Recently my mother was gathering up the last of my childhood toys in a bin bag, for me to either pass on to my own kids or dispense with. It happened to be just at that moment in the summer when Barbie was making a fortune at the box office. Greta Gerwig’s movie about a Mattel-made doll was a sensation, and dozens of other toy-to-screen adaptations were said to be coming in Barbie’s wake, for instance a Lena Dunham-written version of the 1990s toy line Polly Pocket and JJ Abrams’ take on those miniature Hot Wheels cars. Film-makers and other creatives were looking again at the playthings of their youth to see what brilliant contemporary stories might be spun out of He-Man, Thomas the Tank Engine, Cluedo and Uno. I peered inside my toy bag: an assortment of action figures that smelled of perished rubber, Thatcher-era dust and now (unless I was getting ahead of myself) life-altering possibility. Was a piece of billion-dollar intellectual property (IP) sitting right here in my lap?
I was amazed at the level of random detail I could still remember about my He-Man henchman, my StarCom commanders, my average GI Joes. There were toys in the bag from well-known lines such as Hasbro’s Transformers and Kenner’s Ghostbusters, as well as those that reached further and further into obscurity or discontinuation. Maybe there was untapped potential in one of the tiny rubber monsters from the Monster in My Pocket range. Or how about the larger, shades-wearing rodents from the Biker Mice from Mars? Similar ambitious discussions will have taken place in boardrooms and writers’ rooms ever since Barbie struck big.
Hollywood can be relied on to learn lessons (not always the best ones) from movies that make money. There is a movie about Magic 8 Ball in development. By 2025, we must expect that cinemas and streaming services will be awash with bombastic imaginings of (who knows) Stickle Bricks, kiss chase, Wembley doubles.
Why be passive come the inevitable deluge, I think to myself, one day in October, as I’m rooting through my bag of dusty figures? Why can’t I get involved in the IP gold rush?
I come across a muscular, armoured man from a long-forgotten toy line called Visionaries. Hey, buddy! His preposterous name – Witterquick – flashes in to my head and I remember his backstory, that he was a member of an order of magical space knights who could transform into animals. I even remember the 1988 TV ad that suckered me in, its stirring, synth-heavy jingle, the insistent voices that sang the name of the toy and explained the concept: “Visionaries! With magical powers they fiiiiiiiiight!” After some Googling and emailing, I find the person who helped shepherd these Visionaries into existence 35 years ago.
“Nobody ever asks me about this,” says Flint Dille with delight. A veteran screenwriter, he spent years working with toy companies to develop the cartoons that helped them sell their products to kids. “When people do [mention Visionaries], it’s almost always British people. Must be something about the international release patterns?” Dille is 68 but, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and chewing gum, he looks and sounds younger. Chatting by video from his Los Angeles home, he drinks coffee, yawns and otherwise readies himself for what he calls “a real rip-snorter of a day”, picketing outside a Hollywood studio as part of the then ongoing writers’ strike.
Dille remembers first hearing about the concept for Visionaries while sitting in a Manhattan skyscraper. He was between bigger-seeming jobs for the toy giant Hasbro, working on the more successful Transformers franchise and helping develop the soon-to-be-huge Garbage Pail Kids. Dille remembers Visionaries being “this weird orphan idea … It’s hazy.” Hasbro had had the notion to release a new line of action figures that were shapeshifting space knights bedecked with holograms of jungle animals. A kids’ cartoon would support the release of a first wave of toys. They had a few characters’ names, a few prototypes and sketches. Dille’s job was to flesh out the rest of the fictional world.
“I gave it a kind of King Arthur vibe,” he recalls, “a climate apocalypse thing where we’ve run out of gasoline.” There was a man who wore red and grey space armour and had a weaponised boomerang (he was my favourite) and a woman who could manifest as a dolphin. “These characters are shapeshifters?” Dille remembers thinking. “OK! That’s kind of cool, never met a shapeshifter I didn’t like. I just had fun with it. It was kind of very low-stakes poker. We started probably in summer 86 and I was done working on it by fall 87. I think the toy line was cancelled before the show even came out in the US.”
I ask what became of the underlying rights after those toys disappeared from shelves? Dille isn’t sure. I know from scouring the Hollywood trade press that a gang of freelance writers got hired in the mid-2010s to work on ideas to revive the franchise. But the trail goes cold in 2016. Dille wishes me luck on my IP quest, still tickled to have received a call about such a specific, vivid, faintly ridiculous moment from his past. “We were all at the peak of our powers ... I don’t know if it ever occurred to me then that I’d be sitting here in 2023 talking to someone who actually paid attention to all that stuff.”
* * *
Gerwig certainly paid attention to the mythos, the weird, time-stranded notions that clung to her beloved Barbie dolls. It’s what made her movie, co-written with her partner, Noah Baumbach, and produced by its star, Margot Robbie, so interesting. Instead of cruising on brand nostalgia – easily done – these creators went deeper, investigating the essence of a doll that once captivated Gerwig and informed her development, for better or worse. Central to the movie are scenes that bring together Robbie’s Barbie and her real-life creator, Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman. Gerwig used these scenes and others to explore a distance between the adult intentions behind toys and the way toys are actually, honestly played with by children. Gerwig must have sensed that the secret to a successful adaptation was not to dully dramatise the scripted backstory of a product (Barbie loves Ken), but to dramatise the story that must have resulted a million times in actual play (Barbie has no need for Ken).
Ideally, all the inbound Barbie knock-offs will be equally well thought out and worthwhile. We’ll have to see about that. Sitting with my own sack of toys, I try to look at them through a Gerwigian lens. I ask myself, what did I love about He-Man’s closest friend and pet, the snarling green tiger known as Battle Cat, and what did Battle Cat’s creator mean for me to love? I get in touch with Joe Morrison, a former Mattel executive who is known as the main creative force behind the He-Man line. Sharp, friendly, but getting on now, Morrison speaks to me with the help of some prompts from his wife and business partner, Barbara Lewis.
I have a few competing theories about Battle Cat and where the fundamental appeal of his character lies. You see, Battle Cat was quite a multilayered tiger. Out of costume, he was nervy – a coward, they would have called him in the 80s. As soon as he was in his spiked red armour, though, he turned brave. Perhaps Morrison and his collaborators had subversion in mind when they created Battle Cat. Perhaps they were nodding towards the absurdity of ever changing a creature’s fundamental nature?
Lewis looks at her husband: “What’s the Battle Cat story? Wasn’t it something you repurposed?”
“Sure,” he smiles. “There was some other product from another line that we redecorated and changed a little bit.”
This is a revelation so disappointing I’ll later lose some sleep over it. For now, we talk about Monster in My Pocket instead. This was another line Morrison invented after leaving Mattel to form his own toy company, MEG, in the late 1980s. The Monster in My Pocket figurines were each about the size of a thumb, unbreakable and (as a TV ad of the era repeatedly made plain) squishy. There was a werewolf one, a zombie one, a gargoyle one – I had the gargoyle one. Trying to sift through this to something complex and screen-worthy, as Gerwig did with her Barbies, I ask Morrison and Lewis why they think it was so fun for a kid like me to walk around with a shrunken rubber gargoyle in my pocket.
“Boys want power. Obviously,” Morrison says. “They want to be able to control things. Monsters are scary. But if they can control them by sticking them in their pocket, that transfers the power.” HBO serial, I’m thinking. Something about troubled young men and their confused pursuit of power for its own sake.
Whatever became of the screen rights to Monster in My Pocket, I ask Morrison and Lewis? Are they available? Turns out, a French studio called Cyber Group has been working on an animated series for several years. As for the live-action rights, I’ve just missed them. “Guys like you are coming out of the woodwork in various industries,” says Lewis. She means, guys like me who used to play with these things and are now, on paper, grownups. “Two guys came to us from a production company … They said we love Monster in My Pocket, we grew up with it, we have kids of our own, we wanna make a live-action series … They likened it to Stranger Things … We came to a final agreement last week.”
Lewis and Morrison can tell that I’m a little crestfallen, hearing this. I definitely thought that Monster in My Pocket would be well enough forgotten to be there for the taking. “Did you ever play with Stink Blasters?” asks Lewis, kindly. The rights to Stink Blasters are available. “That was a very creative toy,” says Morrison, “sales were through the roof for a couple of years … They stunk.”
But, no, I never played with Stink Blasters and so would struggle with a creative onscreen reimagining. As we say goodbye, the couple direct me to a few useful trademark databases, from which interested parties can learn who owns the rights to what and in which territory. I look into the licence to adapt Biker Mice from Mars, which resides with a company called Nacelle. I speak to Nacelle’s CEO, Brian Volk-Weiss, a toy obsessive who has about 4,000 action figures in his collection at home. At first we compare notes on our memories of the Visionaries line (Volk-Weiss owns several), then he explains how he managed to get his hands on the Biker Mice – by tracking the rights back to their source, in this case creator Rick Ungar, then paying a licensing fee “between the high six figures and the low seven figures”.
I’ve started to compile a list of the weirder toys in my bin bag, the rights to which must surely be available for less than that. Does Volk-Weiss have any advice for me if I am successful in securing some choice IP? Don’t expect to please everybody, he says. All toys are sacrosanct to the individuals who once adored them – but in different ways. “For every 100 comments you get, 98 will say: ‘This is cool, this is awesome!’ And two will say: ‘You are destroying my childhood.’”
That same day, I get through to the executives at Cyber Group Studios, who are adapting Monster in My Pocket for Morrison and Lewis. One of them, Dominique Bourse, joins our video call from France, the other, Ira Singerman, from an office in Burbank, California. Out of his window, Singerman says, he can see a water tower on the Warner Bros lot that the studio – which distributed Gerwig’s Barbie – has painted pink.
What do they intend to do at Cyber Group with their rival adaptation of Monster in My Pocket? Treat this toy as a text for open interpretation, Singerman suggests. “It’s like an actor learning his part. We read the text, we know the text, the text is the data – but now we’re going to play the part.” Bourse picks up the thread from Paris. “How do we make a seven- or eight-year-old kid today experience with the same intensity what young Tom experienced in 1990 with the original Monster in My Pocket? That is the challenge. It is absolutely thrilling. Nobody has the answer. It is really about trying and being wrong and trying again.”
As for how one secures the IP in the first place, “there might still be some low-hanging fruit out there”, Singerman says. “When I started, the streamers and broadcasters were saying, ‘Find us IP, find us IP,’ and I went through old catalogues, old movies ... It’s like going through a vault and blowing the dust off things, trying to see where the hidden treasure is. But the treasure’s hard to find.”
* * *
It really is. Biker Mice: taken. Monster in My Pocket: taken. By now, looking for any hanging fruit, low or otherwise, I’m down to the bottom of the bin bag. For a while, in about 1990, I was completely besotted by a handheld rubber puppet with purple skin and beady yellow eyes, part of the Boglins range. Remember Boglins? You probably don’t. I left the Boglin off my original list because, much as I adored it, it literally started to disintegrate in my hands one day and had to be thrown away. When I call up the toy’s American creator, Tim Clarke, a designer affectionately known as “the king of gross”, I mention the fate of that old product and he winces.
“The original Boglins were made by Mattel in Mexico, and the production standards were probably not …” Clarke trails off, apologetic. He lives on a Navajo reservation now, and still designs toys. “I’m amazed that some of those Boglins are still around, to tell the truth.” We reminisce for a minute about how difficult the buggy eyes of the puppet were to operate. “Terrible prongs on the inside!” he says. “I never understood why Mattel did that. It was painful to put your fingers in.”
As gently as I can, I guide us on to some speculative discussion of a movie, what a modern Boglins story might look like, what sort of stars might attach. It’s all sounding promising until Clarke describes the winding journey the rights to his Boglins have taken, from Mattel to a British company called Ideal, then to another company called Action GT, then to another company called Seven Towns, then finally back to Mattel. That latest deal with Mattel was finalised in June. Clarke is “cautiously optimistic”, given the success of Barbie, that a Boglins movie might result. He’ll get a piece.
I’m happy for him. I’ll be first in line with a ticket. But it is with a heavy heart that I cross Boglins off the list and decide, if those rights are taken, will anything at all remain? The Bionic Six? That family of crime-fighting cyborgs had an 80s toy line made of unusually heavy material that meant they sank to the bottom of the bath – annoying. The Supernaturals? Spooky to the point of being sinister, they all had holograms where their faces ought to have been. The Supernaturals were created in the 80s by Tonka, a toy company since absorbed by Hasbro. I get in touch with Hasbro’s licensing department, and am eventually put through to a nice executive called Olivier Dumont.
He doesn’t think the company has plans to do much with the Supernaturals. But as we’re discussing what it would take for me to pitch for the rights, I start to wonder if my heart’s really in this. Guiltily, I’m still thinking about those toys at the top of my list, the Biker Mice, Battle Cat, most of all those absurd magical knights from the Visionaries line, with their holographic panels and their boomerangs. These toys are texts I know in my bones. With magical powers they fi-i-i-i-ght!
I ask Dumont if he would call the relevant Hasbro people, just to double-check the status of those Visionaries rights, just in case? He agrees to look into it. Later he sends me a regretful email. Hasbro doesn’t have any imminent plans to adapt Visionaries, but neither does the company want to let go of the rights. It feels like the end of the road. When Gerwig was looking for a way to bring her Barbie movie to a resolution, she stuck in a scene with Handler, the toy’s creator. Thinking of this, I drift back to Dille, the screenwriter who made Visionaries seem so vivid and brilliant to me as a kid.
With the writers’ strike over, Dille has just started work on some new Transformers stuff, he tells me. He says he recently went through his attic at home, pulling out tattered scripts and notepads full of ideas relating to dozens of different toy lines from the past, GI Joe, Garbage Pail Kids ... Weirdly, Dille says, “I didn’t find any Visionaries stuff.” He wonders if this was a sign. Maybe some things are better left in the past. “Cos you can’t go home, right?”
I realise I never asked him – what was his favourite toy when he was eight years old? We’re talking over video when I put this question and he disappears out of view for two minutes, three minutes. When he returns, he is holding a small silver car. “Do not work under the assumption that I ever stopped being an eight-year-old kid,” Dille says. “It’s still there. It never goes away. In fact, it’s what you go back to when everything else starts to be over.”
He shows off the toy, a miniature replica of one of James Bond’s cars. “It shoots missiles out the back,” Dille grunts. And, as muscle memory kicks in, a frown of childish absorption on his face, he loads and fires a tiny missile. “I remember first opening the box,” he says. “That’s the magic of this stuff. You remember.”
