In September Kris Paulson attended the “worldwide launch” of an animatronic creature named iZ at the Toys “R” Us in Times Square. Nine inches tall and shaped like a squat bowling pin, iZ has big wide eyes, trumpetlike ears, three legs with disk-shaped feet (it can balance on any one of them, appearing to be in mid-sproing), and–maybe most significantly–a line-in jack for an iPod or other music player. A store employee showed Paulson how you could play music through iZ, how the toy contributes its own sound effects and commentary, how its built-in beats and lead and rhythm tracks could be used to make music, how it giggles wildly when its belly is “tickled” or tapped rapidly.
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Founded in 1988, Big Monster Toys is a direct descendant of Marvin Glass & Associates, whose windowless company headquarters were at LaSalle and Chicago. Some of the most famous toys of the past 40 years were dreamed up by Glass’s team: Lite-Brite, Operation, Mousetrap, the original rubber puddle of vomit. Glass, who died in 1974, was known for being paranoid, intensely secretive, and obsessively committed to toy invention. He was one of the first independents to pitch products to companies that had previously relied exclusively on their own employees for new ideas. Glass in effect founded the small community of indie toy designers that’s still centered in Chicago today. BMT’s founders–Jeffrey Breslow, Rouben Terzian, and Howard Morrison–all worked for Marvin Glass & Associates for more than 30 years before starting their own firm. Terzian and Morrison retired in 2003; Breslow now heads up BMT with three new partners.
BMT’s 30-odd inventors turn out four to five hundred prototypes a year, anything from plastic clothing for miniature dolls to action figures to board games–but no video games, and nothing violent. A small number of these inventions–maybe 20 to 25, Breslow says–end up getting sold to companies like Mattel and Hasbro, and of those only a tiny fraction go on to become household names. Timing is everything, Breslow says. When BMT developed an electronic board game based on The Apprentice for Hasbro last year, he got the Donald to record the voice track, on which Trump boasts that this is the “best game ever invented” and, inevitably, breaks the news when players get fired. “A very sophisticated toy,” Breslow says fondly, but it hit the market nine months too late and didn’t become the smash hit BMT or Hasbro had hoped for. “It’s a business where you have to learn to accept failure,” he says.
For toy mock-ups BMT designers will often poach parts from existing toys, a process they call “kit bashing.” Kurtzer, for instance, has an iDog–a canine-shaped speaker for an iPod–on his bench right now, ripped to pieces. “We take everything apart,” he says. “We were those kids who took apart TVs and managed not to kill ourselves.” One of the first things the designers did to create the iZ mock-up was buy a bunch of talking Bill Clinton dolls and dismantle them. They knew the Clinton dolls had a mechanism that was “very quiet, very responsive,” Crisanti says. Meanwhile Civettini ripped up a plush purple monkey and put its feet on the new character.
Zizzle had planned to introduce iZ as its lead toy next year, but retailers pressed Shiffman to get it into stores for this Christmas. So BMT went from that first crude prototype to production in nine months, record time for the firm.
“They don’t even know where we work,” Kurtzer says, straight-faced. “Our names are aliases, actually.”
