part one : The Early Years

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In most respects, the 56th annual Toy Fair held in New York during March of 1959 was no different from those that immediately preceded. There were roughly 1,600 toy manufacturers in attendance, filling 2,000 showrooms at the Toy Center Building and a handful of hotel rooms where make-shift showrooms had been set up, all to present the new toy lines to 16,000 wholesale and retail buyers from stores all over the world.*

The new decade was nearing, and in the toy business the big success story up to that point was that of Elliot and Ruth Handler, who, over the previous 14 years, had turned their former garage operation into one of the largest toy companies in the world.

During the four years leading up to 1959, visiting the Mattel showroom was like being invited to the Disney studio by Walt himself. Except this was Mattel, and the excitement was to see what the Handlers had come up with in the world of Toys.   Ruth and Elliot Handler were the King and Queen of Toyland. Their stock company of players included some of the most talented designers and toy inventors in the world. They'd taken a mom-and-pop-type operation and turned it into a new kind of business and a new commercial art form, thanks to television and lots of tenacity.

And at the 56th annual Toy Fair, guns were a-blazing as grown-ups in the Mattel showroom tested some of the most realistic replicas of detective and western hardware ever made. What was different at this Toy Fair was that it seemed as though the Handlers and Mattel had finally made a major mistep with another line of product--a lifelike teenage fashion doll called Barbie, which no one seemed to want and the potential appeal of which nobody except for Ruth Handler could explain.

I bet that Elliot expected to find Ruth picking up one of their new shiny six shooters firing their spring activated "shootin'shell" bullets with Greenie stik-M-caps for the firing sound. She would've pointed this at their latest addition in the western series collection, called OUTDRAW THE OUTLAW, an 18-inch plastic masked outlaw with a false back, hooked up to a timer so you could try to outdraw him before his arm swung up and fired. Only when Ruth fired at the outlaw, he represented all those male egos that couldn't see why her Barbie doll would be successful. And so far, Barbie wasn't generating orders so much as ridicule and disbelief.

She had spent many annoying and frustrating years trying to convince Mattel and, especially, her husband, that this doll idea of hers would be a blockbuster. But the reactions during the first few days at Toy Fair weren't very positive, and things weren't looking good for their new teenage fashion doll.

If Barbie didn't succeed, it was to be one of the first failures in the company's history, after nearly a decade of unbroken success. And while Mattel's success was, of course, rooted in the quality and inventiveness of their toys, it was also based on a keen understanding of how to sell them--the company's assets were on the shelves of its warehouse, but also in the movie projector on which they showed their commercials at Toy Fair. The 16mm projector was a regular piece of equipment at Toy Fair for Mattel, because the Handlers had learned early on that it was even more important to excite the buyers with the commercials and marketing strategy than it was to show off the toys themselves.

It was exciting in those days not only to see the new toys but to get a first-hand glimpse of the new televison commercials produced by Mattel for airing on the Mickey Mouse Club (which they sponsored), and some clips from the show were always included as well. 1959 was Mattel's fourth successful year on the Mickey Mouse Club. Mattel's commercials were an art form in itself, and were as special as their toys. They had bigger budgets and better production values than those of most of the other toy companies that tried to emulate their success on television. Indeed, Mattel's were among the very few toy commercials in this period that looked as good as the shows during which they aired.

At Toy Fair in 1959, the western- and detective-theme commercials showing off the impressive and extensive Shooten Shell gun collection were among the highlights of the fair. Each one was a 60 second adventure story filled with drama, tension, basic characterization, and made up of a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even renowned western director John Ford would have been impressed by these well produced 60 second adventure stories, all performed by talented kids who handled the guns as professionally as any adult performers, and all shot on realistic sets.*

The next big craze being predicted that year was for space-related toys. This was perfectly understandable, for Sputnik had been orbited a couple of years earlier, and it seemed like everytime you turned around the Russians or the Americans were trying to shoot something into space. Even a Time magazine article said that Toy Fair's hottest item from Mattel would be a carbon dioxide rocket that, with two stages, would go 200 feet into the air. The television commercial demonstrating the rocket toy was genuinely exciting, and made it possible for any boy or girl considering purchasing the rocket to feel like they were taking part in a little piece of the space program. Mattel didn't have any space toys at the 1959 Toy Fair, but they were expanding their television marketing territory, by sponsoring their own 1/2-hour cartoon show to be called Matty's Funday Funnies--referring to company symbol Matty Mattel--which was to air on the ABC network on Sunday afternoons, and later on Friday nights using the Harvey cartoon series Little Audrey, Baby Huey, and Casper the Friendly Ghost. The show was hosted by the animated characters of Matty Mattel and his Sister Bell, who were the Mattel mascots and also became a toy line themselves the following year.

With Mattel trying to break into the doll business, it was heart wrenching when the same Times article brushed over mention of their new doll entry. If I could quantum leap into any point in Toy Fair history, it would, in fact, be to 1959. That was one of the great years for terrific toys. It was the peak of the plastic revolution, with great large-sized plastic toys. I have to admit that, as a pre-teen at that time, the last place you would have found me was with some Mattel sales person showing me a doll that they claimed was "the only anatomically perfect doll manufactured today." Who cared? I wanted guns and rocketships. In the male dominated world of toy buyers, fashion dolls were not only dead, they were stillborn, especially the new doll that Mattel was hawking, which was just too sexy, with breasts of all things.

The FAO Schwarz and Toys-R-Us of the 1950s was Sears, and it was the Sears buyer who pretty much broke the news to the Handlers, that his organization wouldn't touch Barbie--this so-called teenage fashion doll, complete with breasts, was just too sexy for a mother to buy for her pre-teen daughter. Unstated was the truly revolutionary nature of Barbie--that here was a doll whose purpose and attributes lent themselves to fantasy roles that didn't involve motherhood; here was a doll that implicitly displayed sexuality, but was not a mama doll; here was a doll designed to embody a social life and a sex life, not necessarily concluding with marriage or children, for the user (presumably a young girl) to project onto it. And almost as revolutionary as her implicit sexuality was the idea of a doll that could be dressed in 22 different outfits--girls whose parents couldn't afford to buy them 22 different outfits could live vicariously through Barbie. On the one hand, Barbie was a vehicle for pleasure, and a symbol of a uniquely feminine (but not maternal) brand of success in life, but, on the other, Barbie was also a substitute for a level of success and self-indulgence that many girls just couldn't have in their own lives.