Toys of the Year of the 1990s
It is sometimes hard to predict the success of certain toys. Products such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys and Thunderbirds Tracy Island models were not expected to be best-selling Christmas toys in the year they were released but went on to have staggering success.
Art and craft company Yellow Moon has lots of children's toys which make great stocking fillers. Perhaps some of them will one day triumph at the Toy of the Year awards just as Ninja Turtles and Tracy Island did way back in the 1990s.
The Toy of the Year award is voted on by an expert panel appointed by the Toy Retailers Association and is a reflection of which toys have captured children's imagination the most during the course of the year (and especially at Christmas).
The list of winners in the 1990s reveals some toys which will be very familiar to anyone who was at primary school during the decade.
1990: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
A generation of children grew up thinking of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello not as renaissance artists but as crime-fighting, pizza-eating, sewer-dwelling turtles.
That they did so is the result of an idea which started as a joke.
When comic artist Kevin Eastman first hatched the idea of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles he drew them as a parody of three of the most popular comic strips of the time and included them in a single-issue comic.
A licensing agent didn't see the joke and soon snapped up the rights to the turtles. Cartoons helped launched the range of Ninja Turtle figures and four feature films followed as the Turtles' underground following soon became a massive mainstream one.
1991: Nintendo Game Boy
Having already been a huge success in Japan and North America back in 1989, gaming fans in Europe would have to wait over a year to get their hands on the Game Boys.
Much of the Game Boy's early popularity was owed to the addictive puzzle game 'Tetris' The Game Boy was the biggest gaming phenomenon of the 90s selling over 118 million units. That's a lot of sore thumbs!
1992: WWF Wrestlers
Over in America, the televised World Wrestling Federation bouts took the sport to a whole new level in the 1990s and a range of WWF wrestling figures soon took a tight grip on British youngsters' imaginations.
The toys could perform trademark moves associated with the wrestlers; Hulk Hogan's was capable of demonstrating the Hulkster Hug and the Gorilla Press Slam and Ravishing Rick Rude's toy gave a fine demonstration of the Rude Awakening Headlock.
Despite the popularity of Hasbro's 1990s wrestling toys, many collectors prefer the line of 1980s WWF wrestler figures produced by a company called LJN – though the paint did tend to flake off these toys' faces if they were played with too aggressively. This was not a good look for characters such as The Undertaker who liked to apply eye-shadow before stepping through the ring ropes.
1993: Thunderbird's Tracy Island
The story of how a toy inspired by a 1960s television series came to scoop the Toy of the Year award in 1993 contains many lessons for the toy industry.
Thunderbirds – a science fiction television series which had marionette puppets as stars – was a firm family favourite in the 1960s. Tracy Island is the fictional home of the Tracy family in the series – it looks like a luxurious family house from the outside but it's really the headquarters of the top-secret International Rescue organisation.
A re-run of the show on Blue Peter in 1992 resulted in a massive sales surge for the Tracy Island children's toy. The toy's makers, deluged with Christmas orders, couldn't cope with this unexpected demand.
Blue Peter responded to the crisis by demonstrating how to build a home-made version.
The programme makers soon became swamped with requests for copies of the instructions – perhaps they should have prepared more earlier!
1994: Power Rangers
Popular children's TV shows have always translated well into toy sales, and in 1994 it was Power Rangers who dominated Christmas lists.
1995: Pogs
Of all the toys to feature on the list, Pogs is undoubtedly the simplest. While only a short-lived craze in the 90s, variations of the gamehave existed for decades.
The Pogs from the 90s featured colourful pictures on their faces making them instantly collectable with kids; turning a once little known game, into a worldwide sensation.
1996: Barbie – this was the first time that Barbie had won an award which her arch-rival Sindy had collected in 1968 and 1970.
1997: Teletubbies
On 31st March 1997 BBC television viewers first said "Eh-oh" (it means hello) to the Teletubbies.
The fur-covered Teletubbies have the chubby body proportions of toddlers and display the same kind of behaviour and language. These characteristics were planned in fine detail by the programme makers who also employed a cognitive psychologist to structure episodes so that they would fit the attention spans of young viewers.
It clearly worked as Teletubbies' toys became popular with young children who wanted to join in the group hugs which Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po and Noo-Noo are so famous for.
While the brightly-coloured hills in the TV show are mostly populated by the Teletubbies and a few scampering rabbits – there has been a very occasional human presence.
Actress Tamzin Griffin played the part of the manic Funny Lady and, apart from the baby whose face is superimposed on the Teletubbies' sun, is the only human being to have set foot in La-Laa's Land during the series' 1997 to 2001 run.
1998: Furby / 1999: Furby Babies
Furby was the first electronic robotic toy to win the Toy of the Year show. It is also the first toy which might have been capable of forming a short acceptance speech at the awards ceremony. Furbies look like a cross between a hamster and an owl but it is their speaking ability which really stands out.
A newly-purchased Furby begins life by speaking Furbish – a unique language devised by the toy's manufacturers. Owners soon figure out the meaning of words like ‘boo' (no) and ‘doo-dah' (yes).
However, Furby does not remain in a state of arrested language development but slowly starts to learn and use English words and phrases as the months go by.
After a few months, owners would be astonished to hear utterances such as "WHOA! Me deep sleep!" (Wow! I slept for a long time!) coming out of this clever toy's mouth.
You could say that Furby is the father of toys such as Fijit Friend – a dancing robot which can hold conversations with its owners and which has been included in the Toy Retailers Association's Dream Toys of 2011 list.
Could Fijit follow in Furby's footsteps and become 2011's Toy of the Year?
The results will be announced in January 2012!
Art and craft company Yellow Moon has lots of children's toys which make great stocking fillers. Perhaps some of them will one day triumph at the Toy of the Year awards just as Ninja Turtles and Tracy Island did way back in the 1990s.
The Toy of the Year award is voted on by an expert panel appointed by the Toy Retailers Association and is a reflection of which toys have captured children's imagination the most during the course of the year (and especially at Christmas).
The list of winners in the 1990s reveals some toys which will be very familiar to anyone who was at primary school during the decade.
1990: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
A generation of children grew up thinking of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello not as renaissance artists but as crime-fighting, pizza-eating, sewer-dwelling turtles.
That they did so is the result of an idea which started as a joke.
When comic artist Kevin Eastman first hatched the idea of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles he drew them as a parody of three of the most popular comic strips of the time and included them in a single-issue comic.
A licensing agent didn't see the joke and soon snapped up the rights to the turtles. Cartoons helped launched the range of Ninja Turtle figures and four feature films followed as the Turtles' underground following soon became a massive mainstream one.
1991: Nintendo Game Boy
Having already been a huge success in Japan and North America back in 1989, gaming fans in Europe would have to wait over a year to get their hands on the Game Boys.
Much of the Game Boy's early popularity was owed to the addictive puzzle game 'Tetris' The Game Boy was the biggest gaming phenomenon of the 90s selling over 118 million units. That's a lot of sore thumbs!
1992: WWF Wrestlers
Over in America, the televised World Wrestling Federation bouts took the sport to a whole new level in the 1990s and a range of WWF wrestling figures soon took a tight grip on British youngsters' imaginations.
The toys could perform trademark moves associated with the wrestlers; Hulk Hogan's was capable of demonstrating the Hulkster Hug and the Gorilla Press Slam and Ravishing Rick Rude's toy gave a fine demonstration of the Rude Awakening Headlock.
Despite the popularity of Hasbro's 1990s wrestling toys, many collectors prefer the line of 1980s WWF wrestler figures produced by a company called LJN – though the paint did tend to flake off these toys' faces if they were played with too aggressively. This was not a good look for characters such as The Undertaker who liked to apply eye-shadow before stepping through the ring ropes.
1993: Thunderbird's Tracy Island
The story of how a toy inspired by a 1960s television series came to scoop the Toy of the Year award in 1993 contains many lessons for the toy industry.
Thunderbirds – a science fiction television series which had marionette puppets as stars – was a firm family favourite in the 1960s. Tracy Island is the fictional home of the Tracy family in the series – it looks like a luxurious family house from the outside but it's really the headquarters of the top-secret International Rescue organisation.
A re-run of the show on Blue Peter in 1992 resulted in a massive sales surge for the Tracy Island children's toy. The toy's makers, deluged with Christmas orders, couldn't cope with this unexpected demand.
Blue Peter responded to the crisis by demonstrating how to build a home-made version.
The programme makers soon became swamped with requests for copies of the instructions – perhaps they should have prepared more earlier!
1994: Power Rangers
Popular children's TV shows have always translated well into toy sales, and in 1994 it was Power Rangers who dominated Christmas lists.
1995: Pogs
Of all the toys to feature on the list, Pogs is undoubtedly the simplest. While only a short-lived craze in the 90s, variations of the gamehave existed for decades.
The Pogs from the 90s featured colourful pictures on their faces making them instantly collectable with kids; turning a once little known game, into a worldwide sensation.
1996: Barbie – this was the first time that Barbie had won an award which her arch-rival Sindy had collected in 1968 and 1970.
1997: Teletubbies
On 31st March 1997 BBC television viewers first said "Eh-oh" (it means hello) to the Teletubbies.
The fur-covered Teletubbies have the chubby body proportions of toddlers and display the same kind of behaviour and language. These characteristics were planned in fine detail by the programme makers who also employed a cognitive psychologist to structure episodes so that they would fit the attention spans of young viewers.
It clearly worked as Teletubbies' toys became popular with young children who wanted to join in the group hugs which Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po and Noo-Noo are so famous for.
While the brightly-coloured hills in the TV show are mostly populated by the Teletubbies and a few scampering rabbits – there has been a very occasional human presence.
Actress Tamzin Griffin played the part of the manic Funny Lady and, apart from the baby whose face is superimposed on the Teletubbies' sun, is the only human being to have set foot in La-Laa's Land during the series' 1997 to 2001 run.
1998: Furby / 1999: Furby Babies
Furby was the first electronic robotic toy to win the Toy of the Year show. It is also the first toy which might have been capable of forming a short acceptance speech at the awards ceremony. Furbies look like a cross between a hamster and an owl but it is their speaking ability which really stands out.
A newly-purchased Furby begins life by speaking Furbish – a unique language devised by the toy's manufacturers. Owners soon figure out the meaning of words like ‘boo' (no) and ‘doo-dah' (yes).
However, Furby does not remain in a state of arrested language development but slowly starts to learn and use English words and phrases as the months go by.
After a few months, owners would be astonished to hear utterances such as "WHOA! Me deep sleep!" (Wow! I slept for a long time!) coming out of this clever toy's mouth.
You could say that Furby is the father of toys such as Fijit Friend – a dancing robot which can hold conversations with its owners and which has been included in the Toy Retailers Association's Dream Toys of 2011 list.
Could Fijit follow in Furby's footsteps and become 2011's Toy of the Year?
The results will be announced in January 2012!
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