Being a kid was kind of cool even before video games, smartphones and the Internet. Really.
What did we do for fun? Well, we played real coin-operated pinball arcade games with silver-colored steel balls and bumper flippers on the side, racking up points and hopefully lighting up the backbox and ringing some bells in the back of some local mom-and-pop greasy spoon often. D. Gottlieb & Co. of Chicago’s Humpty Dumpty, introduced in 1947, was the first game to add player-controlled bumper flippers. David Gottlieb had founded the company in 1927. The predecessor of all pinball machines is acknowledged to be the 19th century Bagatelle-Table, a sort of hybrid between a “pin table” and pool table, says BMI Gaming of Boca Raton, Florida. “Players tried to hit balls with cue sticks and get them into pockets or slots surrounded by nails and pins.”
We collected cereal box-tops and with the requisite number sent them into Kellogg or some such cereal manufacturer for the stated prize to claim. Sometimes the prizes even came in the cereal box! The invention of a screw injection molding machine by American inventor James Watson Hendry in 1946 changed the world of cereal box prizes. Thermoplastics could be used to produce toys both more cheaply more rapidly because recycled plastic could be remolded using the process.
In addition, injection molding for plastics required much less cool-down time for the toys, because the plastic is not completely melted before injected into the molds. Hendry also developed the first gas-assisted injection molding process in the 1970s, which allowed for the production of complex, hollow prizes that cooled quickly. This greatly improved design flexibility as well as the strength and finish of manufactured parts while reducing production time, cost, weight and waste, notes Whaley Products Inc. of Burkburnett, Texas in a website article on the history of injection molding you can read here online, should you be so inclined, at: http://www.injectionmoldingchiller.com/history.html
Cereal manufacturers didn’t have a monopoly on cool prizes by any means. Lots of kids cajoled dad to fill ‘er up with Esso Extra in the 1960s so they could get him to also buy a cute and furry fake tiger tail to append to the gas gap. “Put a tiger in your tank” was a slogan created in 1959 by Emery Smith, a young Chicago copywriter who had been briefed to produce a newspaper ad to boost sales of Esso Extra. In 1964 the character hit his stride with a campaign developed by New York-based McCann Erickson (now known mainly as McCann). He quickly gave Esso (known mainly by its Exxon brand name in the United States since 1972) a highly recognizable identifiable brand in a market where brand differentiation has never been easy. As Esso sales soared and the advertising became the talk of advertising pros, TIME magazine declared 1964 to be “The Year of the Tiger” on Madison Avenue.
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