![]() ![]() ![]() Its inventor, Herb Schaper, was, in his day job, a Minneapolis mailman. The Game of Cootie, in which players race to build colorful plastic bugs, was an instant hit in 1949 and remains popular nearly 75 years later. Lionel had switched from toy trains to telegraph keys, compasses and other military essentials.īefore the 1940s came to a close, however, plastics were beginning to pop up on toy store shelves, often due to adventurous entrepreneurs willing to take a gamble. Milton Bradley had cut back its game production during the war to manufacture parts for airplane landing gear and machine guns. In addition, toymakers needed time to retool for peacetime. ![]() Parker Brothers, for example, “was afraid to change any details of Monopoly because it was, and continued to be, a cash cow for the firm,” he says. One 1943 experiment resulted in a bouncy substance that proved of little use to the war effort but went on to post-war fame and fortune as Silly Putty.īut while plastics would revolutionize the toy industry, wary manufacturers didn’t make the leap right away, notes Nicolas Ricketts, a curator at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. These plastics became especially important during the war, in part because certain materials, such as silk and natural rubber, became hard to obtain or impossible to produce in sufficient quantities to keep up with the needs of the military. But the 1930s and ‘40s saw the introduction of many more. Some early forms of plastic, such as celluloid, had been around since the 19 th century. Little wonder that toy sales grew from $84 million in 1940 to $900 million by 1953 and into the billions of dollars in by the early 1960s. And television, little more than a novelty before the war, soon made it possible to demonstrate the latest playthings to millions of kids at a time. The baby boom-more than 76 million kids born between 19-offered them record numbers of potential customers. Not only were toy and game designers and makers able to take advantage of the latest scientific advances, such as colorful and inexpensive plastics they also benefitted from two other post-war trends. industries were more profoundly affected by the war than the toy business. World War II gave rise to countless innovations that would change American life for decades to come-from the rugged Jeep, to mass-produced penicillin, to the terrifying atomic bomb. ![]()
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