RETAIL TRADE: Help for Santa

Moppets who have been watching their parents build boats, houses, planes, and almost everything else in the great do-it-yourself boom (TIME, Aug. 2), are getting a chance to join in the fun. Do-ityourself is the big trend in Christmas toys this year, and children will be able to turn out everything from clocks and racing cars to model battleships. Toymakers are so sure do-it-yourself will be a yuletide hit, that they hope for sales of $1 billion in 1954 for the first time in history.

There are hundreds of new hobby and model kits. Strombecker has knock-down dollhouse furniture (7-and 8-piece sets for $2.50) to give aspiring Chippendales a chance to prove their talents; when they have finished making their own furniture, they can assemble a prefab, 6-room dollhouse from a Keystone Wood Toys kit ($14.95). Renwal Manufacturing Co. has a Be a Designer set ($4.98) with 29 pieces of miniature furniture, paints and traceable designs to make the plastic pieces look different. For more advanced work, Walter L. Herne Co. has a three-sided furnished room ($5) with different wallpapers and upholstery fabrics for experimentation. Toy King Louis Marx has brought out a prefabricated model of the White House, with 3-in. plastic statues of the nation’s 33 Presidents, plus paints to color them. And Manhattan’s F.A.O. Schwarz has a fully furnished colonial dollhouse that can be equipped with miniature brooms, linen, toys, and even tiny beer steins with movable tops (about $300).

The sports-car boom has spawned dozens of kits. Doepke has put out a 50-part set that assembles into a realistic scale model of the MG; Ideal has a Chevrolet Corvette model kit for $4. For more ambitious builders, Revell has motorized its popular “Big Mo” battleship kit ($4.95) with a ready-assembled electric motor. William L. Gilbert Clock Corp. has an 18-piece set ($5.95) that can be made into an electric clock in a short time.

Boys can do their own Simonizing and cleaning with the Kidd-E-Kar Wash kit ($3); girls can cook with a big choice of toys featuring miniature cans and packages of such brand-name products as Campbell Soup, Betty Crocker Cake Mix and Suchard Chocolate. They can clean with Marilyn Products, Inc.’s battery-powered Electrikbroom Jr. ($7.98) and make their own perfumes (Rajah’s Scent, Power Dive, Boing, Shmooth, Jeepers).

Among the more conventional toys there are also many new twists. Marx has a 2-ft.-long shooting gallery enclosed in plastic so that the ball-bearing “bullets” cannot bounce out. As in other years, dolls do almost everything that real babies can do—and one does something more: Ideal’s Betsy Wetsy ($5.98) not only drinks, wets, weeps, coos and sleeps, but also blows her nose, helped by a quick squeeze of her middle. Robert the Robot, an Ideal flashing-eyed mechanical monster ($5.95), can be made to move forward and back, swing its arms and recite: “I’m Robert the Robot, the Mechanical Man.” Ideal also has a “radio”-equipped FBI car that broadcasts “Calling all cars . . .” Among electric trains, the newest is Toyland Products’ train for three-to six-year-olds. It consists of a string of wooden cars, driven by three flashlight batteries, that go forward and back around an oval of fiber on which is printed an electric circuit. Price: $5.95.