Modern Toxic Toy Scandals

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Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just fifteen dollars a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile d. com slash switch. Upront payment of forty five dollars for three month plan, equivalent to fifteen dollars per month required, introate for three months only, then full price plan options available. taxes and fees extra,afful terms at mintmobile. com It's Christmas morning nineteen seventy. And you bound down the stairs to the Christmas tree already looking for your presence before you're even fully awake Underneath a tree you spot a box Bigger than anything that would hold boring presents like clothing or books. And you wonder if this is it? Big one The new toy you've pined all your hopes and dreams on. Is this the magical day that you're getting your very own B big wheel. For many kids who grew up in the seventies and eighties, Even in the early nineties, the Big Wheel was an iconic tricycle scene and heard on thousands and thousands of streets across America There were earlier tricycles, of course, metal contraptions with handlebars and streamers, the kind of thing kids would pedal around on in their driveways and Cul deacs while their mothers made dinner The bigig wheel didn't act like a regular tricycle Made from molded plastic, it put its rider inches from the pavement in a lightweight but durable vehicle, AKA fucking rocket ship pererfect for careening downhills or terrifying plastic wheels had basically zero traction. Meaning that a clever rider could easily launch into a drift around a tight turn or try to execute that move and end up crashing spectacularly and eatating a lot of pavement Oh, there were injuries. Lots of them. so many The big wheel can reach speeds up to fifteen miles an hour or more on a downhill incline. And while that may not sound like much, fifteen miles per hour in a big wheel As a former writer felt like a hundred miles per hour in a car And this was in a time when very few almost zero kids wore helmets or padding and parental supervision often boiled down to Be home in time for dinner and then leaving you entirely to your own devices and discretion until then In hindsight, some have wondered wasas the danger inherent to the big wheel, just incidental Or was that sense of danger exactly what its makers were trying to provide Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream. I'm plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us Let's get nostalgic with this silly ass tale today, a little story that kind of reminds me of the action park T time suck Let's talk about toys. If you grew up with them and Goda hope you had at least one and ideally a whole bunch. probablyably one that sticks out in your memory as being super duper fun. moreore fun than the rest Maybe it was your favorite board game or an extra special doll or action figure U maybe it was the millennium Falcon R? The little thing for your Star Wars toys, your little figurines, maybe it was a gaming system like the Atari or Se Sega Mega dririve Or if you're younger, maybe an Xbox or a Playstation or American doll Maybe I swept up in the tamagotche craze or had a cute but also terrifying furby But did you ever have a toy that was Dangerous or to put it a different way. Really fucking exciting A toy that allowed you to do something that felt even for mere minutes or seconds like you were getting away with something that a five or ten or even twelve year old should not be allowed to do I had a toy like that When I was I don't know, nine ten I got a daisy BB gun rifle Grant Award, let me have it over these strong objections. my grandma Bady and mom who both felt I was too young. h My grandm and mom made me promise not to shoot any little creatures with it or other kids. board hated a local woodpecker that noisily pcked the shit out of his house all the time. So I was given a top secret assignment to kill that motherfucker M me feel like a mercenary hired gun, right? A sniper. And I spent I don't know, months O on this back deck, my grandparents are trying to find and eliminate that son of a bitch. D I ever kill it Uh, no No, I didn't actually However Some other local birds were sacrificed they did meet a violent end. And as much as that might sadden you, and I get it. I felt so cool I like a real man. Primal I love that be begun And I never even put my eye out, kid, Not in one time with it Part of my love for it was that it was dangerous that I could put my eye out with it or somebody else's One of the most famous examples of a dangerous and exciting toy was the old slip and slide the summer of nineteen sixty, Robert Carrier arrived home from work to his Lakewood, California home where he found his ten year old son and friends sliding across a wet concrete driveway They'd run from the garage and belly flop down onto the slick surface, sliding all the way to the curb sounds pretty brut J just slide on some concrete We didn't have a slipp ins slide. I think I may have talked about this in the action Park episode. We did tape a bunch of big black garbage bags together for real low rent version of one And yes, of course, every session ended with somebody crying. When a rock in the yard inevitably tore through the thick plastic or not so thick plastic and left somebody with a nasty gash Wanting to make something safer, Karea used his resources as an upolsterer buildt a long thick vinyl covered surface They could be attached to a hose which would then shoot water through evenly spaced holes in the vinyl The result was a slippery backyard lane kind that would only have been accessible in a water park beforehand Now devoted to at home slipping and sliding Carry you saw neighorhood kids racing over and traffic on the street getting getting to starting to back up He decided to patent his invention And the application referred to it as a portable aquatic play device for body planing Hell yeah The slip and slide was bor With that, Carrier and his business partner, Richard E Riser Old Dicky took the idea to the Wamo cororporation a brand that made wholesome toys like the Hula hoop and the Frisbe. who's love arisb The company agreed to manufacture and market the slip inside with one adjustment the expensive Nagahyide material would be replaced with cheaper plastic The thirty foot long, forty inch wide slip and slide went on sale in nineteen sixty one was an immediate hit Sold three hundred thousand units priced at nine hundred ninety five in a matter of months And Something else was happening as well The same year the slipping slide was introduced, WAO officials, what a great name, WamO observed that adults were trying it out too Hell yeah, they were they were really sover. Initially, this was not seen as a big deal. pllenty of parents play with their kids, toys. However, the slip and slide had been engineered for children of a limited weight and height Typically under one hundred and twenty five pounds When adults, often exceeding two hundred pounds, raised and threw themselves on the surface They were not always deticed cross Sometimes their weaight meant that they would abruptly stop. The forward momentum driving the weight of their body directly onto their necks This could, of course be devastating for the spinal cord, and in several cases led to instances of quadriplegia, paraplegia, or even death as a result of impact Man, imagine that fate Iagine being paralyzed for the neck down for the rest of your life and having essentially I slept but I didn't slide as a summary of your explanation for what happened Between nineteen seventy three and nineteen ninety one it iss estimated that a total of seven adults and one thirteen year old suffered severe neck injuries or paralysis. as a direct result of using the slip and slide Though these instances were obviously clearly rare Wammo was apparently concerned enough that they opted to take it off the market in the late seventies. The slipping slide would then be reintroduced by Wammo's new parent company, Kransco in nineteen eighty two. And that meant more injuries In nineteen ninety seven, Michael Hubert of Wiscin used his neighor sliip and slide, suffered a broken neck thirty four year old was left in incomplete paraplegic meaneaning that he had a limited ability to walk and use his hands, sadly He sued Kranco over the injury American Empire Surplus Lines insurance compomany, which insured Cransco offered Hubert a two hundred fifty thousand dollars settlement, which he quickly rejected case would go to a jury trial in nineteen ninety one, and Hubert would be awarded twelve point three million dollars A Bit more than two hundred fifty thousand. The jury declared the slip and slide defective and unreasonably dangerous It slipped too much Didn't slide enough After an appeal, Cransco ultimately settled with Hubert for seven and a half million And then there were other instances of injuries At least six adults suffered broken necks in the nineteen eighties and nineteen ninety as well as one eight year old girl who suffered brain damage Indeed in ninet eighty nine, a consumer advocacy group, known as the Consumer Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action reported that approximately five thousand people had gone to the hospital for slide related injuries in nineteen eighty eight alone And how many of those injuries were essentially some kind of version of a brutal road rash centered on Ts and or Dicks. I can't be only one who went there mentually. How many of those five thousand injuries revolved around losing or nearly losing a nipple peeling some of the skin off of a dick Finally in nineteen ninety three, donon't think too much about that. Finally in nineteen ninety three, the US. Consumer Products Safety Commission, the CPSC issued a recall notice in conjunction with CrNSCO to alert consumers to the dangers of the slide And it looked like injuries tended to go down after that. But this story is not actually an odd one When it comes to toys in recent decades Between two thousand two and twenty eleven, roughly a million people Most of them kids under the age of sixteen. wound up in the emergency room as a result of bouncing on the seemingly innocent trampoline Oh fuck yelly did I was jumping on a trampoline, a neighborhood one back in fourth or fifth grade spiikeking a buddy to bounce him high and higher when he broke his le. My sister, a couple years later, got her arm broken on a trampoline next door getting spiked by some other neighborhood kids She was around eight. I got spiked, clean off of that trampoline justust you know, or launched other kids completely off of it a whole bunch of times. Can't believe none of us went to the ER. I alm ked a buddy of mine in college when I spked him off of somebody's trampoline. And we were drunk and he nearly got impaled on a piece of rebar And then after all that, knowing the danger I've of course, bought a tramppline for cotam and R Instead I got that one. We plan played it for years, No one went to the hospital, but man, there was some close calls. U Especially when Kyler Monroe and I would play crrack the egg which we still play sometimes. It's an insane game and also so much fun A third of those million injured, I just referenced suffer long bone fractures, breaks in their femurs, tibias, fibulas, humeruses or forearms And this presents an interesting conundrum Toys for kids supposed to be safe isn't keeping the munchkins in our care healthy the number one priority of any parent And if the kid wants to do something dangerous, aren't you supposed to tell them no I asked this as a parent who went hard on nerf gun battles with the kids growing up. And definitely shot Kyler and Monroe in their faces on multiple occasions Do they cry sometimes hurts Of course I did. A consoling them, did I sometimes wander off and then laugh really hard? Yes, of course I did I can't begin to tell you how satisfying it is to shoot your small child in the face with a dark gun J just make sure they're wearing goggles You don't actually put one of eyes out But for real where's a line between dangerous and exciting Whose job is it to figure that out We haven't always had this problem as a species Indeed, for a long time, toys were not considered anywhere close to the realm of dangerous objects They were representations of things humans would use in everyday life. Ds representing infants, animals, and soldiers, as well as representations of tools used by adults These things have been found at archaeological sites from the Indus Valley Civilization to Bronze Age society that existed from around the year three thousand to fifteen hundred BCE You know what? I bet some of the shit was dangerous though. I bet those kids played with knives and threw rocks at each other as well. And I bet dads were behind those games about ninety nine percent more often than moms Actual toys for prehistoric tots though, included small carts, whistles, shaped like birds, toy monkeys that could slide down strings Many toys today are designed with some kind of physical activity in mind whether that's running around, exploring or building something. and for early societies, that was no different. Excuse me.ead of three stone balls were found in the tomb of a four year old girl the Xon, Bunpo, Neolithic site in China. It's actually so sad and sweet. Still when it comes to ancient societies It' kindind of hard to draw the line between what was a toy and what wasn't Often archaeologists tend to think that miniature figurines were most used for ceremonial purposes, not for play Ancient Greece and Rome The toy market expanded Now children played with dolls made of wax or terracotta, sticks, yoyos, bows and arrows Mand Yoo I mean, I forgot how long that toy's been around My grandpa played with one when he was a little kid and after picking one up for the first time in probably fifty years when I was a little kid Oh man, he could still walk the dog And he was so proud of that. whole face l up I do love how a good toy can turn an adult into a kid again. plane is in our nature. sometometimes we forget that S such a beautiful I never could figure out many yoyo tricks Fucking stopuff yos I actually don't think I ever mastered a single yoyo trick Think about this actually makes me want to go get another yoyo Give it a go There was also an expectation even back in Ageent Greece that kids eventually grew out of their toys On the eves of their weddings, young girls around fourteen would give their dolls to the temple as a symbol of their passage into adulthood. I understand, but that's also kind of sad Right As long as you're getting your adult shit done and contributing to society, why can't you also play with some toys you can actually As you can probably see for the most part, toys were not given much special consideration when it came to society as a whole. The kids were mostly seen as small adults, expected to work, contribute, learn essential skills, just like their parents toys helped them learn some of those responsibilities they werere going to face, perhaps even dangerous responsibilities like shooting a bow and an arrow, then they were considered appropriate someone probably wouldn't have gone out of their way to make a super fun toy and definitely not a thrilling or dangerous toy that had no application to adulthood That take on toys would change a little starting with the Enlightenment. As ideas proliferated about kids' growth and how their minds were fundamentally different from adults minds newew toys sprung up to suit the interests of kids For example, blowing bubbles from leftover soap became a popular playtime activity. As well as spinning hoops, pulling toy wagons, flying kites, playing make Bve with puppets In the nineteenth century Western values prioritizize toys with an educational purpose, like puzzles, books, cards and board games Meanwhile with the growing prosperity of the middle class kids were not expected to contribute as much to the family survival, and toy manufactures quickly sprung up to take advantage of this economic opportunity as the industrial era made leaps and bounds in manufacturing. So he's got cheaper. and working class families were able to afford them more often Things like model railroads and leadedcast toy soldiers. But none of these had an essence to them that other companies could not reproduce You could get your toy soldier from one company or another, and they probably look pretty much exactly the same Nobody would say in the playground that you had a knock off an established top of the line toy. In other words, toys were not brands yet That would change in nineteen oh three A year after publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, English author, Beatrix Potter, created the first Peter Rabbit soft toy and registered that toy at the patent office in London, making Peter the oldest licensed character Other spinoff merchandise followed, including painting books and board games, setting the stage for licensed characters like Mickey Mouse and Harry Potter T take over the fucking world But of course There were still toys that were not necessarily brands They were just really cool, good ideas. Something fun to play with Some of these have been discovered by accident during World War II Scientist Earl L. Wart trying to create replacement for synthetic rubber. and ended up coming up with Nutty putty. eventually known as Silly Putty Bandaid toned material sold inside a Yoa red egg like container that can lift ink off of newspapers And I remember playing with a silly Pty when I was a little kid and my grandparents cracking up about how u That was still around from when they were kids. The kids still cared about it Similarly, in nineteen forty three, Richard James, AKA Dick, Jimmy probably never went by that actually was experimenting with spprings as a part of his military research. when one came loose and flopped down to the floor two years then fine tuning a design before he came up with the slinky One of the most iconic toys of all time can we agree That slinkyies actually fucking suck I had one of those too It was really hyped up, right? I liked it for about all of one minute And then I was like, that's it It just kind of slowly, clumsily goes down a few steps. that I got better shit to do like play Packan orrow bouncy balls my sister's head Still, discoveries like these open the floodgates for a new way of thinking about toys, not just dolls or toy soldiers, but something exciting that you could interact with Something you could make move And so, while many toy companies like Mattel, producer of Barbie and Hasbro, producer of GI Joe's, while they still focus on the old reliable, you know, dolls and soldiers Some people began to think more seriously about what kids want Did they want to sit quietly at home with a doll or play kitchen Did they want to spend hours laboriously building a model train set, only to watch it slowly crawl across the room in endless circles Did they want to go really fucinking fast? This is what one man, Lewis Marks would come to believe Although it took him quite a few decades to get there B in Brokly New Yor ninety six to Austrian Jewish parents Markx graduated from high school at the age of fifteen despite the fact that he did not learn English until he graduated grade school Rather than sticking to the classroom, he spent most of his time as a kid roaming the streets of New York and occasionally shoplifting from department stores But he did well enough in school to graduate early and from there, very smart kid became a very smart man. I was off to a career with Ferdinand Strauss. The manufacturer of wind upp toys whose best selling product was Zippo the cllimbing mononkey. mechanical chip that zipped up a tenin string Okay I'm curious Pro probablyably would only like it for slight longer than the slinky but I'm curious By nineteen sixteen, Mark was Markx was managing Strauss's plant in East Rutherford, New Jersey. but then was eventually voted out by Strauss's board of directors over a disagreement about retail sales practices He had suggested that as employers close some of their retail shops and focus more on increasingly on increasing, excuse me, overall manufacturing They didn't like that. And then was World War I looming Marks enter the U.S. Army where he would detain the rank of serergeant before returning to civilian life in nineteen eighteen. and then it was all toys all the time His day spent in the army had left quite the impression on him and would be a huge inspiration for him. He would go on to make tons of toys that represented various pieces of military equipment. For now though, Marx went to work selling for Newton and Thompson A Vermont based manufacture of wooden toys, where he redesigned their product line and increased the company's sales Tfold real quick. Following That incredible and quick success only took him less than a year to do that In nineteen nineteen, Marks and his brother David decided to strike out on their own, and they founded Lewis Marks and Company They would specialize in buying existing toy lines and then improving them. Most tooymakers Marx did not mind emulating competing play thingsings outright, though he would usually make them either better performing or cheaper to produce And they knew exactly just where to start to do this His old boss, Strauss, was not running his business very well And Mark smelled blood in the water, and he swooped in to buy'srous's old molds at a steep discount enabling him to now make Strauss's toys and sell them as his own. And that would make him a lot of money very quickly. In nineteen twenty two at the age of only twenty six, just three years after founding his company Mark was already a millionaire being a millionaire meant you were a multi multi millionaire Essentially, a million dollars in nineteen twenty two is equivalent to roughly twenty million dollars today. He was doing real fucking good for himself Then he followed up his popular line of mechanical toys with something far simpler The Yo yo This concept has been around for millennia, but in nineteen twenty nine Marks introduced a yoyo with a longer loop string threaded around the playlaything's center axle increasing hang time and making new complicated tricks possible for people other than myself This guy was a genius In an article dated november ninth, nineteen twenty nine, New York noted that Marks was selling yoyos at a rate of about one hundred fifty thousand a day. Holy shit. one hundred fifty thousand a day And at an average price of twenty cents each, which translates to more than two or that translates to more than two hundred million dollars annually in today's dollars Yoyos were so popular that they even banned them in many public schools around this time made marks So good that what he did I'll tell you a moment, but you have to have fucking patience I'm gonna tell you right after today's first two Mid Jo sponsor break If you don't want to hear these ads please sign up to be a sppacer on Patreon and get the catalog ad free, episodes early and more. Experience the World Cup at Jersey Fan Hub, New Jersey's home for soccer, music, and culture during the tournament. Join thousands of fans at Sports Illustrated Stadium for matchwatch parties on a giant screen from an on the field view, plus entertainment, giveaways and family friendly activations. Best of all, admission is free on most dates. 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Upront payment of forty five dollars for three month plan equivalent to fifteenllars per month required, introate for three months only, then full price plan options available. taxes and fees extra, CF terms at mintmobile d. com. Thanks for listening to those ads and now what made Lewis Marks So good at what he did Well, he didn't just improve on toys by making them spin faster or work better, he also made them more true to life His companany soon offered kid friendly automobiles that were scalle duplicates of popular full size vehicles the day packed with full toolss basic mechanical sk skills Th theseese kids, or maybe sometimes their parents probably, would also need those tools Put the cars together. since they did not come pre assemble This was actually a cost saving measure on Marx's part, but it also worked out for a lot of these kids who got to pretend to be adults, learn how to use tools and have a sick fucking little car at the end of it In nineteen thirty seven, a London newspaper declared him the toy king of the world and truly was By that time, Marx employed nearly five thousand workers, many of them working on factory lines, making mass produce, cheap toys that families could easily afford Life still came in him hard. Like it does for everybody Damnit life, Why can't you be nicer? Stop treat us like fucking spiders and get stepped on at any moment, or flies and get swatted So you know how special we are Marks has married his first wife, Irene Salzman, nicknameed Renee decemberember thirty first, nineteen twenty seven Less than seventeen years later, April of nineteen forty four She died of breast cancer at the young age of just thirty seven During this time, he struggled with depression, thought about quitting the business and focusing on his four children But in the end he would not do that He would be a great dad, but he would also keep making toys. World War two would present a complication for the toy industry as America entered a new world where food, gasoline, other resources were officially rationed Supplies of rubber, metal, and rayon, all of which could be used to make toys were now considered critical to the war effort In January of nineteen forty two. President Franklin D. Roosevelt pretty sure Iveard guy established the War Prouction booard to oversee the use of critical materials within each American industry and the conversion of civilian factories into war production facilities. More bullets Tys On march thirtieth, nineteen forty two, the WPB issued General Limitation orrder L eighty one, prohibiting the production of toys that contain critical materials Iiron, steel, zinc and rayon that made up more than seven percent of their weight The Eisting toys with content over that amount could be sold until june thirtieth, nineteen forty two WP order or WPB order, excuse me. and related material shortages inspire toy manufacturers to come up with creative ways to continue production And now paper dolls, puzzles and games increased in popularity thanks to their widespread availability Once the war ended, manufacturers resumed their pre war production, and the toy industry experienced a surge in sales from the post war baby boom was ready for that boom Marx had just adapted to different circumstances. He had used this wartime period to make new friends in very high places He' earned Dwight D. Eisenhower's friendship by personally repairing a special model train set that the five star Army general and future president had purchased for his grandchildren He'd also become close friends with famed generals, Omar Bradley and George C. Marshall. Both of whom part of the family as his kids' godparents. Thanks to these connections Marx was even rumored to have contributed to the Manhattan proroject. posossibly building components for the first atomic bombs Although we do not know that for sure We do know that he was recruited by Eisenhower and Marshall to help rebuild infrastructure that had been destroyed during the war, though Dude had a real special mind But to those who did not know about his connections Ms with something much simpler. The guy who made their kids have fun He was frequently described as an exceptionally smart businessman who also in many ways had the mind and spirit of a child Dude was like a real life Peter Pan with an MBA Thanks to the baby Bom. there were about to be a lot more kids in the market for new and exciting toys as they grew older now Indeed, the fifties were a very good decade for Lewis Marks And he already has several very good decades He'd even be featured on the cover of Time magazine, december twelfth, nineteen fifty five. on the cover, his face is seen blocking Santa Claus's profile. In other words He was now widely considered as the rightful face of the Christmas season By this time, Markxs held about a ten percent share of all US toy sales He'd used some of his money to buy a mansion in Scarsdale, New York, just north of Manhattan, complete with white House like Corinthian columns. For his kids life at the Scarsdale mansion was nothing short of idyllic Markx's youngest daughter, by Reneee Trishia We go on to marry Daniel Ellsberg, the think tank analyst who released the Pentagon papers in nineteen seventy one, and she would say we lived an amazingly luxurious life Every Christmas, there were of course, a ton of toys under the Christmas tree notot only Mx's toys, but also toys from his competitors. He wanted to see for himself. how his kids like these toys This luxurious life included a new step momom, Deella Blackadatter Burlesque dancer, Hail Lucfina, who performed under the stage name of Barbara Moffat Della and Marks would go on to have five more kids together Bringing the family to a total of nine kids family also had six dogs that Marks would take running every morning along with the fucking monkey from a trip abroad That would often sit on Marx's head as the inventor smoked a Cuban cigar This guy is one of one inds me likeilly Wonker But Marx never let Leisure distract from his work. partarticularly his partnership with Ray La. And this is all building towards the big wheel, by the way. Ray had joined the company way back in nineteen to thirty, worked his way up to becoming the manufacturer's chief designer over the years. He'd come up with tons of toys Everything from miniature pianos and rocking horses to rock 'em stockem robots Oh man Anyone else remember rock and sockking robots. They didn't quite live up to the hype built for them in my head, but super fun. wayay better than this linky Ray's real passion was wheeled toys Back in the twenties, he had created a mini car made out of stamped sheet metal had a safety feature built in so the car would go into a reverse whenever it hit an object withith the rise of plastic in the nineteen sixties Ray now started to wonder what the new substance could do when it came to wheeled tooys And he wound up creating Marvel the Mustang. intntroduced in nineteen sixty seven. plastic horse that kids could bounce on to activate springs that would move the horse's legs That's awesome But he wanted something more exciting than that He'd heard about a new concept called blow moolding where metal form lined up full of plastic was puffed up with air The resulting form would be both light and sturdy, capable of sitting a child or being dragged around by one How would he use this new process tried over and over come up with something, but his ideas never felt like they measured up to his high standards Not until nineteen sixty eight. That year, Laura's mother passed away and the engineer was driving with his entire family from Erie Pennsylvania, where Marks had one of three US toy factories located Cinat, Ohio for the funeral. Driving along Interstate seventy one, Ray started to tell his kids about how he used to take apart his tricycles and reassemble them upside down How he'd sit on the frame And because the center of gravity was much lower now. go down hills incredibly fast without tipping over. gave him an idea When Laura returned from Cincinati, he began to work on his inverted tricycle, where the seat wouldn't sit far above the pedals but instead level with them or even below them Close to the ground The first step was to create wooden models company was known for its meticulous prototyping, and the company employed a team of skilled carvers who created big wheel alpha. Wood' an upside down tricycle Next came injection molded versions But these iterations were solid plastic, which made them too bulky and hard to manage True Big Wheel really began to take shape when Laura built a blow molded sample The hollow frame gave him everything he was looking for A lightweight object that could easily be maneuvered but still had a lot of durability The really exciting part was the wheels themselves By making it from molded plastic, there was practically zero traction. which meant that kids could build up speed, then skid, drift, and lurch into derreces Now Big wheel was ready for the primeime It debuted for the holiday season of nineteen sixty nine and was an instant hit Even bigger hit than Lewis Marx had hoped for or expected. the bigig wheel, he wrote We are in trouble all over now and we've been swamped. I would say roughly we will be fifty to seventy five thousand pieces oversold and maybe more I get nothing but telephone calls all day on this item And it is a must for a lot of people. Oh man, how exciting to have a hit product like that desespite limited supplies Marx launched a television campaign that zeroed in on the B wheel's trademark roar the sound that echoed in the hollow plastic and made you know instantly if a bunch of kids were big wheeling around your block. TV advertising was fairly common for toys in the late sixties and early seventies, the fact that the big wheel had such a recognizable sound made the product especially well suited for the medium thirty second spots shouted stuff like the big wheel sound of power, roaring, spinning, and winning. Listen for yourself to one of the first commercials I love these retro commercials Big wheels are rolling. Listen to them turn. The big wheels sound of power with speed enough to burn. Winning, Sitting, Braaking The Big wheel by Ms with adjustable seat, handy saddle bag, and a quick stop racing brake. Fuck it Baking. Winning, spinning. It's the Big wheel with saddle bag and racing brake Big wheel by Marks. If we make it, it can take it If we make it, it can take it I, that's like a golderr of commercial for me The promos also benefited from the newly popular color TV. where the Big wheel's red, yellow and blue visuals played perfectly tires were black, which was purposeful because it implied that the big wheel whichich is like any grown up vehle withith a little imagination, it could be a bike, a car, a motorcycle, whatever you want Marks made sure to advertise that the big wheel was actually safer than any other toy vehicle on the market. In nineteen seventy three, Big Wheel advertisements capitalized on a study sponsored by the U.S. Bureau Product Safety predecessor to today's Consumer productuct Safety Commission The report showed that low slung trikes like the Big wheel were much more stable than traditional Higher profile rigs purchased full page advertisements in national magazines touting the survey's conclusions, quote Safety study shows Mark's Big wheel, most stable tricycle design tested in USX Rad an ad that ran in the november nineteen seventy three edition of Family Circle All the different tricycles My grandpa actually saved an old metal tricycle that my mom and her sister, my aunt rose kids And I actually do have memories of trying to ride that old tricycle down his dirt driveway and it fucking sucks Then I got a big wheel wayay better. Both did really suck to recc on But still, B wheel so much better pissed off tricycle manufacturers his whole safety announcement who wrote in into Fam the Circle with their grievances. so many of them wrote in that the paper's chief author later qualified his findings asserting that the study quote U nowhere said that the tricycle is unsafe What we said was only that it is less stable than some other designs that have the youngster seated closer to the ground But to the average consumer, the message had already gone out that the Big wheel gave you the feeling of danger going fast without any of the bloody results. Was that true Well, no, of course not All this shit can be dangerous, right? If you just fucking let it rip down a hill for example, Also these things allowed kids to do the one thing that they really wanted to do that was probably not very safe and that's get away from their parents and oversight You know, and this u what's going on for kids is, you know, young as three or four in an era of parenting that was far less helicoptery than it is today kids could ride around for hours, sk their elbows, knees faces without helmets or pads to protect them, and they did and they did it a lot. According to a medical journal report from nineteen ninety During the summer months at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, forty four kids withith an average age of. just under four years experienced injuries from riding on tricycles, with thirty three of forty four being on big wheels specifically Most injury iss not serious, though but two head head fractures and one had a concussion I surprised it wasn'tse than The report noted that the big wheels were particularly dangerous because they were so low to the ground meaning that drivers couldn't see them. And that was of course, very dangerous. Let's back up We're looking at an event that happened on april seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven right after today's second of two Mid Show sponsor Baks Hey Take a breath You've been moving all day. Scrolling, answering, lanning. But for the next few seconds, you get quiet Now imagine warm light A place where your shoulders finally drop and you feel like a kid again Never lose that feeling. Never lose your splash Visit Lauderdale. This is a Monday dot com ad, the sameMonday dot com helping people worldwide getting work done faster and better. The same Monday dot com designed for every team and every industry. The same Mondayot com with built in AI, scaling your work from day one. the same Monday dot com that your team will actually love using The same Monday. com with an easy and intuitive setup. Go to Monday. com and try it for free. Yes, the same Monday. com. Rock stardom doesn't just create stars. it creates monsters, muryrs, and myths. Who are the conspiracy theorists accusing Lady Gaga of murder I'm Jake Brennan, and on the Disgrace Land podcast I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history Disgraceland is now part of the exactly right network in iHarR podcasts N new episodes, Tuesdays, bonus episodes, Thursdays, and rewinds on Sunday. Listen to Disgrrace Land on the IiHart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Thanks for listening to sponsors. back up Look at that one event that happened on april seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven on that day. Florida resident Cythia Vincent was doing her normal Sunday routine She brought her five year old daughter, Stacey, her son Leo over to her parents' house Stacey went across the street to play with her friend Jill and Cynthia spent the afternoon hanging out with her mom, dad and Leo cameame time to head home. Cynthia called for Stacy. Stacy came running out, but stopped before she got to the car yelling, I forot my big wheel, Mommy. I got to get my big wheel A little girl vanished down the block Since you waitited in the front seat, passively watching as a Cadill, Cadill excuse me, turned onto the street Moments later, she heard the crash, had a horrifying thought, Oh my Godd, that's my kit. Cynthia ran into her mother's house grabbed a phone called an ambulance. The ambulance arrived, then the police. they pulled Stacy's body out from under the cadillac's front tire, her legs still stratling the wheels of her tricycle She' been dragged for approximately fifty feet The driver claimed he had not seen her Cynthia sat in the back of the police cruiser that followed the ambulance to Cardinal Cushing Hospital Unable to get the image of her daughter's bloody body out of her head, off course, the little girl was now in a coma doctors would soon discover that she had a ruptured spleen as well. And so much other shit was going on Stacey would need months of skin grafts, extensive surgery to repair her fractured skull, ruptured spleen, broken jaw In addition, her left side was paralyzed, her knee shredded to ligaments and cartilage She was incredibly lucky to have survived at all. Four months after her admission to children's hospital, Stacey was transferred to Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Brighton for a lengthy recovery process Six years later at the age of twelve, Her left arm was still paralyzed, and she suffered from epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and significant brain damage My God Her fifth birthday present the Big Wheel had turned out to be a nightmare. And neither their parents had seen that coming at all. The Vincent had no idea or claimed they had no idea That motrors couldn't see easily the big wheel unless it was from far away. Even that wouldn't have helped if a child rode off the sidewalk don't into the street when a car sped down the road And I gott to say this shit makes me so mad What happened little Stacy beyond tragic But was it Big Wheel's fault Fuck no, it was her parent's fault. It was her mom's fault in this situation. Clearly in my mind. properly supervising where and when she was writing this thing Uh, you know, don't ride it out in the fucking street. obbviously. Make sure your kid doesn't. watchatch them. To me, her parents suing the big wheels manufacturer is equally stupid as suing Nike because you were dumb enough to step in front of a fucking bus wearing their shoes I had no idea that my Nike shoes would allow me to walk fast enough to step in front of bus Why did no one tell me? Stupid people suing for doing stupid shit will always be one of the most annoying parts of modern life to me Uh Stacy's parents would now file a lawsuit against the Lewis Mark company as with several other parents who experienced their own horrifying incidents with bigig wheels. On may sixth, nineteen eighty, eight year old California boy was killed when he rode his plastical tricycle out into the street and was struck by a car, right tragic, terrible. died a week later from skull and brain injuries But again, How is that the actual tricycle's fault? Was it supposed to come with a giant fucking sticker that announced something like rememinder, you dumb fuck This tricycle will not fare well if you drive it in front of a car. so do not do that Also, do not wride it off of roof Do not ride into Snake Pit Do not wride off cliff Do I ride into active mindfield? Another thing If you ride tricycle into hot lava, you will be burned. Same thing if you ride into open fllame. If there is gas leak, tricycle will not keep you alive. If you ingest poison, riding tricycles, Tysle will not provide antidote The tricycle is not magical and does not protect you from literally anything Please do not do stupid shit involving tricycle and then blame tricycle. In nineteen eighty two, an ele year old Massachusetts boy suffered multiple fractures and a brain injury when he ran into a parked car on his plastic tricycle as he tried to avoid a moving vehicle His parents would su. ar with the tricclesle fa This this case would reveal some interesting information like the fact that some company executives had been suspicious of the new toy from the start Calvin Cook, a former company manager for Rsearch and Development testified in one case that no one at the Mars company had created any kind of test to figure out if the big wheel was visible to cars, but why W day? And of course it is somewhat visible c it's not painted with imaginary and invisible paint wasn't designed to blend into the background like a chameleon me It's like when you see your kidding it, you know how fucking tall it is You know how tall a car is If you don't know those two things, you shouldn't have a kid Cook also knew the use of plastic rather than rubber for the toys' wheels, posed some added danger since plastic meant less traction than rubber, right? Couldn't stop as fast Could they have put something else on it to make it safer? Well, they had thought about it A member of the company's child testing division had concluded that safety flags should be permanently designed into the tricycle to promote visibility Her recommendation based on safety considerations, was all but ignored until a comppetitor came out with a drag flag on its plastic tricycle model. Suddenly the Marks company designed a flag of its own. The device was marketed as a safety flag but sold separately as an accessory not as a mandatory feature as it should have been I mean, you could also spray paint your big wheel, Hunter orrange If you want it to be super visible. You could take fucking glow sticks to it A reflective tape You can tpe a siren to it Please non stop You can do all sorts of shit, It's called personal responsibility In the case of Stacy Vincent, the jury found that the toy company was not liable for injuries family appealed then lost or appeal as they should have. For some people, the danger that Big Wheels offered was the only reason they wrote it In early nineteen eighty six, a sixteen year old gearhead Bayon, New Jersey native by the name of Johnny Spezovsky Hell yeah, decided to take another look at his childhood big wheel I like how this is starting He also wanted to modify it to fit his adult size frame. And take things a step further or maybe like a hundred steps further by adding a miniaturized hemy engine to the back effectively making a toy into a plastic motorcycle h this this progression is going along nicely Johnny also decided that it would be fun to rerace his new invention, so he created an opportunity to do so Big wheel, open class, invitational race. I like Johnny a lot The first race would be held in the back of a gravel filled Kmart parking lot this is so good. On that day, Johnny his little brother Phil and a friend who went only by stitch course Raced around the parking lot for twenty two and a half laps before Pil crashed into a dumper and fractured his skull Acording to onene report,ills in a coma for about seven month But did that minor setback Stop Johnny Stitch. Fuck no didn't. The boys there again the following year dress in hockey gear now. This time about a dozen other local teams had also built their own modified big wheels Within a few years, dozens more were showing up to see if they could beat the competition Like the legendary operator of the Berkeley Marathons and former short suck subject, Lazarus Lake. Johnny felt he wanted to make things harder So in the fifteenth season, he mandated that participants had to wear tube socks Filled with a minimum of three bars of soap so they could take out those bars of soap and throw them at other competitors while they raced. isn't Jhn president? As one writeer would describe, quote This bizarre ruling added a twisted new dimension to the event. as well as an increase visits to the emergency room The amazing thing is that as the race got inherently more treacherous, the more people came out to compete It became a cult phenomenon much to the ire of the local North Jersey community On april first, twenty thirteen, the twenty seventh race, three hundred people from across the globe showed up to compete for the Camacho Cup Camacho cigars being the race's unofficial sponsor not sure it's still running It doesn't I don't think so. But another race definitely is similar. San Francisco's brring your own big wheel As the organization's legend has it, in two thousand, a man named John Brummett happened across a big wheel. We thought it'd be funny to ride it down Lombard Street world's most crooked streets and places and quite steep He invited his friends to watch him head down on Easter Sunday Thirteen people showed up And then John will continue this tradition for the next six years, accumulating other writers and more watchers two thousand seven YouTube video of the event would go viral leading to more and more people attending and participating in subsequent races. The location moved to Vermont Street stillill steep still croked And it's been happening there ever since But listen to some audio. play from the twenty twenty three event. I'll narrate a bit. This is So much joy to be heard So many crashes People dress up in crazy costumes, eating shit in the hay bales. , love it for wiping out I love it no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That'll be me. Oh, no, no, no no, please, please U a lot of those people in that video clip I just showed too, clearly in their mid to late sixties You know, few people in their twenties, I just love everyone just being big kids Also very quickly before moving on, listen to this dad's joyous laughter She watches his todder Uh his little son, face plant into the yard on his big wheel. after heading down the driveway and then catching on the curb And you can just tell that he knew this was going to happen Hey Daddy L little kids looking back at dad like, I'm doing good right? Boom fucking cackle from the dad kills me . you might guess from these stories, The Big wheel, pun intended, has kept on spinning Backing up by the mid seventies, Marks still with Louis Marks running the toy show in his seventies now had expanded the big wheel lineup. In addition to flagship's sixteen inch model, the company introduced the six inch mini wheel, the nine inch little wheel, and the twelve inch sport wheel The second generation Tke, which was five dollars more expensive than the original at fifteen bucks featured a saddle bag, adjustable plastic seat, most importantly, hand brake alongside the right rear wheel commomercial I played earlier was this model Mark s Done advertisement at the time touted the brake as helping a rider slow down without dragging his feet but we actually have the opposite effect Justs like an automobile, an emergency hand bra If you jam the big wheels, unilateral friction lever into the lock position, you could go into even more massive spins and drifts, which people did And that made a lot of money too, not to Lewis Marks needed at this product. By now, he's in his seventies again, looking for a successor, but none of his kids want to enter the business. And to his credit, he hasn't pushed them into it Patricia Marks would remember how her dad told her that toy making was not the kind of thing you succeeded at if you didn't truly have a passion for it. Instead of having a family member take a spot Mark struck a deal that he thought would continue his work. the time, the recreation and leisure industry was being overwhelmed with a kind of mergermania. often known as the conglomerate Boom Be companies could use their own stock to buy other companies and accounting rules made earnings look better after acquisitions buying other companies, no matter their relationship to the original company created the feedback loop Buy a company, report higher earnings, stock prices rise then use those higher price stocks to buy another company and so on and so on In this environment, buying companies was the fastest way to boost revenue and smooth out bad years in one industry with profits from another And so the seventy saw A lot of weird corporate shit taking place like CBS broadcasting, purchasing ideal The maker of the evil Canval action figures. Meanwhile, American machine and Foundry, a manufacture of cigarette machines and nuclear power plant parts randomly merged with a bicycle company and a bowling pin maker Now wanting to be left out, a pair of cereal companies joined the fray with General Mills of Cheerios' Fame Bying Kenner produiser of Play Doo in the Easy Bake oven On some level, it probably made sense for these companies to buy toy manufacturers. You know, CBS, for example, could promote their action figures on TV cereal companies could bundle toys with the products and use a design of boxes to advertise to kids This sometimes worked, but often the idea of synergy It sounded a lot better in theory than it worked in practice As it turns out P's prettyt hard to run a company with an entirely different process than the one you're used to. But a lot of companies didn't know that yet In nineteen seventy two, Quaker Oats would get in all this buying the Ms company for about fifty two million dollars. The acquisition was troubled from the beginning Ray Lor, who stayed on, would recall later that the company mananuel grew from being about an inch thick to over a foot tall None of these new rules seemed to help them with making better toys though. Quaker also eliminated the company's hugely popular lines of military themed toys, citing the growing anti war movement at the time that probably had a lot more to do with the Pacifist Quaker ethos As a result, Marx's profits went down by a third very quickly And Lewis did not like that He was kept on as a consultant, but according to him No one ever asked for his opinion After six months, he left by the mid seventies, Det Tit company that had turned a profit every year of its existence, including through the Great Depression perating into los which speaks volumes to how important his mind was specifically to his business And then uaker Rats made another mistake They were so busy trying to find the synergy that they didn't protect their intellectual property The result was a flood of big wheel look alikes, including the easy Riders My wheel the Colcoco power cycle heads from Supercyc That last one sold well thanks to an advertising tie in featuring Fonzie The motorcycle riding stud from the sitcom Happy Days But the suupercycle's true claim to fame came on the big screen when Danny Lloyd, the six year old who played Danny Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, the adaptation of Stephen King's novel, was depicted riding over the iconic red orange and tan carpet in the halls of the fictional Overlook Hotel on his very own suupercyycle meananwhile Quaker was trying to maintain sales with a program of steep discounts and tie ins. Among them was a nineteen seventy four promotion that connected the trike with the company's leading kid serial brand Captain Crun a family purchased a big wheel and consumed four boxes of cereal they could receive by mail. Check for s three dollars That didn't work out very well. U There were just too many big wheel knockoffs on the market, which in some ways had been Lewis Markx's own strategy early on, right? taking popular toy ideas, adding fun features, making them cheaper to produce By the end of the decade, the company was foundndering And Quaker sold it to a British manufacturer which would then also go bankrupt in nineteen eighty Sadly, Not even the super cool bigig wheel Copraative Cycle launched in nineteen seventy nine. was able to save it It's sleek. It's black. Fuck. It's beautiful. It's new, Big wheel Cobra Cycle for Marks. You can make Cobra really move. And Cobra comes with a license plate and letter so you can put your name on it. Cobra, the beautiful bl, bigig wheel you can put your name on So sinister. Big wheel Cobra with license plates. New from Marks, Assembble Uh, you've got a custom license plate How did that not save the company? I'm not gonna lie kind ofish I had an adult sized big wheel coobver right now Some kind of license plate that something like rocket manan A company called Carolina Enterprises which later changed its name to Empire Industries ended up buying the patent for the Big wheel, though they already had a factory that made their own version of a blow molded tricycle called the Hotcyycle It seem like they hot cycle Sounds like like a menopause kind of phrase or something It seems like they bought the patent just to be able to use the bigig wheel name and it worked. Sales skyrocketed. Nobody seemed to care if they had a version that was true to Marx's original or variant. nineteen eighty the company patented a big wheel variant called the Green Machine trke that use a pair of levers for rear wheel steering Green machine was an exciting product, but it could not save marks The company's head office is at two hundred fifth Avenue. the historic Toy Center buildilding in N York City, which it had occupied for over fifty years finally closed And then Louis Markx died in nineteen ninety two at the age of eighty five And then the big wheels home and emmpire industries did not last. The company, like all others before it, was diversifying and soon it would own the Klondike in popsicle lines of frozen confections By the nineteen nineties, as electronics became the country's new toy market focus, plastic toy production had moved overseas. and in two thousand after three consecutive years of losses Empire declared bankruptcy The Big wheel, along a few other brands. We're sold for a bargain price of about six million dollars The new owner would be Jodody Keener, a toy entrepreneur and former carnival barker. bas in Cedar Rapid Iowa Jodody would end up moving big wheel production to a series of facilities under the name Alpha International. peak of Alphas ownership, manufacturer of bigig wheels reached up to ten thousand trikes per day using over two hundred molds that wouldn't work alone And two thousand seven is part of a highly contested divorce proceeding between Jody and his wife that included both company assets and individual property, including a nearly fourteen thousand square foot mansion complete with an indoor swimming pool, movie theater, and sistine chapel esque overhead fresco A judge wrote quote Two people cannot get along Sometimes it is better for both of them their toys and leave The bigig wheel is essentially the child in this custody battle And the court would award Connie, Jodie's ex wife claim to the patent She was, however, ordered to pay her ex husband some seven million dollars to equalize the division of property. And then a later court proceeding returned the rights to the big wheel to Jodie. It was a big mess In the middle of all that, the big wheel simply faded away. Lost in a divorce battle. What a strange fate for an iconic toy Fbruary twenty, Jodody Kenner, then approaching in his seventies told industry T trade journals a toy book that Alpha was quote, in the process of selling or licensing its brands A potential savior emerged in June of twenty twenty four at the Strong National Museum of Play, which began as one of the world's largest collections of doll houses in the nineteen sixties, but has since morphed into a three hundred and seventy five thousand square foot tourist attraction in Rochester, New York. Notably, it houses the National Toy Hall of Fame which included the bigig wheel or inducted, rather, the bigig wheel in two thousand nine. C cururator, Chris Bench says the big wheel is as close as a toy can get to perfect. The sound it makes, the feeling, the durability pretty much is the essence of play. Has there ever been a toy like that And this acquisition could actually be something good for the Big wheel brand Indeed, Chilling specializes in revitalizing vintage toy brands. It'sn for reestablishing the lav lamp Along with carebears and sea monkeys, all iconic toys that had gone somewhat out of fashion by the turn of the twentyent first century Man, I remember growing up visiting a friend's house and his mom had a lava lamp. I thought she was the coolest lady I'd ever met in real life And then I ended up having a lava lamp later. Oh, so good Tod'silling bigig wheels are available on Amazon for between one hundred and one hundred and ten bucks less than what they retailed for during the Kener era.