This book about the toy biz will be a TV series. Here's the author in 1998.

“I went in with this naive notion that what I was going to find … was sort of this fun-filled Santa’s workshop.”

Toy Wars cover
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Author’s book inscription

Reporter G. Wayne Miller’s inside story about the 1980s and ’90s battles between the toy companies Mattel and Hasbro, Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies That Make Them, is in the works as a drama series from Amazon, starring and co-written by Josh Gad (Frozen, Angry Birds, Broadway’s Book of Mormon).

… Which makes timely my 1998 interview with Miller—a session he called “absolutely great” and one that he’d remember “for years.”

As he then described his five-year mission, “I went in with this naive notion that what I was going to find inside Hasbro or any giant toy company was sort of this fun-filled Santa’s workshop. And, in fact, what I found was a very brutally competitive business.”

Let’s set the WABAC Machine for a time before iPads, iPhones and iPads took center stage in kids’ imaginations to hear a firsthand account of the real-life drama that shaped generations of childhoods.



Footnote: Almost seven years before this interview, I had a personal interaction with Kenner Products, eventually subsumed into the Hasbro empire. It was the subject of my first column for Oak Park’s Wednesday Journal newspaper, newly resurrected on this blog.