The product origin stories are WILD! Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for some of the greatest toys with beginnings that have little - if nothing - to do with the toys they became.
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00:00I love Silly Street!
00:02Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for some of the greatest toys with beginnings that have little, if nothing to do with the toys they became.
00:10This is what you want to go into battle with, right?
00:14Number 10. Lasertag
00:16Players to stadium now! Players to stadium now!
00:22The first use of an infrared light and sensor system in toy form dates back to phaser guns put out in correspondence with the release of Star Trek The Motion Picture in 1979.
00:30However, the origins of Lasertag began miles away from kids' birthday parties and boys' nights out.
00:35And we mean that literally, given that it began with the military's Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System, aka MILES.
00:42Rather than train with real bullets, the U.S. Army developed this Lasertag system as a form of combat training for their soldiers in the late 70s and early 80s.
00:50It was in 1984 when we saw the opening of the first Lasertag Arena.
00:54What are you kids doing in here?
00:56Nothing, Mom. Just playing Lasertag.
00:59Number 9. Colorforms
01:01Colorforms, plastic pieces, stick like magic.
01:05Harry and Patricia Kislevitz were artists in 1951 when a friend of theirs who made handbags gave them a roll of vinyl he didn't want anymore.
01:12What the Kislevitz discovered was that pieces of the vinyl would stick to their bathroom walls and could easily be removed and repositioned.
01:18You can pretend lots of exciting adventures with your imagination and Colorforms' incredible hope.
01:24They even left pieces in the bathroom for guests to use in creating wall art.
01:27Seeing how much fun they and their friends had with it, the couple decided that they had an actual commercial product on their hands.
01:33And they were obviously right, as over 1 billion Colorforms sets had been sold.
01:37Colorforms, plastic pieces, stick like magic.
01:41Number 8. Water balloons
01:43Hey, sweetheart, if the price is you, I'm a ready take.
01:46Well, get bent, turkey.
01:51Trench foot was a serious problem for soldiers in World War I who spent long hours, days, and weeks with their feet in cold, damp, and less than sanitary conditions.
02:00It's estimated that over 75,000 British casualties in the war can be directly related to the condition.
02:05Well, in the decades after the conflict, British inventor Edgar Ellington made it his mission to create a waterproof sock using latex and cotton that would protect soldiers from the aforementioned trench foot.
02:15Needless to say, the invention didn't work and started leaking water, which caused an angry Ellington to throw it down on the table.
02:21The ensuing explosion caught his attention and led to the first marketed water balloons, which Ellington called water grenades at the time.
02:27Is this what you people wanted? Huh? Huh? Come on out!
02:31May I propose an alliance?
02:33You could have just said no.
02:35Number 7. Paintball
02:37You get it all out of your system?
02:46Almost.
02:49Could a Wall Street stock trader survive in the woods against a seasoned outdoorsman?
02:53That's what stock trader Hayes Knoll and outdoorsman Charles Gaines wanted to find out in 1981.
02:58The men saw a paint gun in a farm catalog and decided that would be the way to settle the argument.
03:02Hayes shot first and he missed and I shot him right in the butt.
03:08Why a farm catalog?
03:10Well, that's because paint guns were originally invented to be used by loggers and cattlemen to mark trees and cows from a distance.
03:16There was never any thought of paint guns and paintballs being used on people.
03:20But after Knoll and Gaines went at it, the path towards human paintball competition was inevitable.
03:25I think there's just going to be a lot of paint flying, really.
03:27Number 6. Magna Doodle
03:29Animals, spirals, pictures and more.
03:31We all love Magna Doodle!
03:33A dustless chalkboard. That was the original idea behind what would become the Magna Doodle.
03:38You know, that thing hanging on the door of Joey and Chandler's apartment on Friends?
03:41Yeah, whatever.
03:43The Pilot Corporation of Japan, yes, the guys that make the pens,
03:46wanted to create a dustless chalkboard that could be used by company employees in sterile environments.
03:51However, when someone visiting from the Takara Toy Company asked about purchasing the toy,
03:55Pilot had their lightbulb moment and switched gears, creating the product on a vastly larger scale,
04:00marketing it to kids and calling it Magna Doodle.
04:03I'm doodling here and I'm doodling there.
04:05Two times I'm doodling.
04:07Number 5. Silly Putty
04:09Always put your silly putty back in its egg or it will run slowly away.
04:14During World War II, rubber was scarce and a vital component of many wartime necessities from tires to gas masks.
04:21So while the American government asked its citizens to ration rubber,
04:24they also put money into finding synthetic rubber compounds to solve the shortage.
04:28While the credit for silly putty might be in dispute,
04:30there's no disputing the fact that it came out of synthetic rubber research.
04:33It might sound obvious now, but what a couple of researchers found, acting independently,
04:38is that mixing boric acid with silicone oil produced the now iconic bouncy, stretchable material.
04:43It wasn't quite good enough to replace rubber, but it was perfect for whatever silly putty is good for.
04:48What picks up pictures from a newspaper and makes them silly?
04:51And if you stretch it, even sillier.
04:54Silly putty.
04:55Number 4. Super Soaker
04:57You made a career out of this and spacecraft. Amazing.
05:02One day in 1982, NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson was at home working on his idea for an environmentally friendly cooling system.
05:09In testing his invention, he connected a high-pressure nozzle to the faucet in his bathroom and turned it on.
05:14And I shot this stream of water across the bathroom and it was so satisfying.
05:19I thought, geez, a high-performance water gun would be a lot of fun.
05:22How that had anything to do with a cooling system isn't important.
05:25What is important is the hard stream of water that came out of the nozzle that day.
05:29Because when Johnson saw that, he didn't just see water, he saw great toy potential.
05:33After years of working on prototypes, in 1990, the Super Soaker was born.
05:37Well, actually, it was originally called Power Drencher, but the name was changed to Super Soaker in 1991.
05:47Number 3. Silly String
05:56It was 1972, and Leonard Fish and Robert Cox were working on their invention for a spray-on cast.
06:03To get their creation just right, they had to find the perfect nozzle.
06:06Well, they ended up testing upwards of 500 different nozzles to find the one they needed.
06:10During the testing process, they came across one nozzle that created a fun string that would fly across the room.
06:15It didn't take them long to recognize the toy-etic potential.
06:18And with a little tweak of the formula to make it less sticky, Silly String was born.
06:23Number 2. Play-Doh
06:35We'd love to tell you that Play-Doh was invented by Homer Simpson, get it? D'oh!
06:39But it wasn't.
06:41It was invented in the 1930s by Noah McVicker, who created the non-toxic putty as a wallpaper cleaner.
06:48Then, in the 1950s, nursery school teacher Kay Zufall read an article about how the aforementioned putty could be used for art projects.
07:01Well, the kids loved it. And guess who Zufall's brother-in-law was?
07:04If you guessed Noah McVicker's son Joe, you're right!
07:07Zufall encouraged the McVickers to produce the compound for children, and she and her husband came up with the name Play-Doh.
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07:34Number 1. Slinky
07:42Everyone knows the lyrics to the Slinky song, right?
07:44Slinky, slinky, it's such a wonderful way to stabilize a ship's equipment in rough waters.
07:50Okay, so that isn't how the famous jingle goes, but it does describe what inventor Richard James was working on when he happened upon the Slinky.
07:57A spring took a step in the lab he was working in, and he looked at it, and he picked it up and tried it again, and it did it again.
08:06And he took it home to mom, and he said, you know, there's something here.
08:10After accidentally knocking one of his stabilizer springs off of a shelf and seeing how it walked along the floor, James knew he had a cool toy in his hands.
08:18He spent the next few years finding the best metal and the perfect proportions, and his wife came up with the name Slinky.
08:23Sales were slow at first, but after James did a demonstration at a local store, the shelves emptied quickly.
08:28Gimbal's store in Philadelphia gave us the end of a calendar, and we had 400 pieces, and we sold them in 90 minutes.
08:37Which of these famous toy origin stories surprised you the most? Let us know in the comments.
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