From WWII Through TV LAND
by Bruce Whitehill
Toy Shop, Oct. 1997
By the early part of the 20th century, American games–commercially manufactured boxed board games, card games, and dexterity games–had become a staple of American leisure life; games could be played for sheer enjoyment rather than for the academic or moral teachings so often associated with games decades before. Games were no longer merely an adjunct of a company’s lithography operation or an off-shoot of a business focusing on toys; companies prospered with predominantly games in their line.
Three major companies survived the transition from the late 1800s through the depression: Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, and Selchow & Righter. In 1920, McLoughlin Brothers, the most prestigious game company of the 1800s, was absorbed by Milton Bradley, a prolific firm that had been in business since 1860. By 1927, Selchow and Righter had ended its 60-year stint as jobbers of other company’s products and began to manufacture and sell its own games exclusively. Parker Brothers, founded by George S. Parker two decades after Mssrs. Bradley and Elisha Selchow started business, made rapid strides in becoming what many collectors of today would call the foremost large manufacturer of quality games after McLoughlin.
Most of the smaller companies from the 1800s, such as Bliss, Clark & Sowdon, Horsman, Ives, Ottmann, and Singer, were gone by WWI. New companies emerged, such as Alderman-Fairchild, Cadaco-Ellis, Einson-Freeman, Sam’l Gabriel Sons & Co., Pressman, Russell, Saalfield, Stoll & Edwards, Transogram, Whitman, Wilder, and Wolverine.
As the United States began to prepare for eventual involvement in World War II, manufacturing efforts were geared up for defense. Game companies became involved in the war effort, and war and patriotism became popular themes for all types of games. But the war took its toll on game production. The game giants cut back considerably. In 1941, Milton Bradley had 150 items in its line–a great decline from it’s previous year’s 410. Restrictions on the use of metal affected such firms as Wolverine which manufactured almost exclusively games with metal gameboards. The metal tokens in games such as Parker Brothers’ CONFLICT or AROUND THE WORLD were changed to composition pieces. Though this more than likely lowered the value of the games during the period, it has added to the value of these historic items on collectors’ market nearly 50 years later.
In spite of restrictions and economic hardships, companies still produced games, which, like movies, afforded an inexpensive respite from the curtailments of war. During the war and the recovery period which followed, many now-classic games were introduced including CANDYLAND, CHUTES & LADDERS, CLUE, GAME OF STATES, and SCRABBLE. CHINESE CHECKERS, taken from the 19th-century classic American game of HALMA, received a U.S. patent number in 1941.
For some of the smaller companies, though, the outbreak of war was fatal. But with economic recovery came new companies.
World War II had a major effect on the game industry (as it did on so many other industries), but not nearly as great an effect as did the popularization of television. Television was a live, visual medium with a sense of immediacy. It’s novelty was such that the sale of TV sets and the growth of the broadcasting industry during the late 1940s and early ’50s was phenomenal. Television, of course, changed the game industry in the way in which it changed so many other things in society–it changed the family, brought the world into the home, ended our innocence, and provided a new “toy” that would replace reading a game playing for many Americans.
The new medium served people from coast to coast with a variety of programs, all interrupted by a multitude of commercial messages. The products’ pitch men were often famous personalities that people never expected would be sharing their living rooms. Television advertising became big business.
Soon companies could reach a larger audience through television than through any of the print media. But only the larger companies had the capital required for promoting products on television, and many small manufacturers were forced out of business because they couldn’t compete with the giants in the marketing of their products, though their games were often as good as, if not better, than the competition’s. A lack of regulations in the early days of broadcasting let advertisers pander to youngsters who would then push their parents into buying the game that had the best hard sell or the most frequent airing. And, as games were developed based on television shows, TV hosts offered testimonials about the new TV-tie-ins.
Then the distribution of games changed too, with large retail toy stores, buying in huge quantities and selling at a discount, replacing the small, independent dealers. Shopping malls provided convenient one-stop shopping, and national chains could buy, sell, and advertise in a volume which forced many small stores out of business. The tie-in with television is that once these retail giants gained control, they could dictate what products they would and would not sell in their stores: unless a game was already a runaway best-seller because of free media coverage and exceptional word-of-mouth, a game would not be accepted unless the manufacturer backed its sales with TV advertising. The larger game companies, such a Milton Bradley, could get products not advertised on TV into stores like “Toys R Us,” because of deals made regarding the TV advertising Bradley would put behind other products sold by the store. Independent inventors and small manufacturers without sufficient capital for a TV ad campaign were forced to rely on much more limited avenues of distribution.
Television also effected, albeit indirectly, the quality of game play. With word-of-mouth advertising being replaced by a visual media blitz, what became important was how a game looked, and who or what character promoted it. The question was not so much whether a game was exciting to play as whether it could be made to look exciting to play in a 15 or 30-second commercial. And what went in the game box became much less important than the character name that went on it.
The TV-tie-in (television programs or characters licensed to the game manufacturers) was the beginning of planned obsolescence in the game industry–a game was only good for the duration of the television series on which it was based. (The exceptions were certain quiz show games that continued to be sold after the programs were canceled.) During the ’50s, many game companies, especially Milton Bradley, Lowell, and Transogram, began to produce more and more games linked to television shows. This meant that companies that once hoped to sell an item that would be a staple in the company’s line for decades were now making products almost guaranteed to be out of fashion within a few years.
It’s interesting that the medium that took people away from the family game-playing table and put them in front of a video box, is the same medium that led to the licensing of games that have become the super sellers of today.
