and "Frogmen, check your scuba gear."
Hasbro is also extending the G.I. Joe line to service academy cadets, astronauts, firemen, action pilots with actual working parachutes, state troopers, jungle fighters and other models, all authentically dressed and equipped with appropriate accessories. "Action Nurse" has been added to the line for the little girls whose brothers play with Gi Joe. She comes complete with a Red Cross armband, stethoscope. plasma bottle, two crutches and a package of bandages and splints.
The Space RACE
Even more prevalent than the military toys, however, are the space toys. Mattel's "Major Matt Mason" comes with a complete space complex, including a space crawler, astronaut moon suit, space sled, and rocket launch pad. Back on earth, Ideal Toys offers a city planning kit, "Super City," with which children can build entire plastic cities of skyscrapers, houses and roads.
A certain element of grotesqueness, growing out of last year's monster fad, is present in some of the 1967 toys. Cossco Products introduces as "frisky bathtub companions" its "Water Wonders" line of pellet-charged octopi and Loch Ness monsters. Mattel is bringing out a "Fright Factory" of do-it-yourself shrunken heads, teeth and scars, as well as Incredible Edibles - with which children can make - and eat -gelatinous snakes, bugs and scorpions.
Mattel is also the maker of the all-time-get-rid-of-your-hostilities toy" Scrunch with Creeple People". The toy consists of two battling monsters, each with detachable parts. The child who first decapitates his opponent's monster is the winner.
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