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It is the 39th of an exclusive series of 50 articles, published daily until July 20, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon. You can check every day 50 days on the moon.
In the middle of a dusty landscape anchored in a futuristic space outpost, two children, a white and a black, play in a fleet of lunar vehicles. The year is 1968 – one of the most controversial and racist in recent US history – but here on the moon, harmony reigns.
A voice-over says, "We'll all be living here soon", this "exciting place / the space world / as all astronauts know / this world is inflated / it was created by Mattel / with him, how far can you go? "
The scene is an advertisement for Major Matt Mason, "The Man of Mattel", an extremely popular but short-lived figurine whose rise and then rapid disappearance perfectly mimic the obsession of popular culture, then the quick boredom with the madness around the moon itself.
Mason and his elaborate props – from this three-foot-tall space dwelling to the Astronaut Jets Pack, Space Sled, Space Crawler, Space Bubble and Uni-Tred Space Hauler – were introduced in 1966, went on sale the following year. were out of the market before the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. "Why is the Major so important to me? Because I was an Apollo baby, "wrote Washington Post The reporter Frank Ahrens in 1996. "The major represented the idealism of childhood and American can-do-ism. If we had put a man on the moon in 1969, barely eight years after President Kennedy had ordered it, Major Matt's moon station would be likely in a few years. "
The story of how Mattel created the successful product line reflects a surprising symbiosis between the effort to travel to the moon and the challenge of captivating 1960s obsessed youth.
First, the aerospace industry had a surprising talent pool in toys. Mattel, who was the leading machine maker of the post-second world war, led the way. In 1956, a year before Sputnik and the start of the space race, its founders hired a young Ray Ryan engineer, Jack Ryan, to assume the duties of vice president of research and development and design . At Raytheon, Ryan had worked on the Sparrow and Hawk missile systems.
"Jack has transformed the toy industry by bringing scientific standards and new materials and processes to make products that have not yet been manufactured," said Jerry Oppenheimer, author of Monster toy, an unauthorized story of Mattel. "I think that all aerospace engineers feel that if they have enough, they can still start making toys and it will not be as difficult," said Jay Smith, who joined Mattel in as a product development engineer after the TRW defense subcontractor, where he notably performed a vibration analysis of the lunar module descent motor for lunar landings. "But I think the opposite is true: the mindset is so different and the cost constraints are so severe. You have to produce a whole toy for what costs a few nuts and bolts in the space program. "
Mattel, headquartered in Hawthorne, California, in the suburb of Los Angeles that currently hosts SpaceX, was also near the defense companies that surrounded Los Angeles, as well as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ryan had his pick of talent from almost everywhere, given Mattel's status as a company and its inviting climate of Southern California. "Mattel was virtually a NASA field lab," Mason enthusiast John Michlig wrote on his blog.
As for the toys themselves, Ryan and his team were clearly inspired by the first models shared publicly. In 1961, the assembly work of the Apollo Spatial Suit (later known as the Extravevehicle Mobility Unit) was set up so that astronauts could venture into any security in the space. Hamilton Standard won the contract and the first models of 1962 describe an accordion design at the major joints. The latest Apollo suit, made by Playtex and not by Hamilton Standard, had a very different appearance, but Mattel's design for Mason has retained the contrasting colors of these early joints, which looks cool and reinforces The idea that Mason, at six inches, could provide more fun than Hasbro's GI Joes twice his size.
Astronaut Matt Mason was a memorable success. Oscar-winning Tom Hanks, who produced a HBO series on Apollo, From the Earth to the moon, as well as starring in Apollo 13, was 13 years old at the time of the first landing of the moon. For Hanks, Mason "was a great astronaut: a realistic and realistic astronaut, made of rubber and wire, a bit like Gumby. Hanks talked about Matt Mason in 1995. "I've reviewed a few of them because, after a while, the wires got twisted." Mattel had some problems with Mason's reliability (as well as with paint off Mason's costume), but not bad for a toy that sold for $ 2.97. (It's about $ 23 in today's dollars.)
These references to Apollo's real efforts were a key part of Mattel's first selling point to children. "One of the claims was that they were based on NASA's designs," says Bill Ystrom, a passionate toy collector Matt Mason, a child of the race to the moon. In 1961, Allyn B. Hazard, a senior development engineer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, published a seven-page proposal for a Moon Suit for the exploration of the lunar surface. In one way or another, its design was found on the cover of April 27, 1962, Life magazine for a report presenting the "Man's Journey to the Moon". In 1967, Matt Mason possessed what Mattel called a "pneumatic space capsule" that was remarkably similar to this Hazard design.
Mattel moved away from NASA by adding a black astronaut, Jeff Long, to Mason's crew in 1968, at a time when NASA's astronaut body was exclusively white. Mattel's advertising on Mattel's toy line included white and African-American children playing together. (Barbie, Mattel's flagship product, had his first black friend, Christie, the same year.)
But even before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the Moon, Mattel had abandoned his initial likelihood efforts and made the Mason world more of a science fiction site – he introduced several extraterrestrial characters – than an exploration. lunar.
For kids like Ystrom, though, the joys of playing with Mason stem from the simple but ingenious designs that Ryan and his group of defense industry expats imagined to represent their vision of the astronaut game. "You can take the string from Mason's jet pack, fix it on a door and shoot it," recalls Ystrom. "In the back of Mason's backpack was a psychedelic orange and black spiral. When Mason flew, he was hypnotic. This is what we thought we were headed for.
Charles Fishman has the day off. Fishman, who wrote for Quick business since its inception, has spent the last four years researching and writing A giant leap, his New York Times Bestseller book on how it took 400,000 people, 20,000 businesses and a federal government to bring 27 people to the moon. (You can order it here.)
For each of the next 50 days, we'll be releasing a new story from Fishman – a story you've probably never heard before – about the first effort to reach the moon that illuminates both the historic effort and the ongoing effort. New publications will be posted here daily and will be distributed via Fast Company ยปs social media. (Follow us at # 50DaysToTheMoon).
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