Inducted Toys

Baseball Cards

Inducted Year: 2023 Baseball players began posing for photos in the mid-19th century. Photography, like baseball, was becoming more widespread and popular. The late 1880s saw tobacco manufacturers including the cards in packages, to stiffen them and as incentives toward purchase. Soon candy manufacturers offered these premiums too, and went a step further, manufacturing their own cards. The production of cards burgeoned in the 1930s, when famous players like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were featured, and cards were printed […]

Top

Inducted Year: 2022 Ancient peoples of Greece and Rome amused themselves with toys resembling the spinning tops we know today. Archaeologists have found 5,000-year-old clay tops in Iraq and 3,000-year-old whip tops in China. Native peoples of the Americas played with tops in the 15th and 16th centuries. Top makers have formed their tops from clay, metal, stone, wood, and, later, rubber, tin, and plastics. Shapes and types of tops also vary, leading to the different ways in which the tops are […]

Nerf Toys

Inducted Year: 2023 In the late 1960s, game designer Reyn Guyer and his co-workers at Winsor Concepts developed a game idea inspired by the popular Stone Age characters from The Flintstones television series. Guyer’s game required players to toss foam “rocks” at their opponents while protecting their own piles of ammo. Guyer offered the game to Parker Brothers, but the toy giant tossed out the game and kept the foam, preferring the notion of a ball that kids could play with […]

Lite-Brite

Inducted Year: 2022 In 1966, a New York City window display featuring hundreds of colored lights inspired toy creators Marvin Glass, Henry Stan, and Burt Meyer. Convinced they could design and build a plaything employing this concept, they simplified and streamlined the idea, and reduced the light source to a 25-watt light bulb. Their design placed a perforated plastic panel in front of the bulb and covered the panel with a simple sheet of black construction paper. When colored translucent plastic […]

Sand

Inducted Year: 2021 Sand may be the most universal toy in the world. From a geologist’s perspective, sand is a dry, gritty material consisting of small, loose pieces of rock, soil, minerals, and gemstones. But children recognize sand as a creative vehicle for play suitable for pouring, scooping, sieving, raking, and measuring. Wet sand is even better, ready to construct, shape, and sculpt. Historians have every reason to believe that the earliest people played in sand. As early as the 1800s, newspapers […]

Risk

Inducted Year: 2021 The French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse designed a board game with simple rules but complex interactions, La Conquête du Monde (The Conquest of the World) in 1957. Purchasing the rights, Parker Brothers published it with a few small changes as Risk in 1959. It became the first popular game involving strategy, diplomacy, conflict, and conquest.  Risk players control armies of tokens on a world map board in attempts to capture adjoining territories from other players, battling by rolls of the […]

Masters of the Universe

Inducted Year: 2022 The story of Masters of the Universe begins in 1979 when Ray Wagner of Mattel formed a Male Action Team to explore creation of the company’s next big action figure line. The company recognized that it needed to compete with the success of Kenner’s Star Wars action figures. Roger Sweet, a member of the team, added modeling clay to bulk up Big Jim. In turn, Mattel illustrator Mark Taylor developed the proposed aesthetics for the action figure and, […]

Fisher-Price Corn Popper

Inducted Year: 2023 In the 1950s, scientist and inventor Arthur Holt designed the Corn Popper, a stick with a plastic dome filled with gumball-sized balls. As a child pushed the Corn Popper, the toy sent the colorful balls airborne. When the balls hit the dome, they made a popping noise. The seemingly simple design reflected progressive thinking about how children play and learn—Holt intended for youngsters to use the toy while learning to walk. The Corn Popper’s usefulness and good looks […]

Cabbage Patch Kids

Inducted Year: 2023 Influenced by Martha Nelson Thomas’ Doll Babies, art student Xavier Roberts created fabric sculptures he called Little People in the 1970s. Roberts’ creations featured a pudgy face with close-set eyes and hair fashioned of colored yarn. Roberts did not exactly “sell” his Little People to customers. Instead, he offered the dolls up for “adoption”—in return for a fee. Roberts included a birth certificate and adoption papers with each doll. As interest in his Little People spread, Roberts organized the […]