The Toys That Built America

After passing on the biggest deal in toy industry history, Mattel President Ray Wagner finds himself a step behind former colleague-turned-rival, Bernie Loomis.

Defence contractor Ralph Baer invents the world's first home video game console. But it is soon eclipsed by a new table tennis game that becomes one of the most famous video games of all time.

A visionary named Marvin Glass oversees the creation of many of the most iconic toys of the 20th Century. From chattering teeth to a legendary game based on a mouse trap, Glass pushes the boundaries of what a toy can be and inspires generations.

At the height of the industrial age, Alfred Carlton Gilbert goes all in on a revolutionary steel building toy that inspires generations of Americans to build bigger. Decades later, a struggling Danish carpenter creates the world's biggest toy empire.

Hungarian professor, Erno Rubik, ignites Cube Mania with his 3-D puzzle that takes the world by storm. Hot on his heels, Leslie Scott will stop at nothing to bring an iconic building block board game to market.

In the midst of the 1970s folk art movement, art student Martha Nelson creates a one-of-a-kind doll to sell at local Kentucky craft markets.

A former amusement park employee combines his animatronic knowledge with the cassette tape to create the world's first realistic talking toy; a NASA engineer invents an entirely new toy segment stemming from the boring old squirt gun.

The Christmas crazes that helped transform holiday shopping into the frantic, no-holds-barred $1.1 trillion frenzy that it is today.

Gross-out humour is as old as human society, and so are the toys designed to capitalise on it.

After the U.S. videogame crash of 1983, a Japanese electronics company single-handedly resurrects the industry with a game featuring a jumping plumber.