Mattel, Inc. is an American multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment company founded in Los Angeles by Harold Matson and the husband-and-wife duo of Ruth and Elliot Handler in January 1945 and headquartered in El Segundo, California. Mattel has a presence in 35 countries and territories; its products are sold in more than 150 countries. Mattel consists of three business segments: North America, International and American Girl.
Little People is a toy brand for children ages 6–36 months and to ages 3 and up, originally produced by Fisher-Price, Inc. in the 1960s as the Play Family People. The current product line consists of playsets, mini-sets and accessories, books, CDs, and DVDs focusing on various configurations of a group of characters by their names. Mattel reports that since the brand's launch, over 2-billion Little People figures have been sold in over 60 countries. In 2016, Little People was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame.
Shogun Warriors was a line of toys released by Mattel Inc. in North America from 1979 to 1980.
Tickle Me Elmo is a children's plush toy from Tyco Preschool, a division of Tyco Toys, of the Muppet character Elmo from the children's television show Sesame Street. When squeezed, Elmo shakes, vibrates, and recites his trademark giggle.
View-Master is the trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes and corresponding View-Master "reels", which are thin cardboard disks containing seven Stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small transparent color photographs on film. It was originally manufactured and sold by Sawyer's.
Thingmaker, also called Creepy Crawlers, is an activity toy made by Mattel, beginning in 1964. The toy consists of a series of die-cast metal moulds resembling various bug-like creatures, into which is poured a liquid chemical substance called "Plasti-Goop", which comes in assorted colours. The mould is then heated to about 390 °F (199 °C) in an open-face electric hot plate oven. The Plasti-Goop is cured by the heat, and when cooled forms semi-solid, rubbery replicas which can be removed from the mould.
Pixter was among the first portable handheld touch screen drawing toys for children invented by Rehco, LLC and marketed by Fisher Price from 2000 through 2007. Pixter was pre-programmed with fun content and repeatable play. Pixter also could accept cartridge-based games and other activities. Pixter was originally marketed successfully with a black-and-white display but later was upgraded to a color display.
Chatty Cathy is a pull-string "talking" doll originally created by Ruth and Elliot Handler and manufactured by the Mattel toy company from 1959 to 1965. The doll was first released in stores and appeared in television commercials beginning in 1960, with a suggested retail price of $18.00, though usually priced under $10.00 in catalog advertisements. Chatty Cathy was on the market for six years and was the second most popular doll of the 1960s after Barbie.
Magna Doodle is a magnetic drawing toy, consisting of a drawing board, a magnetic stylus, and a few magnet shapes. Invented in 1974 by Pilot Corporation, over forty million units have been sold to date worldwide, under several brands, product names and variations, including Tyco and Mattel/Fisher Price.
Blokus is an abstract strategy board game for two to four players, where players try to score points by occupying most of the board with pieces of their colour. The board is a square regular grid and the pieces are polyominoes. It was designed by French mathematician Bernard Tavitian and first released in 2000 by Sekkoïa, a French company. It has won several awards, including the Mensa Select award and the 2004 Teacher's Choice Award. In 2009, the game was sold to Mattel.
Merchandise for the Thomas & Friends franchise has been produced to capitalize on the success of the television series Thomas & Friends. Whilst merchandise was produced alongside due to the popularity of the first of The Railway Series by the Rev. W. Awdry since 1945, and the original broadcast of the television series in 1984 in the United Kingdom, large numbers of manufacturers have sought to produce Thomas-branded items after the television series was broadcast in the United States and Japan.
Mega Brands Inc. is a Canadian children's toy company that is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of Mattel. Mega Bloks, a line of construction set toys, is its most popular product. Its other brands include Mega Construx, Mega Puzzles, Board Dudes and Rose Art. The company distributes a wide range of construction toys, puzzles, and craft-based products.
Wooden toy trains are toy trains that run on a wooden track system with grooves to guide the wheels of the rolling stock. While the trains, tracks and scenery accessories are made mainly of wood, the engines and cars connect to each other using metal hooks or small magnets, and some use plastic wheels mounted on metal axles. Some trains are made to resemble anthropomorphical, fictional, and prototypical railroad equipment.
Fisher-Price is an American company that produces educational toys for infants, toddlers and preschoolers, headquartered in East Aurora, New York. The company was founded in 1930 during the Great Depression by Herman Fisher, Irving Price, Helen Schelle, and Margaret Evans-Price.
Zhang Shuhong was a Chinese businessman and factory owner. Zhang committed suicide after toys made at his factory for Fisher-Price were found to contain lead paint.
Plarail is a toy train and plastic track system made by Tomy and introduced in Japan in 1959. It was expanded into a battery-operated electric toy train system in October 1961. Plarail is not compatible with most other brands of model railway, although as it has a similar rail gauge to the wooden toy train systems, rolling stock may run on both systems to some degree.
Mattel Interactive was a video game publisher and software distributor.
Kasey the Kinderbot is an educational toy learning system designed, developed, and sold by Fisher-Price, a wholly owned division of the Mattel Corporation, nominated for the Educational Toy of the Year award in 2002. Because of its strong commercial sales, Kasey was reported as an important item in the balance sheet of Fisher-Price.
Toys-to-life is a video game feature using physical figurines or action figures to interact within the game. These toys use a near field communication (NFC), radio frequency identification (RFID), or image recognition data protocol to determine the individual figurine's proximity, and save a player's progress data to a storage medium located within that piece. It was one of the most lucrative branches of the video game industry espically during the late 2000s and 2010s, with the Skylanders franchise alone selling more than $3 billion worth over the course of four years.
