Name: おもちゃの専門家だけど質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-03-05T08:50:38.000Z
Duration: 14 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm an independent toy analyst and historian.

I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.

At Addie915 says, why are they called teddy bears?

Actually, the teddy bear is named for Theodore Roosevelt.

And in 1905, Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot a baby bear on a hunting trip.

Morris Mictum of the Ideal Toy Company saw that.

He wrote to Teddy Roosevelt and said, can I make that teddy bear?

And that's how the teddy bear came along.

Now, that's not the only story, because Steiff, which is a German plush company, also said that they made teddy bears at the same time.

So that's one of those historic conflicts.

But at the end of the day, the teddy bear is still named for Theodore Roosevelt.

At MacTagney says, just seen a commercial of a toy that pooped.

How do toy makers come up with these dumb ideas?

There is millions of dollars that's been made with poop toys over the years.

Whether it's a magic toilet where the poop disappears or it's a pooping dog, this is comedy if you're three years old.

Consistent with the Freudian anal stage, as children are discovering their bodies.

So for example, when Baby Alive first came out, Baby Alive was designed to replicate a real child.

But suddenly there was a mechanism that allowed the doll to have solid food put in and it came out into the diaper.

So for a child, that was really important because they were understanding their bodies at the time, but they also got to nurture in the way that they were being nurtured in changing the babies.

It's a very short road from that to dogs that poop, to monkeys that poop, to kangaroos that poop, and poop is funny.

Keith L. wants to know, how different do prototypes usually end up being?

Usually when people are developing toys, they start with two different models.

A looks like model, which is often done today with 3D printing, and a works like model, which is a mechanism.

So when those two things move together, very often that's used as the basis for the manufacturing.

So the prototype may go through many different iterations and revisions as you're getting to the final product.

But when you get a final prototype, that's almost the complete toy.

At Keegan Tindall asks, for ages eight and up, how do they decide that for toys?

Are they giving it to younger and younger kids until something really bad happens?

No, there are elaborate testing mechanisms that happen for kids of all different ages.

And because of the way children's bodies develop, you can have a mechanism that measures the size of a child's air pipe.

And then when it gets to eight and up, there's also the cognitive development.

There is the, is my child intellectually ready for this?

And so it's a real good guideline, but definitely for younger kids, you wanna pay attention to those age gratings for what kids can do and what's most safe.

At Toby Teaback wants to know, how can you use math to design a toy?

Toy design is almost all engineering, so it's almost all math.

And you need to figure out the tolerances of plastic, and that's chemistry and physics put together.

So you really need to understand the different levels of math so that you can engineer a toy effectively, so it'll stand up under pressure, it'll pass safety regulations, and of course it'll be fun.

At the 71 Legacy says, do kids still play with action figures?

This is one of the most iconic action figures of all time.

The term action figure was actually coined when Hasbro introduced G.I.

Joe to market for was to be a boy's toy that competed with Barbie, which by 1964 was doing pretty well.

So any toy really targeting largely a boy audience based on a TV show or that is a figure, oh that's a doll, is called an action figure.

But then there's also the concept of the cadult.

These are adults who are still collecting action figures.

They're the ones who are driving toy lines like McFarlane.

They're the ones who are insisting on much more detail in the Marvel or DC action figures.

So yes, action figures are still a big part of the toy industry and a big part of people's lives.

At Lizzy Bob Bizzy says, who is Rubik and why do we have his cube?

In the 1970s, Erno Rubik designed Rubik's Cube as a way of helping to teach math.

What was unique about it is the mechanism inside that allows the cube to turn in different directions on different planes very easily and fluidly.

Rubik's Cube also became kind of synonymous with intelligence.

A kid who could solve Rubik's Cube and could solve it fast or could solve it with their feet was really considered a genius.

It's become a phenomenon within the context of brain puzzles throughout the years.

And there've been many other Rubik's puzzles that have come through the years.

Ed Barstool says, how is the pet rock ever a fad?

The thing about a fad is nobody sees it coming.

The thing about a pet rock was that it came at a specific time, at a specific point in our culture.

It was the whimsical nature of the manual that came with it, which is you could teach your rock to do tricks.

I think Johnny Carson had it on the Tonight Show and it just became this running gag in the country.

At H-Hole 31 says, why were Beanie Babies popular?

Beanie Babies were introduced in the 90s, but it was really when they came into the later 90s and the 2000s that it became collectible.

And people really thought, as Ty Warner decided to discontinue some of the Beanie Babies, that they would grow in value.

So that Peanut the Blue Elephant would be worth $2,000.

That doesn't really happen very often, but that didn't stop people from believing it.

And Beanie Babies created an entire industry around collecting them.

We've seen those kind of phenomenon in history.

Probably the biggest one was the tulip craze in the 17th century when one tulip bulb would be worth what a family could make in a year.

So we really do see this as happening within human civilization from time to time.

At Withered BB Film says, I will never understand how Transformer toys are designed, especially in such high numbers.

The really amazing thing about Transformers, I'm gonna bring my friend Optimus back in here for this.

These were originally made by Takara and it was all about robots transforming.

It's really an engineering tour de force when they do all of these.

The different plastic pieces that fit together and fold up.

This one particularly is done with a process called injection molding.

So you have two halves of a mold and literally what happens is when it's in the machine, liquid plastic is shot into the mold and it takes on the shapes you see here.

That's why precise molding is really important and molds are very expensive.

Molds also have a life cycle so they have to keep redoing them.

So it really is a way of getting the plastic into a shape but with Transformers, it's doubly hard because not only do you get it into the shape but it has to move in a specific way and there's not a lot of room for mistakes in this.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

おもちゃの専門家だけど質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan

specific

entire

stick

phenomenon