Meet Big Loo, your new best friend. If you ever go to the moon, make sure you take Big Loo with you. With him along, you won’t need any other companion.
Advertised as a robot from the moon and perfect for lunar exploration, the 38-inch Big Loo functioned like a one-man, er, one-robot army. Louis Marx & Company, the largest toy maker in America at mid-20th century, introduced Big Loo in 1963. Operating on three D batteries, Loo flashed his red […]
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The Best Toys Ever
What’s your favorite toy? I had the chance to talk about some of my favorites from the National Toy Hall of Fame with Gerri Willis on The Willis Report not long ago. The Fox Business network brought me to New York City as part of the lead-in to holiday toy shopping and to remind their viewers about classic toys. The segment’s theme, “Best Toys Ever,” felt like a perfect fit since celebrating toys with enduring play value is what the […]
Molding Minds
If someone placed a lump of clay in front of you, what would you do? Would you immediately be drawn to pick it up and shape it into something? Would you pass it from hand to hand, simply enjoying the tactile qualities? Perhaps you wouldn’t be inclined to touch it at all, maybe you find the idea of sculpting something daunting. Whatever your choice, in that lump of clay lies an important and undeniable quality: possibility.
Now consider how a […]
Video Game Designers Partner with Writer Neil Gaiman
Novelists have collaborated with video game designers to create interactive fiction for decades. In 1984, author Douglas Adams and computer game developer Steve Meretzky paired-up to turn the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy series into an interactive fiction video game. Cyberdreams later worked with author Harlan Ellison to turn his short-story, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” into a point-and-click adventure game. Writer Tom Clancy created his own game studio, Red Storm Entertainment, and has produced popular series like […]
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A Mere Bagatelle: From Marbles to Pinball and Beyond
What does it take to play a game? Historic outdoor games like Duck on a Rock only require found stones. Other traditional outdoor games such as lawn bowls, bocce, and croquet used wooden balls. Early table versions of these games employed smaller ivory or wood balls or clay marbles. All these games have one thing in common: each involves knocking something aside with something else.
These games go back centuries and draw their basics from competitive games of shooting marbles. Billiards, […]
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Screen-Play: NBC’s Community and the National Toy Hall of Fame
Community is one of the most playful shows on television. The comedy about a study group at dysfunctional Greendale Community College not only features unconventional storytelling methods and an innovative visual style, but its characters actually play—all the time. And either its writers have been looking to The Strong for episode ideas, or the toys and games featured on the show are simply as iconic as our experts say they are. In honor of the show’s fifth-season premiere on January […]
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Born to Laugh: The Element of Humor in Play
Holiday time is a good occasion to think about humor and play since it’s filled with reflection, rest, and relaxation with relatives and friends—a time to play again. Like vacation time, holidays let us back off a bit, lighten up, and try to laugh a lot more, for our own good. I firmly believe that the day we stop playing is the day we stop living.
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The Toy Experts
Every autumn, The Strong inducts two or three toys into the National Toy Hall of Fame. The process begins by staff examining the thousands of nominations received from the public through the Hall of Fame website and in letters, emails, and phone calls. Museum curators, educators, historians, and administrators then carefully consider the many toys nominated to determine how well each one fits the established criteria for induction. We evaluate each toy for its longevity, icon status, innovation, and the […]
Five ICHEG Acquisitions of 2013
As Acquisitions Cataloger, I get to see every object ICHEG acquires. The CHEGheads have already written about some of our most influential new items of 2013, such as our collection of nearly 7,000 Japanese video games; a Fix-It Felix, Jr. arcade machine commissioned directly from Disney to promote their animated feature film Wreck-It Ralph; and Hercules Pinball, the largest commercial pinball machine ever created. Here are some of my other favorite acquisitions of this year. 5. Jet Force Gemini Signed […]