Where's your soul? Wears your sole?

August 30, 2008

I was thinking about shoes the other day. Maybe I have too much time on my hands, but it all started with some Light Up Iron Man Sneakers that caught my eye. "If they only made them in adult 13s," I whispered to myself. See I'm a big Iron Man fan, too big for most of the licensed apparel that he adorns. My wife is thankful for that.

God has a funny way of bringing things to your attention, for shortly after my run-in with the Iron Man running shoes, I heard an add on my local radio station looking for 10,000 shoes for orphans in Guatemala.

So through the power of the internet, I give you two links below and leave the rest up to you. You can "fill your closet" or fulfill a basic need for someone else... or both.

SHOES FOR ORPHAN SOULS

The paternity tests are in...

August 27, 2008

...and the Bratz girls and Barbie are related. They were both born at Mattel. Or so a federal jury decided when they awarded Mattel Inc. $100 million in damages yesterday in a federal copyright lawsuit that had Barbie (Mattel) and Bratz (MGA Entertainment) facing off in what seems like a twisted version of the Jerry Springer show, in which the Bratz were asked, "Who's you're daddy?"

Turns out it was designer, Carter Bryant. The same jury that made the decision yesterday decided last month that Bryant was indeed employed at Mattel when he came up with the Bratz designs. Mattel was asking for $1 billion in damages, which isn't so far fetched when you consider what the Bratz line has made (MGA is a private company, but revenue is said to be around $2 billion), and what the Bratz line has done to Barbie's sales (down over 10% since the Bratz debut).

Read the full story here.

When I was employed at Patch Products in the mid 1990s, I worked with an outside inventor on a game called Mock My Words. I renamed it Mad Gad, conceived of its unique cube package, and designed its card flipper/card holder. I also made a crucial decision to stack the word puzzles on the game cards instead of stringing them in sentence form, as two unsuccessful incarnations of the game had done. As an employee of Patch, I was fairly compensated for my job and thus received no royalties for the sales of Mad Gab, which went on to sell over 1 million copies for Patch. I made no money when Patch sold the game's licensing contract to Mattel in 2001 for an undisclosed sum and I make no money from royalties on the game now, even though I see it is in the fall planogram for Target, Walmart and Toys R Us this coming holiday season. This is how the game invention business works. I got paid very well to be the VP of Product Development for Patch. The game inventor who brought the game to Patch deserved (and still deserves) all the royalties he still enjoys.

Carter Bryant knew that this is how the toy business works, but he got greedy. I'm not surprised that the article reports, "Bryant, the Bratz designer, settled with Mattel on the eve of trial. The terms of that settlement have not been made public."

You can't eat your cake and have it too.

"Hula-Hoop is Back?" It never really left

August 20, 2008

Hooping is hip again! Articles are popping up everywhere about this new fitness craze of spinning the Hula-Hoop for its hip-reducing benefits. The humble hoop is showing up in Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé videos, in parks and around celebrity waistlines. I can see it now, "Tony Little's Hoopin' Workout." If not from him, it's coming from some other fitness entrepreneur wanting to capitalize on a perfect storm.

Let it be known right now that my forthcoming WHAM-O Super-Book: Celebrating 60 Years Inside the Fun Factory was planned well before this phenomenon and that there is no marketing conspiracy out there drumming up this fad to sell books. Yes, 2008 happens to be the 60th anniversary of the founding of WHAM-O and the 50th anniversary of the invention of the Hula-Hoop. But I proposed writing this book for Chronicle Books two years ago, knowing that these anniversaries were coming. Two anniversaries in one year was too good to pass up, but now a Hula-Hoop resurgence to boot? I'll take it... but I didn't start it. Really.

We use the expression, "It went the way of the Hula-Hoop" to describe something that was hot and then disappeared. While it is true that the Hula-Hoop sold like gangbusters in the summer of 1958 and then drowned in the wake of the many hoop knockoffs that flooded the market, it never went away completely. Sure it was marked down and liquidated during 1959 and from about 1960 until 1964 it was on hiatus. But it returned with a vengeance in 1965! Since then it's not only been on the market continuously, but sold pretty well at times. In fact, when I interviewed WHAM-O co-founder Rich Knerr for my book he told me that in 1983, when he and Spud Melin sold their company, they were selling "a million and a half Hula-Hoops a year."

For that reason, I don't call it a fad. To me that word conjures up novelties like the Pet Rock or Mood Rings, products you'd be hard-pressed to find today. No, the Hula-Hoop was more of a craze. With over 100 million sold (that includes knockoff hoops. WHAM-O's share in that number was ~ 25 million) in less than a year, it was the granddaddy of all crazes. Rich told me, "It was born in January and dead as a doornail in October." That was 1958. 50 years later, it's alive and well.

Check out this article.

New Playmakers Poll

August 11, 2008

With my WHAM-O Super-Book coming out in a few months, I thought I'd find out what classic WHAM-O toys you like best.

Boardgamenews.com

August 1, 2008

Jeff Allers, game inventor, author, friend and fellow game geek did a nice story on me and my entrePLAYneurial ventures for BoardGameNews.com. Thanks, Jeff! READ THE STORY HERE.

...Even Loved by Robots

June 11, 2008

Check out the new promo for WALL-E. It seems no one can resist the allure of the Hula-Hoop.