Word: toy
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...midst of the distractions (not to mention the quest for batteries), TIME relied on a panel of five-year-old experts: Brian Alexander advised his father, Economy & Business Senior Editor Charles Alexander, who, in turn, helped the writers with the business aspects of toys; Sam Cocks, whose dad Contributor Jay Cocks reviewed the more popular toys; and Julian Graham, whose mother Megan Rutherford helped research the stories. Brian tested the robots, while Julian and Sam went into the field (an F.A.O. Schwarz toy store in New York City), where they particularly approved of the trains and educational computers. Says...
This Christmas the pair may be called He-Man and She-Ra, and their blond manes and mesomorphic torsos beckon from shelves in nearly every toy store in the nation. In other times the wandering children have been differently named and more modestly dressed. Observes Roger Sale, a professor of English at the University of Washington: "A girl is in a wood. Give her a brother, and one has Hansel and Gretel . . . send the girl to dwarfs, and one has Snow White. Make the girl a boy, and one might have Jack, either the one who climbs beanstalks...
...past eleven months, toy manufacturers have dangled fresh enticements - before small children, hoping for the greatest separation of them all: the parents from their wallets. More interested in the here-and-now bottom line than in fairy tales or the mythic wellsprings behind children's play, the marketers have long since phased out the elves in Santa's workshop (and kicked the old gentleman upstairs to his present role as the Colonel Sanders of the Yuletide franchise). Big business, after all, is not kid stuff; the other way round is more like it. In the U.S. last Christmas, according...
...child fights more single-mindedly for a toy than do some 800 manufacturers and distributors for a share of that market. At Mattel, the second largest toy company, with sales of just over $l billion, guards patrol the R&D building in Hawthorne, Calif., as if it were a Strategic Air Command base. Understandably. A successful new product can mean buckets of the stuff that grown-ups' dreams are made of. Coleco came charging out of the Cabbage Patch with its pathetic but lovable doll, and currently ranks third, with annual sales of more than $500 million. Hasbro, the leader...
...Every toy and tale throws a long shadow," says Film Animator Chuck Jones. "I could never have done some of the Bugs Bunny cartoons -- and kids couldn't have responded to them -- without a knowledge of knights and witches and giants. Every popular figure, from Daffy Duck to the Cabbage Patch Kids, has ancestors in the old country...