Tonka

And Lake Minnetonka was certainly home to me.

We were home to Tonka Toys.

A lot of people don't know where Tonka Toys were made.

That's where the idea and the name came from.

Lake Minnetonka, Tonka Toys.

So my little town of 7,000 people employed quite a few people for many years.

And then they did what most businesses did.

Mm-hmm.

And I had to borrow my friend's Tonka truck.

And then I lied to everybody.

I lied to their face that this was my Tonka truck and I described how I play with it, you know? But that fear of being poor never left me.

It never left me to a certain extent to the point where, you know, In college, I was gambling to the extreme where I would over-leverage myself in real estate.

This is in my 20s.

Not only did you have Voltron and then the Transformers, but another Japanese toy line called Machine Robo.

The North American toy version was released by Tonka, with an animated series produced by Hanna-Barbera.

Let's go, let's go, let's go! In The Challenge of the Gobots, Peter Cullen provided voices for Tank, Pinscher, and in a departure from his signature deeper voice, a character that feels like it may have influenced Jar Jar Binks.

And that was the character Spoiler.

Mound is about 25 miles west of Minneapolis, straight west.

It's on the shores, the western shores of beautiful Lake Minnetonka, and my little town was home to Tonka Toys, Lake Minnetonka, Tonka Toys.

So population about 7,000.

It was a very athletic town.

no it wasn't any of those you couldn't dive you know couldn't see anything great memories though oh great memories alright let's get into this next one We had Corinthians.

What about Tonka? Sports dog.

Tonka.

Yeah.

Where

You know, it used to be that there was more than just Hasbro out there.

I'll use Hasbro as an example, but, you know, Hasbro now has Tonka and Kenner and all of Milton Bradley.

Toilets.

So... you had different companies coming up with innovative ideas, innovative play patterns, and the whole bit.

And I still have them all.

I have every matchbox, Hot Wheels, model car, every Tonka truck, every toy I've ever owned, I still have.

Man, I am super fucking jealous of you.

I have

After doing a lot of R&D on it, they scrapped it once again.

Meanwhile, the company continued to get larger because it ended up absorbing, in 1991, Tonka toys, which, as we discussed in our Kenner Parker episode, had ultimately ended up buying Kenner Parker when Kenner Parker fell apart.

which ended up being a disaster because after the stock market crash in 1987, their financing was suddenly not so good, and Kenner Parker had actually been the bigger company.

They had taken out a lot of loans to do this thing, and with the stock market crash, they were now in serious trouble and hurting financially.

It was a dark time, so Hasbro ended up coming in and buying Tonka Toys in 1991, which also brought along Kenner Parker, which had been... bought by Tonka a few years prior.

That's a very important event to our story, because now that we've got the Hasbro background, we can finally shift our attention to the formation of their first actual true, we're really going forward to this interactive initiative, Hasbro Interactive.

The impetus for that did not come from anyone within traditional Hasbro.

It did not come from anyone within Milton Bradley.

A true log cabin is like log construction.

It looks like a Tonka, you know, the old toys, the Tonka bricks or whatever they're called.

It looks like that from the inside.

You can see the logs.

you're talking about like Lincoln Logs.

That's what I'm thinking of.

Yeah, Tonka Trucks is what I said.

Lincoln Logs is what I was thinking of.

That's it.

Um, when Mel was making the prop table, she was deciding which Tonka wrestling buddy to bring over there.

Ooh.

And it was between Macho King and Hulk Hogan.

WrestleMania V sets off, like, this chain of events when wrestling is peaking, and you think about WWF Hasbro Series 1 and what all those figures look like and the guys that were selected to be in that toy line.

It's all based on this time period.

Macho Series 1 Hasbro is wearing what he wore at WrestleMania V. Twin Towers are a tag team like they were at WrestleMania V. It's like Hasbro Series 1 sets off a chain of events of all the merch that we grew up with, the Tonka wrestling buddies, the video games, the board games.

It all kind of starts here.