Burt's Brainstorm

The Asics sports shoe company is launching a new Gel Lyte sneaker and what better way to do that than to create the world's largest Lite Brite image? Although neither Asics nor Hasbro apparently know how to spell the word light, they certainly know how to pull off a cross branding stunt. The 11-by-15-foot, 300,000 peg display took 6 months to create and has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records.

FUN FLASHBACK!
Burt Meyer, who was working for Marvin Glass and Associates in the late 1960s, was walking down the street in Manhattan with Marvin and another MGA designer when they came across a large window display of colored light bulbs. The toy men all thought that kids would love to play with colored lights, but such a toy would be too dangerous and too expensive. As they began to walk away, the light bulb above Burt's head went off. Couldn't you get the same effect with one light source and a bunch of translucent pegs? Having worked with a jukebox company in the past, Burt knew he could pipe lighting through plastic and so he went back to his bench and MGA and began to tinker. The ingenious part of the Lite Brite toy is the black paper which is sandwiched between two panels, each having an identical serious of holes. The paper blocks out the light and so when a child take a colored, translucent peg and slides it into a hole, it pokes through the paper and appears to magically "turn on." So simple and yet, so fun.

We interviewed Burt Meyer for our TOYLAND documentary film, which will be coming to a film festival near you soon! How big was Burt's brainstorm? 42 years after its invention, Lite Brite is still in the public eye in a very big way.