Fads: Return of the Oldies

The immutable law that governs the world of toys is that there is no new fad like an old fad. Remember the YoYo? It is back now as the Glow Go, in a $1.50 version with a pair of small batteries that make it light up when it bobs. The Mickey Mouse watch? Staunch Mouseketeers have been willing to pay up to $200 for the campy $4.95 original. Now, Timex has brought out a new $12.95 Mickey Mouse watch and sold 100,000 in the first three weeks.

Or take Footsee, the newest craze with the playground set. The toy consists of a plastic ankle ring to which is attached a 30-in. string with a bell-shaped weight at the other end. The object is to twirl the string with one foot and hop with the other; well-coordinated youngsters can now twirl three Footsees at once—one on each leg and one on an arm. In the first three months on the U.S. market, about 4,000,000 of the $1.29 toys have been sold. The reason cannot be novelty: a similar toy enjoyed brief popularity four years ago. Robert Asch, president of Twinpak Ltd. of Montreal, which makes the Footsee, is sure the game is far older; he got the idea while watching Arab children in Jerusalem playing with like contraptions.

And then there is button-on-a-string. Versions of this simple plaything may be as old as the Pyramids. But that did not deter Kramer Designs of Royal Oak, Mich., from producing a pop copy with twin twirling plastic disks in psychedelic hues. When the string is pulled taut, the disks whirl apart, then clop together in mid-spin, sounding like a shark with loose plates chewing on an oyster. Op-Yop is its name. At $1 each, Kramer has sold 1,000,000 of them to date, confidently expects to sell another million by Christmas.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles’ Wham-O Mfg. Co., which a decade ago launched the Frisbee and last year revived the Hula Hoop as the Shoop Shoop, does not intend to be caught napping. For Frisbee flyers, whose six-month-old International Frisbee Association now totals 20,000 members, a new indoor model, only 3¾ in. in diameter, is on the market, and has already matched the sales of the conventional model. Latest of Wham-O’s line is the Whirlee Twirlee. Something new? Not if you remember the way vaudeville jugglers used to spin plates at the end of a stick. In fact the company had some success with an earlier version. But the toy has not been around for almost nine years, and that for fads is approximately a millennium.