ROCHESTER, N.Y. — When National Toy Hall of Fame curators learned last fall that the Fisher-Price Corn Popper had been elected to the Class of 2023, they knew they had serious work to do.
With an official induction ceremony approaching, they’ll have to figure out how to introduce toddlers’ beloved push toy with colorful balls that ricochet around a clear dome.
It’s not as simple as going to Walmart and pulling one off the shelves: The room, part of the Strong National Museum of Play in upstate New York, aims to show how its toys have lasted and evolved over the years – parts range from wood to plastic, electronics added.
That means digging through archives, auctions, the Internet and yard sales to search for an original or a close relative — a process repeated with each new Hall of Fame inductee.
“We want recognizable objects currently on the market, but we also want people to say, ‘Oh, I had one of those!'” said Christopher Bensch, chief curator of the Strong Museum, which is a more interactive museum larger than life. toy box for children and adults.
For example, when the puzzle was introduced in 2002, they added one of the world’s first versions, a map of Europe glued to a thin mahogany board dating from 1766, alongside a Donald Duck puzzle for children dating from 1990. All the toys introduced in the hall are specific products, i.e. — Inducted in 2021 was simply “sand”.
In the case of the Corn Popper, conservatives had to find something recognizable for generations. The toy has been around since 1957 and more than 36 million copies have been sold, according to Fisher-Price. Nearly 650,000 visitors would come over the next year to see it and the Hall of Fame’s other vaunted toys.
Safes, garage sales, eBay
After being voted on by experts and fans, many Hall of Fame toys are pulled from the museum’s extensive archives for permanent display.
The winners are usually so iconic – the Barbie doll, the teddy bear, the checkers games – that there is a good chance that there will be multiples among the half-million objects already in the constantly expanding collection.
But the staff is always on the lookout for toys worth keeping — keeping an eye on eBay and garage and estate sales, especially if a toy is already enshrined or seems destined for the Hall of Fame.
With new toys hitting the market all the time, curators can only guess what the next Etch A Sketch, a mechanical drawing toy still popular and virtually unchanged after 100 years, might be and which toys will sparkle.
“We want to be their custodian, for the nation or for the world,” Bensch said. “That’s why we have 1,500 yo-yos in our collection, which is 8,000 puzzles,” he said, naming two past inductees.
Some of the cast, molded and sculpted board games, stuffed animals, dollhouses and other childhood memorabilia were donated by the manufacturers. Others come from private collectors following a death, divorce or move. A parent recently donated a collection of 1,600 American Girl dolls and accessories after their child outgrew them.
Some items are sold at auction, in the same way that an art museum acquires a masterpiece. This is how The Strong landed one of his most prized possessions, an original Monopoly set, hand painted on oilcloth in 1933 by inventor Charles Darrow before the game went into mass production. With Monopoly in the Hall of Fame since 1998, the winning bid of $146,500 at Sotheby’s in 2010 was over budget – but worth it.
“We are the National Museum of Gaming. If we were the Henry Ford Museum and we didn’t have the first Model T, we would be forever sorry,” Bensch said.
An eBay find
Babies have been chasing Fisher-Price Corn Poppers for more than 60 years, but finding a “historic” one in pristine condition and on display in a museum has proven difficult.
“These are toys that are used pretty hard,” Bensch said, “especially the early versions with that plastic dome and the wooden balls that hit on top of it. Those haven’t survived in very good condition.
What was finally exposed were two versions. One is a 1980 model purchased on eBay from a woman in Canada, who probably has no idea that her wreckage – its wear and tear evident in its dirty, slightly cloudy dome – is now a museum piece. The other is a shiny new version that’s still on store shelves for around $12, with a sleeker blue handle and sturdier red wheels that reflect slight design changes over the years.
“It was hard to find a photogenic one more than a few decades old,” Bensch said. “I’m not sure we ended up getting one that was as old as we wanted, just because they had been so well loved.”
What makes a toy a Hall of Fame?
Each year, a new toy class enters the Hall of Fame, the culmination of an annual process that invites everyone to nominate their favorite toy online.
Museum staff select nominees from 12 finalists before a panel of experts vote for the winners. Eighty-four toys have earned this honor since the room opened in 1998.
Nominees can be as enduring as the creations of a steel erector, inducted in 1998, or as ephemeral as bubbles blown through a plastic wand, honored in 2014.
Many inductees recall that the true value of a toy lies not necessarily in the price, but in the play. In 2008, a regular tree stick – but a free sword or wand for a child – was introduced in the room, but the Flexible Flyer sleds and the Rubik’s Cube were not selected that year. The Easy-Bake oven was bypassed in 2005 – by the cardboard box it could have been shipped in.
The museum received 2,400 nominations for 382 different toys for the Class of 2024.
This year 12 finalists Include Apples to Apples, balloons and the trampoline. Also: Choose Your Own Adventure books, Hess toy trucks, remote control vehicles, the Stick Horse, Phase 10, Sequence and the Pokémon Trading Card Game, plus two perennial nominees, My Little Pony figures – seven-time finalist – and Transformers action figures.
Among them, a few elected officials will be announced and honored in November, and the conservatives will begin their hunt again.
Carolyn Thompson contributed to this report.
