Don't Play With Your Food

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

Max Kull, LHS '67, wrote, "How about some love for this guy? I don't think I've seen this one mentioned in any of your recent issues. We're all of the age to have had one of these in his glory days before he went plastic and gender neutral. This spud's for you!"

Max sent a link to an internet article that covers the history of this favorite toy. Here is the info.

The Surprisingly Starchy History of Mr. Potato Head

Before he was a "Toy Story" star, Hasbro's first major hit was … an actual potato.

By Tim Nelson

Hasbro's line of potato head products is back in the news these days, with the toy maker announcing it would drop the "Mr." from the line of toys, though the names Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head would still refer to individual anthropomorphized potatoes that kids could create and play with as they see fit. The subtle change might take certain Potato Head fans some getting used to, but it certainly wouldn't mark the most significant change in the history of this particular food-based toy. In fact, it wouldn't even come close.

Behold, the bizarre, unexpected story of how one man's observation that kids play with their food would end up entertaining generations of kids while also starring in one of the most beloved animated films of all time.

The Mr. Potato Head concept was the brainchild of George Lerner, a Brooklyn-born inventor who spent his childhood making dolls for his sisters out of potatoes from the garden, fashioning rudimentary facial features out of fruits and vegetables. Over time, that idea evolved into a toy that'd give kids the tools and accessories they needed to transform sturdy starches and vegetables into dolls of their own.

By the time Lerner began formally pitching the idea in 1949, however, potential business partners were skeptical. Only a few years removed from the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II-era rationing, the idea of encouraging kids to "waste" perfectly good food by turning it into a toy didn't sit well with some. Eventually, Lerner was able to get a food company to agree to put some of the plastic pieces in its cereal boxes, handing Lerner $5,000 for his troubles.

That's (obviously) not where the story of Mr. Potato Head ends. In 1951, Henry and Merrill Hassenfeld, owners of a small toy company called Hassenfeld Brothers (which we now know as Hasbro) saw Lerner's idea and fell in love with it, paying the cereal company both $5,000 for the rights, plus an extra $2,000 to halt their production. They gave Lerner a $500 advance and a 5 percent cut of every Mr. Potato Head kit sold, which sure sounds like a fairly good deal in hindsight. And thus, the first real version of what we know as "Mr. Potato Head" was "born."

As you might've gathered from Lerner's original source of inspiration, the original Mr. Potato Head didn't come with a "potato" at all. Each of these early kits came with 28 plastic facial features including eyes, nose, mouth, ears, accessories like pipes or glasses, and, most unsettlingly, hair. The potato body? Back in the day, you had to go out and find your own dang potato (or tomato, or — even more unexpectedly — a cucumber) to jab with pointy sticks yourself. Kids whose parents would rather not have them stab the family's starches could "practice" making faces on an included bit of styrofoam.

It's hard to say whether creating a face on styrofoam or giving hair to a lumpy potato is a more unsettling image, but those potato head kits (1952 retail price: $0.98) sold like hotcakes. Mr. Potato Head's early success was no doubt aided by its starring role in what was literally the first-ever televised toy commercial. Perhaps because parents had no experience resisting the urge to buy something their kids saw on TV, Mr. Potato Head supposedly surged to $4 million in sales (the equivalent of just under $39.2 million in 2021) in a matter of months after its launch.

Mirroring the trajectory of many American families in those postwar years, the Potato Head family would grow, also enjoying the trappings of a more (upwardly) mobile way of life in the form of cars and boats. Mr. Potato Head met Mrs. Potato Head when she was introduced in 1953, and potato children "Brother Spud" and "Sister Yam" (the Boomers of the family) soon followed.

Things seemed swell with the Potato Head family until the 1960s, when it suddenly occurred to the government that having kids shoving pointy-ended, easily swallowable bits of plastic into potentially moldy produce maybe wasn't such a great idea. Though the Child Protection and Toy Safety Act wouldn't become law until 1969, Hasbro decided to play it safe by ditching the "BYO potato" model in favor of an included plastic spud that could hold facial features without the need for sharp sticks. In a move to further reduce potential choking hazards, the plastic potato doubled in size in 1975 to resemble what non-Boomers recall from their own childhoods.

In addition to inspiring the product's initial popularity, Hasbro's media savvy also helped introduce Mr. Potato Head to a whole new generation thanks to 1995's Toy Story. Voiced by legendary comedian Don Rickles, Mr. Potato Head's status as the only licensed toy to appear in Pixar's smash hit (and its sequels) was a marketing coup for the then-43-year-old toy.

So if you're somehow worried about how the switch from "Mr. Potato Head" to "Potato Head" will affect a toy that's nearing its 70th birthday, rest assured that this spunky spud has been through much bigger changes and come out all the better for it. As long as Hasbro doesn't decide to go back to making kids decorate their own lumpy potatoes, I have a feeling everything's going to work out just fine.

The Wayback Machine

Thanks to Max Kull for taking the time to send in a suggestion for our look-back at the toys we grew up with. Most of the Class of '64 would have been six years old when Mr. Potato Head arrived; '65, five; '66, four. I know I stabbed a lot of potatoes making faces when I got my kit. I did not remember that it originally came with only the face parts and not a body to place them on. 

Keep the ball rolling...I need someone else to help me with some other great toy memories.

Last Week's Questions, Answers, 

And Comments

Mary Ann Bond Wallace, LHS ‘64, "I love seeing and reading about the toys of our childhood and the personal comments.  As a child I was such a tomboy.  My brother, Al would get pop guns, coon skin caps, bows and arrows and I would get a doll with clothes for Christmas.  I seldom played with my dolls but wanted to play with what Al had gotten from Santa.  Through the years I started getting the things that boys loved to play with.  I had a Balsa Glider and broke or lost many of them.  I had my own pop guns.  Al and I went through rows of popping cap strips that were loaded into the gun - great sound.  One thing that was not mentioned that we had every summer were paper kites.  I grew up in Louisiana until age 9 or 10, then 2 1/2 years in Tennessee and then Huntsville and Lee Jr High.  My father would take us to the high school grounds in Bossier City, LA where there was a raise area and lots of room to run and get your kite up in the wind currents.  One of my favorite memories!  I was a very energetic child, probably ADHD (which was not known at that time), and got into a lot of trouble and spent a lot of time with my nose in the corner.  So many of the baby dolls I received were rubber bodies with stuffing.  One year I found my mother's syringe (she was a nurse but did not work).  I filled the syringe with water and gave my baby doll shots in the butt.  Needless to say, I got in trouble and the doll had to be thrown away. The memories and information in our Lee's Traveller are always fun to read and discover my own memories that I had not thought about in years."

Barb Biggs Knott, LHS ‘66, "I always looked forward to the Betsy McCall paper dolls, but I think my favorite doll was my Saucy Walker doll that I named Susie. I still have her. I ended up sending her away to have her eyes, hair repaired as well as them putting her head back on. She's beautiful now just as I remember her."