Hasbro called G.I. Joe an action figure so boys would buy a doll
In 1964 a Rhode Island company that had started out selling textile scraps launched a posable soldier and refused to call it a doll. The label action figure let boys play with it without embarrassment, and for two years the toy brought in two-thirds of the firm's sales.
Herman, Hillel and Henry Hassenfeld, Jewish immigrants from Ulanów in Poland, founded Hassenfeld Brothers in Providence in late 1923. The first trade was textile remnants, then pencil cases and school supplies, and when their pencil supplier began making cases too, they started producing their own pencils. Modelling clay and doctor and nurse kits were their first toys, and by 1942 toys had become the main business. During the war years the family also helped rescue and employ Jews from their hometown.
The action figure grew out of a refusal. Offered a licence for a toy tied to a TV series, the company worried the show might not last and designed G.I. Joe instead. The name was shortened to Hasbro Industries in 1968, and as the Vietnam War peaked the next year, Joe was reworked into an adventurer rather than a soldier. Missteps followed in the 1970s, including a lawn dart toy and a syringe-shaped water gun, both recalled, and by 1977 losses reached $2.5 million.
Stephen Hassenfeld turned things round. He cut the product line by a third and stuck with cheap, long-lived toys like Mr. Potato Head, avoiding the electronic games crash of the early 1980s. In 1982 he revived G.I. Joe with help from Marvel Comics and launched My Little Pony. After spotting two Japanese toy lines from Takara at a Tokyo fair in 1983, Hasbro licensed them and relaunched them as Transformers, backed by a cartoon series.
Buying Milton Bradley in 1984 helped push Hasbro past Mattel to become the largest toymaker in the world by the mid-1980s, and the name became simply Hasbro, Inc. in 1985. When Stephen died in 1989, yearly sales had climbed from $104 million to more than $1.4 billion during his tenure.
Source: Hasbro
