Toys: Plastic Sugarplums

Once upon a time there was only one Santa Claus, and all the toys in the world came from his workshop at the North Pole. Every Christmas he would climb down the chimney and leave funny, old-timey toys like Raggedy Ann dolls, Lincoln Logs and Monopoly sets under the Christmas tree. And the funniest thing about it was that toys from one Christmas would still be around next year. How could anybody break a steel steam shovel, or abandon a doll which could actually say “Ma-ma” and shut her eyes when she lay down? Oh, it was a funny time, all right. It must have been way back when Daddy was a boy.

It was also way back when there wasn’t any television or Marvin Glass. Glass, 48, is the nation’s foremost toy designer and consultant, the Frankenstein who set Mr.

Machine clunking and whirring through a million U.S. living rooms last year. He also gave the world the Kissy Doll and the Robot Commando. Most Glass toys embody several principles: 1) they are big (so that they “participate with a child”); 2) they are made of plastic, with all of plastic’s built-in obsolescence; 3) they are eminently TV-promotable.

Glass believes himself to have a mystic affinity with the infant psyche, and calls his toys “a substitute for a son.” He explains, as an example, that he got the idea for Mr. Machine while having a telephone conversation with his former wife. “Just before she slammed down the receiver, she said to me. ‘You are nothing but a machine.’ And I decided that a toy named Mr. Machine would be an adequate psychological symbol of our times.” Glass, who is already planning his 1964 line, manufactures no toys himself, instead leases his ideas to toymakers (Mattel, Ideal) for a percentage of the gross.

Mr. Machine has already sold more than $14 million worth since it first strode across TV screens in 1960. Glass pays his 25 designers between $18,000 and $30,000 a year, but being an elf in Santa Glass’s workshop involves more hard work than ho, ho, ho. Staff designers are expected to work 14 hours a day, six days a week; during crucial periods, Glass locks them in their rooms and does not allow them to speak to one another.

Ogg & Zor. Moppets in front of their TV sets are currently being hypnotized by members of the Glass class of ’62. Odd Ogg (“half turtle and half frog”) is a blue-and-green, battery-powered plastic creature that plays ball in an odd way: if a ball rolls into his middle, Ogg loses the round and waddles meekly toward the child with the ball. If the ball hits one of his outstretched flippers, he will back up, stick out his red plastic tongue, and razz his opponent with a disgusting noise.

King Zor, Glass’s most expensive toy this year, is a terrifying-looking, three-foot plastic dinosaur. Six plastic “prehistoric rocks” are loaded into Zor’s back. The child then fires a dart gun at a red target on the beast’s tail; a bull’s-eye causes Zor to lunge toward the nursery-school St. George and launch one of his projectiles with a primordial roar. King Zor is already stirring up controversy among disapproving parents, who claim the toy teaches children combat. Glass disagrees, calls it a game of mechanized tag: “It is better to give a child an outlet for his combative instincts than to suppress them. He feels like a knight fighting a dragon.”

Echo & Jet. Overall, toymakers predict a record Christmas this year (“a billion-dollar season,” says Arnold Bolka of Manhattan’s Toy Guidance Council) and are spending $15 million on TV advertising. However, discount selling may shrink the profits of many dealers who cut prices as Christmas nears. Among the most-asked-for items that will find their way beneath many a seven-foot vinyl (flame-resistant, colorfast, $9.98) Christmas tree this season:

> The last (or latest) word in talking dolls is Little Miss Echo. Hidden in her tiny tummy is a battery-powered tape recorder. Turn the locket on her bodice one way and Little Miss Echo soaks up anything said in her presence; flip the locket the other way and she sounds off with 25 seconds of back talk. Little girls owning this transistorized Trilby will have a tough time keeping her away from Mommy and Daddy’s cocktail parties. American Doll & Toy; $32 to $36.

> Triumph of the injection-molder’s art is Jimmy Jet, a dial-laden gadget that looks like a cross between a 1958 Pontiac dash board and the cockpit of the U-2—and is nearly as big. Activate its batteries and an aerial view of a terrain nicely dotted with factories, bridges and other targets moves across a simulated TV screen; a silhouette of a plane also appears, and by turning the controls this can be made to pass “over” a target. A lever launches missiles from the cowling. More dazzling than durable, it is sold in supermarkets exclusively. Deluxe Reading Corp.; $12.88.

> A. C. Gilbert Co., whose long-beloved Erector Set has been updated to include rocket gantries and moon vehicles, has a flying model plane, the Skyflash. Its gasoline motor has a new type of silencer to reduce the hornet’s-nest buzz, and its wings and fuselage are made of high-impact plastic, which is strong, flexible and shatterproof. $19.98 to $24.98.

> The Hokey Pokey Cotton Candy machine is a battery-operated, 16-in. miniature of the ones at the circus, is apt to get hands even stickier. Hasbro; $14-95.> Games are getting down to business, and Square Mile is an exercise in land development for future Zeckendorfs. Taking up where Monopoly left off, Square Mile plants industrial parks, housing developments and shopping centers amid forests and swamps with a singleness of purpose designed to make Secretary Udall quake in his hiking shoes. Milton Bradley; $7.

> For juvenile Jackson Pollocks, there is a new medium called Electro-Swirl Art.

Squares of cardboard are mounted on a battery-powered turntable inside a protective pot-shaped housing, the switch is turned on, and the cardboard begins to spin. With a special plastic spoon, colored plastic paints are dribbled on the spinning “canvas,” and the results can range from wild abstractions to concentric geometric patterns. Kusa; $4.