Word: toying
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DIED. ARTHUR MELIN, 77, entrepreneurial co-founder of Wham-O, the toy giant that brought baby boomers the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee and the SuperBall; of Alzheimer's disease; in Costa Mesa, Calif. After a friend showed Melin and his partner a rattan hoop popular in Australia, Wham-O introduced a plastic version in 1958. Mania over the Hula Hoop was ferocious but short lived; it cost Wham-O, which at one point made 20,000 a day, $10,000 in losses that year...
Facing anesthesia can be a scary prospect for patients of any age. But for kids at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, it is literally child's play. Doctors there are trying out a toy-like device called PediSedate for putting kids to sleep without anxiety. Meant for kids ages 3 to 9, the gadget looks like a big, plastic version of a pilot's headset--in a choice of blue or cranberry--with a snorkel attached. The contraption is connected to a Nintendo Game Boy or, for music lovers, a portable...
Animators draw figures; movie execs read them. So consider these numbers, just from Disney product. The studio's four CG features (Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.), produced by John Lasseter and his cyber-Merlins at Pixar, earned an average of $214 million; the last two averaged $250 million. As for Disney's once mighty traditional animated films, the last four (Mulan, Tarzan, The Emperor's New Groove and Atlantis: The Lost Empire) grossed, on average, just $116 million, and the last two didn't make it to $90 million. Pixar films were originally...
Where's God When I'm S-Scared? was released two years before Toy Story, making it the first fully computer-animated movie on the market. Nineteen VeggieTales videos have followed. Technologically, they are ingenious rather than astounding. One of the reasons Vischer chose vegetables was that they didn't need arms, legs, hair or clothes, making the animation process much simpler. Initially he created a candy bar with eyes, "but my wife walked by and said, 'Moms are going to be mad if you make their kids fall in love with candy bars,'" he says. He moved the eyes...
...industrial espionage. Boosted by an e-commerce website, sales were up 1,200% last year, half of the total accounted for by exports. Wu attributes rapid growth in part to advanced R. and D. With the help of his Japanese partner (the Japanese are, unsurprisingly, the leaders in sex toy innovation), he is developing unusual products to fill new niches of sexual proclivity-and not just farm animals. Works-in-progress include a "lovebot," a humanoid doll with lifelike skin that will be able to move and speak lines such as, "Am I going too fast for you?" Wu claims...