Lot's of quality father-son time playing this one.
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 ...
Lot's of quality father-son time playing this one.
My favorite Mattel toy gun (never got to own one, just saw it on TV) was the “MMP” which I guess meant Mauser machine pistol. It was a Broomhandle Mauser looking thing with a windup machine gun sound.
:’) We didn’t have one, but I *may* have eaten one at a cousin’s house. :’)
I think my first cap gun was given to me back in 1957, and being that westerns were all over the television at the time, I tended toward plated die-cast "cowboy" rigs until that Mattel Tommy Gun came along. Around the time the Mattel broke, I was given a black plastic "Schmeisser"-looking toy gun that clacked and simultaneously had a red plastic piece move in/out of the barrel end... not as loud as a cap gun, but loud enough to get me ordered outside PDQ.
Mr. niteowl77
I remember those thingmakers: Fighting Men, Creepy Crawlers, Fright Factory, Creeple Peeple and Fun Flowers.
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