Rent Was Due on Every Action Figure

A toy maker sold roughly 40 million pieces in 1978 on characters it did not own. The owner set the calendar, and by 2000 the company was gone.

The tiny guns are gone.

Each figure came with a blaster about the length of a grain of rice. Almost none of them survived the shag carpet.

The figures are still in a shoebox in the basement. Three and three-quarter inches tall, with arms that swung at the shoulder and nowhere else.

The cardboard cards they hung on went out with the wrapping paper on Christmas morning. So did the plastic bubbles.

The movie had already left the theater. It was not on television, and nobody had a tape of it.

So the only way to see it again was to stage it yourself, on the patio, from memory.

The name printed on every one of those cards belonged to a toy company in Ohio.

Kenner was founded in 1946 in Cincinnati by three brothers named Steiner. They named it after the street where they kept their office.

For thirty years it sold its own ideas. A bubble gun. A toy oven that baked a small cake with a light bulb.

In 1977 it signed for the toy rights to a space movie called Star Wars. By a later newspaper account, the terms were a $25,000 advance and a royalty of about five percent.

That was the whole arrangement. Kenner owned the molds, the packaging and the shipping schedule.

It did not own a single face.

The figure looked like the product. The real product was permission, and permission belonged to someone else.

Every figure sold sent a few cents west to the man who owned the story. The story, not the toy company, decided when children would want more.

The timing was almost perfect.

Home video was still rare. A child who loved the film could not replay it, so the figures became the replay.

The small scale mattered too. Figures that size made the ships and playsets cheap enough to build, and a ship needed a crew.

Demand arrived faster than the factories. For Christmas 1977, Kenner sold an envelope in a box, a certificate promising figures that would ship in the spring.

A few hundred thousand families bought the promise.

In 1978 the line sold about 40 million units, worth roughly $100 million. More than 300 million would sell before the original run ended.

The rent had been set before anyone knew what the house was worth.

A toy company with its own characters could release a new one any season it liked.

A tenant waited for the landlord.

The third film came out in 1983. After that there was no new movie to send children back to the store.

By mid-1985 demand had slowed, and Kenner ended the line.

The rest of the industry had been watching. Studios and story owners now priced the toy rights before the cameras rolled.

When the next three films were licensed in 1997, the contract carried a minimum guarantee of about $590 million.

A royalty that had once cost a few cents a figure now required one of the largest balance sheets in the business.

General Mills, which had owned Kenner since 1967, spun off its toy business in 1985.

Two years later a truck maker from Minnesota paid about $622 million for it, mostly with borrowed money.

In 1991 Hasbro bought the truck maker for roughly $500 million, less than the price of the toy company alone four years earlier.

The figures kept coming for a while, still stamped with the old name.

Then, in 2000, Hasbro closed the Cincinnati offices. About 100 people moved east. About 420 were laid off.

The name now turns up on retro packaging, as a style.

Walk down any toy aisle today and most of the faces are borrowed.

Superheroes, cartoon animals and streaming characters all arrive with a license attached and a royalty flowing back to whoever owns the story.

The toy maker supplies the factory, the shelf space and the risk.

The story owner supplies the reason anyone wants it.

That division was invented, almost by accident, in a Cincinnati office in 1977.

The plastic could be made anywhere. The faces had only one landlord.