Barbie was a doll who thought she was a goddess, Wanted everything in sight, But she was just a plastic bimbo in a townhouse, And Joe, he was ready to fight.
In 1996-97, toys went to war. Barbie, with her evening dresses and pneumatic shape, was pitted against that most famous of boys' dolls, GI Joe (or Action Man in the UK), and Mr Potato Head, the simple make-a-face-from-a-potato idea that won a second chance in the toy box after the film Toy Story. Yet this battle, unlike those of the film, was real.
The takeover bid by Barbie's maker Mattel for Hasbro, a nearly 100-year-old family company transformed by GI Joe into a billion-dollar business, no doubt caused feelings to run high in both companies. But because this book is about Hasbro, we learn of ditties like the one quoted here, penned by an employee and sung to the tune of the Beatles' song Get Back at an anti-takeover rally.
It was still possible in 1980 to think of the toy-maker in the light of Geppetto, the benevolent old man who made Pinocchio in Carlo Collodi's book of that name. Although few would have been naive enough to imagine that the only concern of the toy-maker was to please children, it was somehow thought that the harsher side of capitalism had not invaded the child's world. The only thing innocent in this picture is the naivety of those who would believe it.
Few people paid any attention to the toy industry until quite recently because Wall Street paid no attention to it. The thinking was that investors could not get excited about products whose sales depended on the whims of children, whom everybody knows want one thing now and something else in 10 minutes.
This perception radically changed when Stephen Hassenfeld took Hasbro, a small toy company founded by Polish immigrants at the beginning of the century, from being a US$100 million (about HK$773 million) company to a US$1.2 billion one in a couple of years. As author Wayne Miller points out, when one considers that Hasbro began by dealing with surplus bits of cloth, it really was a 'rags to riches' story.
