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Staff at The Strong passed around several emails this week noting the passing of Gary Dahl, inventor of the Pet Rock, a wildly popular fad from the mid-1970s.
In 1975 Dahl, a California advertising man, dreamed up the notion of a Pet Rock and shipped it to a San Francisco gift show that August. His idea was so absurd, everyone had to have one. A Pet Rock was nothing more than a smooth stone from San Rosarita Beach in Mexico that […]

Continue Reading about Rock On, Gary Dahl Published on:
April 2, 2015

Invented in the 1950s to simulate surfing on land, the skateboard enjoyed a second wave of popularity 20 years later as a West Coast drought obliged residents to drain their backyard swimming pools. The drought resulted in a wealth of vacant, dry, sloping, and gently-curved concrete surfaces that tempted skateboarders to sneak in and show their stuff.

Continue Reading about Will the Postmodern Skateboard Find the Sweet Spot? Published on:
April 1, 2015

ZA is a perfectly good word. You know, like PIZZA. While you probably wouldn’t use (or eat) ZA in a formal social setting, it’s a two-letter word that might help boost your next Scrabble game. Surprised that ZA is a legal word? Don’t be. The entire world of Scrabble terms can be pretty surprising. From the first word (AA) to the last (ZYZZYVAS), the Scrabble dictionary overflows with the uncommon and plain old bizarre words that high-level Scrabble champions apply […]

Continue Reading about Under Scrabble’s Spell Published on:
March 30, 2015

The National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong inducted Scrabble in 2004. Since then we’ve made efforts to collect many different versions of the famous “scrambled word game.”
Oldest

Visit The Strong’s National Toy Hall of Fame web page for Scrabble, and you’ll learn that unemployed architect Alfred M. Butts invented the game during the Great Depression. Butts first called his game Lexico, and later Criss Cross.The Strong holds one of very few known copies of the Criss Cross game board. […]

Continue Reading about Scrabble: Oldest, Newest, Biggest, and Smallest at The Strong! Published on:
March 30, 2015

I first heard of Brian Sutton-Smith when I was an undergraduate at Bowling Green University in Ohio. Though he had by then moved on to Columbia Teacher’s College, the campus still reverberated with stories of the inspired teaching and impish good humor of this prolific young scholar, a dashing New Zealand import fully in tune with the sense of liberation and rebellion growing in America in the late 1960s.

Continue Reading about Brian Sutton-Smith—He Helped us Find Our Way on the Playground Published on:
March 16, 2015

The limits of computing hardware of the 1980s required game designers to use pixel art, a 2D graphical style that is enjoying a revival today. Games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, and The Legend of Zelda consisted of 2D images with low resolutions and limited color palettes that many designers and gamers considered pioneering. The introduction of consoles like the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 in the 1990s enabled game designers to render 3D images that made earlier […]

Continue Reading about Pixel Art: Nostalgia or Visual Style? Published on:
March 9, 2015

A friend sent me this striking image a collector had reproduced as a postcard in 1993, and titled “Angel of the Asphalt: A Miracle on Maplewood Drive.” The attribution on the back guessed its original date at 1954. Irony had accumulated over those four decades between the original and the reproduction. The collector, in a skeptical, post-modern spirit, meant the copy to evoke and poke fun at a hokey, bygone ideal. 

Continue Reading about Solving the Mystery of the Angel of the Asphalt Published on:
March 9, 2015

“Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.”                
~ Admiral James T. Kirk

Continue Reading about Beam Him Up, Scotty: Remembering Leonard Nimoy Published on:
March 3, 2015

When I leave The Strong this week after almost seven years, a shiny, new collections manager will take the helm. I feel like the well-worn toy Margery Williams describes in The Velveteen Rabbit who becomes Real when the Boy loves him and when the nursery magic Fairy sets him free. Except for the trials of becoming Real, the Rabbit’s greatest anxiety is being forgotten or replaced. And here I am, undergoing the process willingly when so many toys are not […]

Continue Reading about Screen-Play: Succession Planning in the Playroom Published on:
March 3, 2015