Word: toying
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Walk around the airy orange-and-yellow-hued loft of Rumpus Toys in New York City. Stick your hand down the throat of a plush Gus Gutz and remove his stuffed organs. Toy companies are supposed to be like this--creative places where adults dream up wacky stuff for kids. "I make the kinds of toys I love to play with," explains the 29-year-old founder, Laurence Schwarz, standing next to a showroom of Harry Hairballs, a cat whose stomach contains fish bones, slippers and hair balls. "We don't put this stuff through focus groups or watch kids...
Even if Rumpus' toy line strikes adults as gross, it has struck a chord with children, driving revenues from $1 million in 1997 to an estimated $15 million this year. More important, Rumpus represents the kind of fun-first, marketing-second approach to toymaking that has become alien to America's corporate giants Mattel and Hasbro, which together control about 30% of the toy business. The corporations instead scheme to recoup their nine-figure licensing fees for movie characters by filling the pipeline with action figures...
Executives at Mattel, for example, can't remember the last hit toy the $4.8 billion company incubated without a movie licensing tie-in or an idea purchased from a smaller company. The days when the firm, based in El Segundo, Calif., was capable of organically growing a brand from the roots up, building Barbie or Hot Wheels into multibillion-dollar annual businesses, seem long gone...
...greatest toy the movie has to play with is the participation of real-life actor John Malkovich, playing himself with perversity and panache. The film brings him into the plot with characteristic audacity; Cusack discovers a secret door at work that leads directly into the inside of Malkovich's brain. He becomes famous Malkovich for fifteen minutes (get it?), and is then spit out onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. It is to the film's credit that this bizarre, supernatural turn of events doesn't jar the logical tone of the movie at all. Getting inside Malkovich...
...least not until they turn 13. That, according to the Federal Trade Commission, is the new rule of Internet advertising. On Wednesday, the FTC passed down some serious restrictions to online marketers? maneuvers: Beginning in April, any information solicited online from a child under 13 ? say, from a toy company?s site ? must be accompanied by parental consent. The form of consent will vary depending on what the marketers intend to do with the information; if it?s for that toy company?s sole consumption, a e-mail and a follow-up phone call to the parents will fulfill...