Toy story

A LITTLE MORE THAN 40 years ago, a Southern California chemical engineer approached a local toy company called Wham-O with an idea. It stemmed from a substance he had stumbled on by accident while designing an industrial valve. It didn't teach anything, or require batteries purchased separately, or appeal to a carefully-studied demographic group. But formed into a ball, it bounced--higher than anyone had seen a ball bounce before.

The folks at Wham-O, who had an eye for this sort of thing, signed him up.

After some tinkering, some practice play, and a christening with the requisite catchy name, Wham-O introduced the Superball to the world in 1965. By the end of the year, some 6 million were sold, and the company could boast another giant success. Wham-O had already introduced the Frisbee in 1957 and the Hula Hoop in 1958, and would later give the world Slip 'N Slide, Silly String, and Superelastic Bubble Plastic. It was a hothouse for simple, iconic, runaway hits.

Kids know a good thing, and the Superball and its ilk represented a particular kind of summertime fun--open-ended, free, and undisciplined. Wham-O's toys didn't need a guiding purpose so much as an air of originality. Founder Richard Knerr called it the ''wow" factor: ''If you're playing with it and showing it off and everybody says, 'What's that? What's that?"'

Then again, kids were different in those days--or, at least, their lives were different. Those endless, lazy summer afternoons are increasingly a thing of the past. A recent study by the market research firm Mintel shows that between 1981 and 1997, the percentage of childrens' days considered ''free-time" dropped from 40 to 24. Studies also show that, in the past two decades, structured sports participation has increased by some 50 percent; another Mintel report found that in 2003, a whopping 86 percent of boys aged 9 to 11 took part in an organized team sport.

And when kids aren't submitting to a regimen of scheduled activities, they're often subjected to academic exercises in the guise of play. Today's toy industry offers video games designed to teach preschoolers math, electronic ''books" that teach reading comprehension, craft kits designed to turn play time into productive time. If Wham-O had a gift for speaking to kids, many toy companies seem to be aiming their pitch directly at parents, selling them on the magnetic idea of achievement.

A new incarnation of Wham-O now hopes to speak to both, marketing a line of ''classic" toys to appeal to parents' nostalgia and kids' own longing for freestyle fun. It's the sort of synergy the toy industry always aims for, though parents and kids don't have a perfect history of seeing eye-to-eye when it comes to play.

''Part of the fun of toys is the connection that we have," says Tim Walsh, author of ''The Playmakers," a history of classic toys. ''It's more than a shiny new Superball--you give your grandkid or your kid a piece of yourself."

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In the beginning, Wham-O didn't plan on selling toys. Knerr and Arthur ''Spud" Melin, childhood buddies fresh from the University of Southern California, aimed to build a sporting-goods business when they launched the company from Knerr's parents' Pasadena garage in 1948. ''Wham-O" was the sound made by their first product, a slingshot.

But in 1956, some Wham-O folks spied a salesman hucking a plastic disc with a miraculous power of flight. Knerr and Melin bought the rights to the product that would later be called the Frisbee, and eventually shifted their focus to toys and games.

They grew their astounding success on two principal ideas. First, Wham-O understood salesmanship. What we know today as guerrilla marketing, Wham-O executives were practicing in the '50s; they called it ''seeding the market," recalls Dick Gillespie, the company's research director at the time. Wham-O offered toys on consignment to local stores, or gave toys away to local kids in the hopes of creating a buzz. Melin and his wife, Suzy, invited themselves to local television stations to demonstrate the Hula Hoop. At one point, Knerr set a rule: Any Wham-O executive who took a flight would have to bring a hoop on board, so the flight attendants would ask about it.

Just as important, though, Wham-O knew about fun. That meant not just studying kids, but channeling them: acting impulsively, giddily, without much thought to consequences. Employees once made a Superball the size of a bowling ball, which somehow managed to fall off a roof in Australia; whether it was an accident or a result of a few ''toddies" appears to be in dispute. (So do the consequences: Some remember it destroying a gift shop, others a parked car.)

Lots of Wham-O toys had a way of getting themselves into mischief. Suzy Melin, whose husband died in 2002, remembers the Silly String she extracted from her carpet --''Oh, gee, I hated that stuff," she says--and the Superballs bouncing through the house. She also recalls the way the neighborhood kids used to knock on her door and ask her 9-year-old daughter, ''Can your dad come out and play?"

''Spud" Melin had a particular brand of rapport with kids, an uncanny ability to get into their brains; he was on the lookout for toys the way some adults keep an eye out for stock tips. (The Water Wiggle, a splash toy that was another onetime Wham-O staple, came about after Melin spied kids playing with a hose in the family swimming pool and realized how funny that thrashing could be.)

Today's parents often seek rapport of a different sort, says Reyne Rice, a trend specialist for the Toy Industry Association of America. That's particularly true of affluent, educated parents who start their families later in life; they have the disposable income to spend on high-tech gizmos, and the well-meaning urge to prepare their kids for looming academic pressures. Their influence on the industry reached a critical mass in 1999, Rice says, the first time an educational toy cracked the Top 5 sellers in the nation.

It was called the LeapFrog LeapPad, and it resembled an old-fashioned lap desk, topped with an electronic board that played interactive books. It's still a top seller, marketed as a ''learning system" to prepare the smallest kids for kindergarten. And it launched a trend that persists. Aside from video games, Rice says, the nation's fastest-growing toy categories are educational: science and exploration kits, building and construction toys, arts and crafts kits, ''electronic learning products."

The way Rice describes it, many of these toys are practically a public service, promoting intergenerational bonding. ''It's that whole thing about finding your kid's passion," she says, recalling how excited her own kids were when they learned to read. ''If kids are interested and are introduced to it in a very fun way, then it involves that whole love of learning."

Not everyone takes such a generous view. Dr. Chris Lucas, who coordinates the Early Childhood Service at the NYU Child Study Center, fears that the toys--including enrichment-conscious educational toys--leave little space for kids to engage in some of the classic psychological purposes of play: interacting with peers, rehearsing social situations, pretending.

''The concern I have over the development of toys and the toy industry," Lucas says, ''is the degree to which toys are now less something that stimulate creativity and interaction, and more things that children passively experience or receive." Press-of-a-button responsiveness can become a crutch, he says.

There's something different about the way an open-ended, active toy can spark the imagination, says Walsh, the ''Playmakers" author. ''The robotic dog can do a lot of things, but it can't be anything but a robotic dog," he says.

A Superball, by contrast, can mean different things to different kids. During Walsh's 1960s childhood, the thrill was in ''the deadly second bounce."

''The first bounce is so harmless, and you kind of get lulled into a false sense of security," Walsh says, starting to sound rapturous. ''We played in the street under the street lamp. We'd bounce it once and then you'd know [you were hit] once you got a welt on your forehead."

Pain (up to a point) can be pleasure to a giddy, active kid, and there is joy in the sheer act of self-exhaustion. The toy industry has been getting some extra heat, of late, for producing so much electronic ''watch-me" fare, acknowledges Rice of the Toy Industry Association of America. Now, companies are responding, she says, ''trying to get behind getting kids off the couch and getting them moving, so it's not a chore."

This fall, she says, a company called Toy Quest is launching a product called ''Go Go TV," a sports game that responds when kids move in front of the television screen. Another company, Wild Planet, has developed a game called ''Tek Tag." You wear a mechanical pod on your arm, and if another player's hand swooshes over the pod, it beeps. You're it.

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Next to such high-tech gadgetry, the old Wham-O fare can look positively quaint: simple shapes powered by water from a hose or the sharp snap of a wrist. The company's current owners hope that's part of the appeal.

Wham-O is in its fourth iteration now, after a few decades of change that mirrored the ever-consolidating state of the toy industry. In 1982, Melin, his health declining, decided to sell his shares, and Knerr followed suit. Wham-O was purchased by Kransco, a large toy company known at the time for selling Power Wheels, a line of ride-on toy cars. In 1994, Kransco--which extended the Wham-O catalog of hits with the Hacky Sack and the Boogie Board--was acquired by the nation's largest toy company, Mattel.

But a few years later, Mattel put the Wham-O line on the block; a spokeswoman says Mattel was asserting its core image, and the Wham-O sport and water toys didn't fit. A new group of private investors bought the company and moved the ''Wham-O Workshop" to Emeryville, Calif.

The current owners' market research makes them believe that Wham-O can capitalize on a growing wave of nostalgia among adult toy-buyers. Retro is hot, Wham-O's vice president of marketing Peter Sgromo points out. (G.I. Joes and marbles are among the other classic toys making a comeback.) And parental guilt, it turns out, is also sweeping the nation, as Gen-Xers and young baby boomers lament their children's overscheduled lives. ''We created this mess," one parent said in a recent Wham-O focus group. Another glumly recalled yelling to a child, ''I'm doing this for you! Get dressed and get your gear!"

Wham-O's aim, Sgromo says, is to produce toys that take the pressure off. ''There's no winning and losing in a Slip 'N Slide," he says. ''It's not like you're going to become the Michael Jordan of Frisbee."

That's a tall order for a few simple pieces of plastic, but Wham-O is rolling out the old toys with verve and some stabs at modernization. The company has rekindled its relationships with devotees of unofficiated, underground Frisbee sports like Ultimate and Frisbee Golf, which it once helped develop. It reissued the Slip 'N Slide with its trademark yellow strip, but some updated features: an inflatable base and a bumper that collects water at the end, to make diving safer for bigger players. (The Slip 'N Slide was first redesigned in the late 1990s, after a man broke his neck on a dive and won $12 million in a product liability suit.)

Wham-O has issued a few new products, as well, such as ''Battle Boogie"--a combination Boogie Board and squirt gun--and a machine that lets kids make their own version of that strangely iconic candy, Marshmallow Peeps.

It's hard to tell how well the experiment is working. Wham-O is privately held, and Sgromo won't release sales figures; he only says the brands are growing. Rice says Wham-O is well-placed in the top 250 toy companies, out of about 5,000 in the country, and ranks even higher in the summer-toy category that is the company's bread and butter.

Walsh said the prospects for Wham-O's classic toys seem good, particularly given their price points: compared to a $75 electronic gizmo, a Superball is something a kid might be able to afford on his own.

And of course, Wham-O has reissued the original Superball, which had been off the market for decades. But 40 years after its debut, today's product is different, Sgromo says. It doesn't bounce quite as radically as it used to. The retro collectors aren't pleased, he says, but as ever, Wham-O is following the kids: According to the company's marketing research, kids today prefer consistency to a deadly bounce.

Joanna Weiss covers pop culture for the Globe's Living/Arts department. E-mail weiss@globe.com.