A company built on soft foam balls stumbled into a genuine arms race once it discovered spring-loaded blasters — and turned 'you'll shoot your eye out' from a parental fear into a marketing non-issue.
Read more →Hasbro needed a word that let boys buy what was, mechanically, a doll. 'Action figure' solved that problem in 1964 and became the industry's default term ever since.
Read more →A simple grid of colored plastic pegs and a lightbulb became one of the most recognizable creative toys of the 70s and 80s, precisely because it required you to turn the lights off to enjoy it.
Read more →Hasbro didn't design a toy and then make a show about it — it licensed two unrelated Japanese toy lines, then commissioned an entire fictional universe to sell them together.
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