RIP, Mr. Handler. Your company brought joy into countless households, including ours.
Posted on 07/24/2011 3:42:29 PM PDT by Pan_Yan
Elliot Handler, who co-founded the Mattel toy company and designed the plastic playthings that have filled millions of Christmas stockings, made dinner parties possible by occupying otherwise fidgety children, and stubbed countless parents’ toes, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.
The cause was heart failure, his daughter, Barbara Segal, said.
Mr. Handler helped introduce Barbie, helped design the talking doll Chatty Cathy and popularized Hot Wheels toy cars.
He began Mattel in 1945 with his wife, Ruth, and a short-term partner. Until the Handlers were forced out of Mattel in 1975, they oversaw a toy empire that is among the largest in the world today.
Elliot Handler was born April 9, 1916, in Illinois. He was a struggling art student and designer of light fixtures when, in 1939, he began making costume jewelry and dollhouse furniture in his garage in Southern California. Eventually, he designed a realistic-looking miniature piano that caused a furor at the New York toy fair. Stores ordered more than 300,000 of them — but the Handlers had mispriced the toys, losing about a dime on each one.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Here is an interesting aside.
Did you know that the Barbie Doll was based on a Sex Doll created for German soldiers back during Hitler’s reign?
RIP, Mr. Handler. Your company brought joy into countless households, including ours.
I LOVED their toy guns!!!!
The best was cap firing “grease gun”
When our son was 2 we put some Hot Wheels in his stocking. Big mistake. He wouldn’t open any other presents. Christmas was over by 9 am.
Burned my hand more than once on a Thing Maker.
TV Commerical for the Mattel Tommy Burst Machine Gun (Click the pic).
Many thanks to Mattel for Barbies and American Girl dolls and little toy cars. My son used to carry a car in each hand at all times, when he was two.
Also, we are grateful, here in the LA area, that Mattel has provided jobs for so many people for so many years.
Long may they play!
My big brother got creepy crawlers and I got incredible edibles.
I can’t believe I ate those things. Yuck! But it was fun.
>> Burned my hand more than once on a Thing Maker.
Ditto. Pretty clever product from a business perspective, too.
(1964 prices, best as I can recall)
Thingmaker and molds: fixed cost, $9.95
Plastigoop: consumable(!) $0.99 a bottle
Somehow the subject of toys made me think of you guys.
The only thing I probably ever played with more was my Betsey McCall Fashion Designer. It was a light box with hundreds and hundreds of patterns. You could design millions of different outfits. I spent hours on that thing!
My Uncle, Dad an I used to have those Tommy Guns an watched the Untouchables....back in the late 50’s....awesome fun !
The floors in our house looked like this for years.
The ThingMaker gets my vote as well. If there was a cologne that smelled like ThingMaker Goo, I would wear it.
Thanks Pan_Yan. A couple of years ago I did a search on Incredible Edibles — which were a spinoff of Creepy Critters — and wound up reading an interesting online posting by someone who purported to have been one of the I.E. team. He said he didn’t know the recipe for the critters any longer, it’s probably locked away like the formula for Coca-Cola. ;’)
“He said he didn’t know the recipe for the critters any longer, it’s probably locked away like the formula for Coca-Cola. ;’)”
I had an Incredible Edibles set. They were more fun to make than they were to eat. They really were awful, but I ate them anyway.
My favorite uncle - who was in the Army Reserve - bought me the Dick Tracy version of this cap gun, and I quickly "de-Dicked"* it so it would look more like a military Thompson. It turned out to be a roll-cap hog and was not particularly rugged, but it was about as state-of-the-art as any cap gun in town while it lasted... one of my most remembered childhood toys.
Mr. niteowl77
*This sounds much worse than the actual procedure, which was simply label removal.
RIP.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.