Embrace Life

If you have not seen this yet, it's worth two minutes. Very powerful, emotional, combination of pictures and sound. Gets me every time.

Toy Fair 2010

I'm not saying that ignorance is bliss, but there's something to be said for launching a career and not knowing how incredibly high the odds are stacked against you.

I've been attending Toy Fair, the toy trade's biggest American trade show in NYC, since 1990. That was the year that we introduced TriBond to a very unimpressed, uber-competitive industry. We didn't know what we didn't know, and our youthful exuberance was contagious. My first 5 years in the toy business was a blur.

The next ten years was not boot camp by any stretch, but the fun was plummeting. I recently told a game inventor that if the movie business were like the game business, then your new film would have to try and get into movie theaters where Gone with the Wind, Star Wars, Citizen Kane, Titanic and The Dark Knight all still played to packed houses. Any new game has to try and get on retail shelves alongside Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue, Uno and Trivial Pursuit. It can be a tough, tough business. After TriBond and Blurt stopped selling so well in late 1990s, my job started to feel like work and I lost my enthusiasm.

Well I am happy to say that work is play again and for the past 5 years or so, Toy Fair has gotten increasingly more enjoyable every year. I get to see dear old friends and forge new relationships. This business is not for the faint of heart and so I enjoy, once again, working very hard at play.



It would be easy to assume that I'm excited again because Blurt is selling so well for Educational Insights and is entering its second year back on the market after a three year hiatus. But that guess would be too simplistic.

I love being on a team again. Educational Insights has the best people working for it and they allow me to be a part of a team pitching in for a common goal. Educational Insights hosted signings at Toy Fair with two other inventors and myself and allowed us to give autographed games to many fair goers.

The booth was packed the entire fair and there was a buzz there that is hard to describe. Thank you Etienne, Lisa, Scott, Maria, AnnMarie, Riley, Kent, Ernesto, Amy, Michelle, Julie, Mark and everyone at E.I. I feel like family.

The rest of Toy Fair was awesome. I had four new games that I designed at Daddy-O Productions and RSV Productions and two more from inventors for whom I helped land deals at Imagination Games and Find It Games. Crazy Chins was back all over the Jumbotron and the Bible versions of TriBond and Blurt were hoping over at Talicor/Aristoplay. It was, as we said at the very beginning of this 20 year journey, BIG FUN. Even if, at times, it's been Ugly...

Frisbee's Fred Morrison, 1920 - 2010

Fred Morrison, inventor of the modern plastic flying disc died on Tuesday, at the age of 90. I had the privilege of interviewing Fred for my WHAM-O Super-Book a few years ago and he was full of great stories that had nothing to do with the toy he made famous. Here are a few:

Fred was driving behind Spud Melin and Rich Knerr, the founders of WHAM-O, as they drove to a Frisbee event in 1965, the year the WHAM-O Super Ball was introduced. “I’d never seen the damn things before and I didn’t know what they were,” Fred told me. “...All of the sudden here comes all these little black things bouncing all over hell, all over my car, all over the freeway. Here they’re throwing these mini Super Balls out of the back of their car down the freeway!”

In 1958, a year after Frisbee hit it big, WHAM-O licensed an ingenious idea from Fred — a hollow, plastic bowling ball that could be filled with a quart of water to give it realistic weight. "If you didn't fill the bowling ball all the way, it sort of gyrated when you rolled it," Fred recalled.

After the "Home Bowling Set," Fred came up with another use of liquid, this time frozen. This “machine” for making homemade popsicles was licensed to WHAM-O and released in 1962. My favorite line from this ad is "If it tastes good and it's wet... FREEZE IT!"

My favorite Frisbee story from Fred is how he and his wife would open the royalty checks that they received from WHAM-O. He told me they'd cut open the right-hand side of the envelope and slide the check out slowly, counting the zeros.

An estimated 200 million Frisbee brand discs have been sold since WHAM-O introduced them in 1957. It all started on a Thanksgiving day in 1937. That's when Fred, then a high school student, first tossed a metal popcorn can lid for fun. Later, he and his girlfriend sold metal cake pans for 25 cents on Santa Monica Beach.

After World War II, in which he survived being shot down and held as a POW, he returned home jobless. Thinking back to his carefree days of “pan handling” on California beaches, Fred sketched out an idea which eventually became the Flyin' Saucer, one of the first commercial, plastic flying discs. He sold it with the help of a partner named Warren Franscioni, who financed production in 1948. The idea proved to be ahead of its time and the partners went their separate ways in 1950 after sales of the disc slumped.

In 1955, with the UFO craze in full swing, Fred came up with a new design he dubbed the Pluto Platter. This was the disc that caught WHAM-O's eye, and in 1957, they licensed it from Fred. Not knowing what to call it, Spud and Rich covered all the bases by naming it the WHAM-O Frisbee Pluto Platter Flying Saucer.

The world has come to call it Frisbee. Thank you, Fred.

Photo of Fred Morrison courtesy of Phil Kennedy.

Bitter About the Super Bowl

I know it was a great victory for the Saints, but I was just devastated after the Super Bowl was over. That shot of Drew Brees tearing up while he held his son and the confetti rained down almost made me forget, but then the reality of it all settled back in. The next morning my girls, who had gone to bed by the beginning of the third quarter, looked at me as if to say, "Well? Tell us!" It was impossible to hide my bitter disappointment...

No Iron Man 2 spot. Until then...

20 Years? Really?

In 10 days I head to the Big Apple to attend my 20th International Toy Fair. It doesn't seem possible that we've been tinkering in the toy business for that long, but the proof is in the photos.

Toy Fair 1990. Yours truly, Ed Muccini, Dave Yearick, Staci Yearick

Suspenders anyone?

We loaded our $10,000 booth into my beat up Jeep at 3:30am and headed down the New York State Thruway to the future of TriBond. We arrived at the Jacob Javits Convention Center at 6:00am on set-up day. Big Fun a Go Go Incorporated was the first to arrive at Toy Fair. The second shift cleaning crew let us in. We arrived at the opening day of the 1990 Toy Fair without thunderous applause. We carried inside 5 custom-made wooden boxes of marble tile, which weighed 75lbs a piece. We had to pretend that they were quite light so that the union workers wouldn't see us struggling and charge us for the labor required to help us. We had glass table tops, columns, yards and yards of fire-retardant, purple velvet, and oh, yeah 48 copies of TriBond, a game we'd invented in our spare time.

My brother Mike, our first investor, and me, Gordon Gecko

The morning was slow: no million dollar deals. The afternoon was worse: no orders. Buyers liked our booth, but didn't stop to play TriBond. We took one order on the second day, and only a handful after that. By the end of Toy Fair we had sold 30 TriBond games. Orders only trickled in from game shops in the weeks following Toy Fair. Thinking that our hit game was dying on the vine, we decided that drastic measures were in order. Although it weakened our hand by calling them before they called us, we decided to contact Milton Bradley. It was shortly after the sample TriBond game we sent was returned to us unopened, that we realized we didn't have a hand and we didn't have a clue as to how the game business worked.

20 years later and TriBond has sold over 3 million copies and is finally headed back to the market after 3 years on hiatus. It's been one weird and wonderous ride.