Read Online THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA by Marvin Kaye - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Marvin Kaye
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toy games, action games, and threedimensional games. The goal of Mouse Trap is to be the player with the last remaining mouse (game piece) on the board. In the process of play, a surrealistic monstrosity of a mouse trap is built, piece by piece. Mice that land in the danger spot are trapped and eliminated.
But the real appeal of the game is the intricate accuracy of the trap itself when triggered: first a player turns a crank which rotates a pair of brightly colored plastic gears. The gears snap a lever with a stop sign on the end, causing the sign to slap a shoe hanging from a lamppost. The shoe kicks a bucket poised at the top of a set of stairs. A metal ball rolls out of the bucket, down the stairs, and along a twisty rainpipe. At the end of the rainpipe is a pole with an upturned palm at the upper end. The ball joggles the pole and the hand pushes a bowling ball off a precarious perch; it drops into a bathtub with a hole in it, falls through the hole, and lands on a diving board, causing a diver to leap into the air and fall in a bucket. The bucket jounces a large cage at the top of a post, and the cage careens down on the unsuspecting mouse.
The quality control involved in making Mouse Trap is beyond belief.
“We opened in Pittsburgh with Mouse Trap,” said Herb Sand, a vice president at Ideal, sounding like the producer of a new play. “In marketing you can almost predict what will be a flop or a hit. But you never can predict a phenomenon. It took off a bit slowly in the initial market, but by the following Toy Fair, Mouse Trap was selling phenomenally. Since then, it has remained a popular game, and we are thinking of recycling it again soon with a new heavy TV ad campaign.”
Glass considers the complex futility implicit in Mouse Trap to be his comment on the depersonalization of modern society. Several of his ideas have evolved from his satiric turn of mind—like those oversize spectacles that novelty stores began selling a few years ago. “I got the idea for them from a talk with a scholar,” said Glass. “He was wearing glasses with heavy frames and the longer he spoke, and the more important the things he said, the bigger his glasses seemed to grow until they were covering his entire face.” Over four million pairs of Super-Specs have been sold.
Ideas like Super-Specs are so much the lifeblood of his business that Glass takes CIA-like precautions to prevent anyone from getting a glimpse of next year’s Christmas goods. The “fortress,” his Chicago headquarters, has no windows and is constantly patrolled by guards. Visitors are escorted up a staircase to Glass’s office, and no farther. Even the firm’s silent partner reputedly has never been allowed into the design shop. Closed-circuit TV cameras keep watch over every doorway, and triple locks secure all portals. The locks are changed periodically, and only three full sets of keys are ever maintained. Glass holds one set, while the owners of the other pair are unknown, even to each other.
In this cloak-and-dagger setting, Marvin Glass holds counsel with his staff (“an idea session without a lot of shouting is a bad one”), demanding of them the same combination of audacity and professionalism that produced the Glass classics. “It takes a creative individual to go for an innovative idea,” he believes. “There are few people like that. I think a good deal of my success has been that I broke the rules right at the start. Today, among my people, I try to foster the necessity of rule breaking in design. The world needs unconventional people.”
In the case of Marvin Glass, breaking rules has paid off. But the wall of inertia in the toy industry, as elsewhere, is no doubt as solid as ever, and “wild genius” remains suspect.
“Marvin Glass has a rare and singular talent,” one toy executive remarked. “He has to be left alone to dream his big dreams. But we can always bring them back down to the realm of practicality.”
7 The Toy
But the real appeal of the game is the intricate accuracy of the trap itself when triggered: first a player turns a crank which rotates a pair of brightly colored plastic gears. The gears snap a lever with a stop sign on the end, causing the sign to slap a shoe hanging from a lamppost. The shoe kicks a bucket poised at the top of a set of stairs. A metal ball rolls out of the bucket, down the stairs, and along a twisty rainpipe. At the end of the rainpipe is a pole with an upturned palm at the upper end. The ball joggles the pole and the hand pushes a bowling ball off a precarious perch; it drops into a bathtub with a hole in it, falls through the hole, and lands on a diving board, causing a diver to leap into the air and fall in a bucket. The bucket jounces a large cage at the top of a post, and the cage careens down on the unsuspecting mouse.
The quality control involved in making Mouse Trap is beyond belief.
“We opened in Pittsburgh with Mouse Trap,” said Herb Sand, a vice president at Ideal, sounding like the producer of a new play. “In marketing you can almost predict what will be a flop or a hit. But you never can predict a phenomenon. It took off a bit slowly in the initial market, but by the following Toy Fair, Mouse Trap was selling phenomenally. Since then, it has remained a popular game, and we are thinking of recycling it again soon with a new heavy TV ad campaign.”
Glass considers the complex futility implicit in Mouse Trap to be his comment on the depersonalization of modern society. Several of his ideas have evolved from his satiric turn of mind—like those oversize spectacles that novelty stores began selling a few years ago. “I got the idea for them from a talk with a scholar,” said Glass. “He was wearing glasses with heavy frames and the longer he spoke, and the more important the things he said, the bigger his glasses seemed to grow until they were covering his entire face.” Over four million pairs of Super-Specs have been sold.
Ideas like Super-Specs are so much the lifeblood of his business that Glass takes CIA-like precautions to prevent anyone from getting a glimpse of next year’s Christmas goods. The “fortress,” his Chicago headquarters, has no windows and is constantly patrolled by guards. Visitors are escorted up a staircase to Glass’s office, and no farther. Even the firm’s silent partner reputedly has never been allowed into the design shop. Closed-circuit TV cameras keep watch over every doorway, and triple locks secure all portals. The locks are changed periodically, and only three full sets of keys are ever maintained. Glass holds one set, while the owners of the other pair are unknown, even to each other.
In this cloak-and-dagger setting, Marvin Glass holds counsel with his staff (“an idea session without a lot of shouting is a bad one”), demanding of them the same combination of audacity and professionalism that produced the Glass classics. “It takes a creative individual to go for an innovative idea,” he believes. “There are few people like that. I think a good deal of my success has been that I broke the rules right at the start. Today, among my people, I try to foster the necessity of rule breaking in design. The world needs unconventional people.”
In the case of Marvin Glass, breaking rules has paid off. But the wall of inertia in the toy industry, as elsewhere, is no doubt as solid as ever, and “wild genius” remains suspect.
“Marvin Glass has a rare and singular talent,” one toy executive remarked. “He has to be left alone to dream his big dreams. But we can always bring them back down to the realm of practicality.”
7 The Toy
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