The Story of Hasbro: The Toy Empire Behind G.I. Joe and Transformers

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: $104 million. That was Hasbro in 1980. Nine years later, $1.4 billion. In between, G.I. Joe. Transformers. A $360 million check for the company that owned Monopoly. By 1985, Hasbro was the largest toy company on Earth. Neither G.I. Joe nor Transformers was their idea. G.I. Joe came from a stranger with a pitch. Transformers came from a Japanese toy line that was failing in Japan. Hasbro bought the license, invented the entire mythology from scratch, then sold it back to Japan. The Japanese company had to cancel its own original product to make room for the American version. One word held all of it together. A word that didn't exist until 1963. A word they invented because the real word, doll, was banned inside the building. Action figure. Every toy company on Earth uses it now. The people who built this empire started with nothing. Not a toy factory, not a design studio, not a single patent. Fabric scraps. If this is the kind of story you want more of, subscribe. We cover the companies, the families, and the decisions that built the toy industry. The story of Hasbro doesn't begin in a toy factory. In the spring of 1903, mobs tore through Kishinev. Dozens of Jewish people were killed. More than a thousand homes and shops were destroyed. The violence spread fast. Word reached Jewish families across the region. In villages, in small towns, in places that had no way to defend themselves. One of those families was named Hasenfeld. They lived in a small village in what is now Poland. When the news arrived, sent the two oldest boys first. Hillel was 17. Henry was 14. They spoke Yiddish, no English. They arrived in New York with almost nothing and moved in with an uncle. Then they did what most Jewish immigrants in that city did when they had no money and no connections. They hit the streets. Manhattan's garment district ran day and night. Fabric scraps piled up on factory floors. Leftover textile remnants that manufacturers had no use for. The brothers bought those scraps cheap and sold them cheaper. Low margin. Long hours. In Yiddish, this trade was called the "shmata" business. Rags. It wasn't glamorous. But it was a foothold. Over time, they learned the supply chain. They learned who sold what, who needed what, and where the gaps were. And one gap kept standing out: pencil boxes. Every American school child needed one. The standard version was plain wood, functional, forgettable. Nobody had thought to line them with soft fabric. The Hassenfelds had access to quality textile remnants. The math was simple. A fabric-lined pencil box felt premium. It sold better. And once they realized how well the boxes moved, they stopped buying them from suppliers and started making them directly. That pivot changed everything. School supplies became their engine. Pencil boxes led to zipper pouches. Zipper pouches led to full supply kits. By the mid-1920s, the business had real momentum. Then Henry met a woman named Marion Frank. Her father, David Frank, ran a textile factory in West Warwick, Rhode Island, a thriving operation built by another Jewish immigrant. Henry visited, met Marion, and that was it. They married in 1914. He brought her to New York. But Marion was homesick. Rhode Island was her home. So in 1917, they moved to Providence. That single decision, a young wife missing her hometown, is why Hasbro is a Rhode Island company. Their younger brother Herman joined them in Providence. And on December 6th, 1923, the three brothers made it official. They registered a company under the name "Hassenfeld Brothers". Eight employees, all family members. Their first factory sat at the corner of Bowen and North Main on Providence's east side. It no longer exists. But in 1926, they incorporated the business, they incorporated the business formally. Hassenfeld Brothers Incorporated. And Hillel stepped back to pursue other textile ventures, leaving Henry in charge. The Depression didn't stop them. By 1929, they had 150 workers and half a million dollars in annual revenue. In 1932, they moved into a 65,000 square foot factory on Broad Street, a building that had previously housed a jewelry manufacturer. In 1935, they cut out one more middleman. They started making their own pencils instead of buying them. Every move followed the same logic. Find the gap. Control the supply. Own the process. They were still making school supplies. Still selling pencil boxes and cloth pouches to kids across New England. Nobody would have called them a toy company. Not yet. But something was shifting. The product line was expanding. Paints. Crayons. Modeling clay. Items that blurred the line between school and play. By the early 1940s, Hassenfeld Brothers was making doctor and nurse kits. They were in the toy business now. They just didn't know yet what that would mean. George Lerner had an idea that nobody wanted. It was 1949. The war had been over for four years. But rationing still lived in the back of people's minds. Lerner's idea was simple. A set of plastic facial features, maybe 30 pieces, that a child could push into a real potato. Eyes. A nose. A mouth. Ears. A hat. Suddenly, the potato had a face. He took it to toy companies. They passed. Every single one. The country had just spent years being told not to waste food. Executives weren't going to sell a toy built around stabbing a potato. Lerner eventually sold the concept to a cereal company. They used the pieces as box prizes. The kind of thing a kid finds at the bottom of a cereal box and immediately loses. That's where Meryl Hassenfeld found it. Meryl was Henry's son. Second generation. He had grown up watching his father turn fabric scraps into a school supply business. And he had learned the same instinct. Find the thing nobody else is paying attention to. He licensed the concept from Lerner and built it into a standalone product. The kit cost 98 cents. 30 plastic pieces. No potato included. You brought your own. On April 30, 1952, Hassenfeld brothers ran a commercial for it on television. That date matters more than most people realize. Before that day, every toy advertisement on American television was aimed at adults. Parents. The people with the money. The logic seemed obvious. Adults make the purchase. So, sell to adults. Meryl flipped it. The Mr. Potato Head commercial talked directly to kids. It showed the toy working. It showed a child's hands putting a face together. It made the toy look fun in a way that no parent's buying decision could capture. The result? Kids went home and asked for it. Then they asked again. Then they kept asking until someone bought it. The marketing industry later gave this a name. The nag factor. The idea that a child, properly activated, becomes the most effective sales force in the house. Meryl didn't name it. He just did it first. Within the first few months, Mr. Potato Head brought in over four million dollars. More than a million kits sold in the first year alone. By 1953, Mrs. Potato Head had joined the lineup. In 1954, Hasenfeld Brothers became a major Disney licensee. One of the earliest toy companies to attach a licensed IP to a physical product. By 1960, they were one of the largest toy companies in America. The pencil boxes were a memory. Then came Don Levine. Levine was Hasbro's creative director. He had served in the Korean War. And in 1963, a licensing agent named Stanley Weston walked into his office with a prototype. A military figure, rough, about 12 inches tall, with movable limbs. Weston's pitch was simple. Boys played with toy soldiers. But toy soldiers were static. Little plastic men frozen mid-stride. What if the figure could actually move? Levine saw it immediately. Meryl Hasenfeld did not. The problem wasn't the toy. The problem was the word. Every movable figure on the market was called a doll. And the conventional wisdom, backed by years of retail data, said that boys did not buy dolls. Parents did not buy dolls for boys. The doll business belonged to Mattel. It belonged to Barbie. Going up against that felt like a bad bet. Levine pushed anyway. But he changed the language first. The word "doll" was removed from every internal document, every meeting, every pitch deck. In its place, Levine put two words that had never been used together in the toy industry before. Action figure. That's it. That's the entire solution. Not a new mechanism. Not a new material. A new word. A word that made the same object feel completely different to a parent standing in a store. The figure itself was engineered to back up the language. Eleven and a half inches tall. Nineteen points of articulation. Shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles. Each one modeled after how the human body actually moves. Levine had taken inspiration from the wooden mannequins artists used to study anatomy. The result was a figure that could be posed in almost any position a child could imagine. Four versions launched simultaneously. Action soldier. Action sailor. Action pilot. Action marine. The name almost didn't happen either. Early candidates included Rocky the marine. Ace the fighter pilot. Salty the sailor. Levine spent weeks stuck on it. Then one night, he watched a 1945 film called The Life of G.I. Joe. He licensed the name the next day. The toy debuted at the New York Toy Fair on February 9th, 1964. That summer, Hasbro ran test sales in New York. Stores sold out. Hasbro ran double production, then triple. By Christmas, G.I. Joe had gone national. The price was $4 per figure. But the figure wasn't the product. The figure was the entry point. Uniforms sold separately. Weapons sold separately. Vehicles sold separately. Foot lockers, accessories, play sets. All of it sold separately. Buying one G.I. Joe was the beginning of a spending cycle that had no natural end point. No toy company in America had ever built a line like this before. A single figure designed as the center of an entire ecosystem. Every purchase led to the next one. By 1965, just one year after launch, G.I. Joe was generating $28 million in revenue. Within two years, it accounted for roughly 66% of Hasbro's total profits. One toy. Two-thirds of the company. And a word, action figure, that every toy company on Earth would be using for the next 60 years. By 1966, G.I. Joe was the most profitable toy brand in America. More than 100 accessory sets had hit shelves in just two years. Uniforms for every branch of the military. Vehicles. Foot lockers. Weapons. In the United Kingdom, Polytoy licensed the figure and sold it under the name Action Man. The brand was crossing borders before most American toy companies had figured out how to cross state lines. Then, Vietnam happened. Not the war itself. The feeling around it. By the late 1960s, the anti-war movement had moved from college campuses into living rooms. Parents who had grown up idolizing soldiers were raising children in a country that was questioning everything the uniform stood for. The sales of military toys dropped hard and fast. Hasbro tried to save G.I. Joe by changing him. They gave him a beard. An explorer's look. They retooled him as an adventurer. Someone who went on missions, not wars. They even gave him a kung fu grip in 1970. A rubberized hand designed to hold equipment more realistically. It bought some time. Not much. In 1973, the oil crisis hit. The price of crude oil spiked. And with it, the price of every petroleum-based product, including plastic. A 12-inch figure made entirely of molded plastic had become too expensive to produce at a margin that made sense. In 1975, Hasbro discontinued G.I. Joe entirely. By 1977, the company was posting a $2.5 million loss and carrying significant debt. The biggest toy in their history was gone. The company that had invented the action figure couldn't afford to make one. Then, Merrill Hasenfeld died. It was 1979. Merrill had led the company through its most transformative years. Mr. Potato Head. G.I. Joe. The television advertising revolution. His death left a leadership vacuum that the was immediately fought over. Stephen Hasenfeld, Merrill's son, was the natural successor. Third generation. He had grown up in the business and understood it from the inside. But Harold Hasenfeld, Merrill's older brother, who ran Empire Pencil, the nation's largest pencil manufacturer and a Hasbro subsidiary, refused to recognize Stephen's authority. The standoff lasted until 1980. The resolution was blunt. Hasbro spun Empire Pencil Off as a separate company. Harold traded his Hasbro shares for Empire Pencil shares and walked away. Stephen became CEO and chairman with no competing voice at the table. He inherited a company doing $104 million in annual revenue with a shrinking product line and no clear path forward. His first move was to cut. Between 1978 and 1981, Stephen reduced Hasbro's product catalog by one-third and slashed new product launches by half. He focused on simple, low-cost toys with long shelf lives. The kind that didn't need to be replaced every Christmas. He watched the electronic game market explode and deliberately stayed out of it. That decision looked foolish at the time. When the video game market crashed in 1983, taking dozens of toy companies down with it. It looked like foresight. Stephen was building a foundation. He just needed something to build on top of it. That something came from a chance encounter in a men's restroom. In 1981, Stephen Hassenfeld and Jim Galton, president of Marvel Comics, happened to be at the same charity event. They introduced themselves. Stephen mentioned he was thinking about bringing back G.I. Joe. Galton told him Marvel could help. The two companies went to work. The new G.I. Joe would be 3.75 inches tall. A decision driven by economics. Kenner's Star Wars figures, launched in 1977, had proven that smaller figures meant cheaper production and smaller vehicles that parents could actually afford to buy. Hasbro followed the logic. But size wasn't the real innovation. Story was. Marvel Comics writer Larry Hama, a Vietnam veteran, built out a complete mythology for the relaunched line. He wrote character backstories that appeared on the back of every package. Small biography cards that told you where each soldier was from. What their specialty was. What drove them. Children who had never read a comic book were memorizing file cards. The animated series, produced by Toei Animation in Japan, ran alongside the comic book and the toy line. All three fed each other. The cartoon introduced characters. The comic added depth. The toys let kids hold the story in their hands. G.I. Joe. A real American hero launched in 1982 and ran for 12 years. The following year, Hasbro sent representatives to the Tokyo Toy Show. They weren't looking for anything specific. They were looking for what they didn't have. What they found was a line of transforming robot toys from a Japanese company called Takara. Vehicles that converted into robots designed for miniature pilot figures to sit inside. The line was called Diaclone. Takara had tried to sell it in the American market under the name Diaclone. It had gone nowhere. Hasbro bought the North American rights. They brought in Marvel Comics again, this time to build a mythology from scratch. Writers created the names, the factions, the conflict. Autobots, Decepticons, Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumblebee. None of those names existed before Marvel invented them for a set of Japanese toys that were struggling to find an audience. Transformers launched in 1984 with the same tri-media structure that had worked for G.Y. Joe. Toy line, comic book, animated series. By Christmas of that year, stores were running out of stock. There were confrontations in toy aisles over the last available figures on shelves. Takara, watching from Japan, cancelled Diaclone and MicroChange, their own original lines, and licensed the Transformers brand back from Hasbro to sell in their home market. The toys Takara had originally made, now carrying an American mythology invented by Marvel Comics, sold better in Japan than the Japanese originals ever had. Hasbro wasn't done. In 1982 and 1983, My Little Pony hit shelves and quickly became the company's top selling brand in the girls market. Care Bears followed through a licensing deal with American Greetings. For the first time in the company's history, Hasbro had dominant brands across both major demographics simultaneously. In May 1984, Hasbro wrote a 360 million dollar check for Milton Bradley. Milton Bradley brought Monopoly, Scrabble, Parcheesi, the PlaySchool line, Lincoln Logs, ABC Blocks, classic preschool toys. The combined company briefly called itself Hasbro Bradley before dropping the Bradley in 1985. The two CEOs reportedly clashed personally. The product lines fit together perfectly. By 1985, Hasbro was the largest toy company on earth. From 104 million dollars in 1980 to 1.4 billion dollars in 1989. 85 percent growth every year for nine consecutive years. Steven Hassenfeld died in 1989. He was 42 years old. The cause was never publicly announced. He had built Hasbro from the edge of irrelevance into a global empire and did not live to see how far it would go. His brother Alan took over as CEO. Alan moved fast. In 1991, Hasbro acquired Tonka Corporation for approximately 486 million dollars. The deal brought in Parker Brothers, Monopoly's original publisher, along with Kenner products, which carried Nerf, the Star Wars toy license, and several other lines. The toy empire was now selling board games, action figures, preschool toys, foam weapons, and die-cast vehicles. In 1994, Hasbro acquired Waddington's. The British company that had originally published Cluedo. In 1995, J.W. Spear, which held Scrabble rights across international markets, came into the fold. Then came the acquisition that changed everything about what Hasbro actually was. In September 1999, Hasbro paid approximately 325 million dollars for Wizards of the Coast. Wizards had launched Magic. The Gathering in 1993 had a gaming convention in Dallas. Magic was a collectible card game. Players built decks from randomized booster packs and competed against each other. The model created a spending cycle with no natural ceiling. New sets came out regularly. Older cards became obsolete. Serious players bought constantly. Wizards had also acquired TSR Inc. in 1997. The publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, which had been struggling financially for years. D&D came with the deal. Magic. The Gathering became Hasbro's top-selling brand almost immediately. The company that started selling fabric scraps in 1923 now owned the most successful trading card game on earth. The most iconic role-playing game ever made. And the largest collection of toy brands in American history. It had taken 76 years. And it wasn't finished yet. The toy business doesn't stand still. It never did. Every decade brings a new threat. A new technology. A new reason for children to want something different. The companies that survive are the ones that see the shift coming early enough to do something about it. Or stubborn enough to outlast it. Hasbro had already survived Vietnam. It had survived the oil crisis and the near collapse of the late 1970s. By the time the 1990s arrived, the company was bigger than it had ever been. But size doesn't protect you from what's coming next. What was coming next was the screen. Nintendo's entertainment system arrived in American homes in 1985. Sega Genesis followed in 1989. Sony PlayStation hit shelves in 1994. With each new console generation, children spent more hours in front of screens and fewer hours on the floor with plastic figures. This wasn't speculation. Toy industry sales data showed it clearly. The hours a child spent playing each week were not expanding. They were being redistributed. Every hour in front of a television with a controller was an hour not spent with a GI Joe or Monopoly board. Other toy companies tried to fight it by entering the electronics market directly. Some built their own handheld games. Some licensed their brands to game developers. Most of those moves produced mediocre results at significant cost. Hasbro's answer was different. Allen Hassenfeld's strategy wasn't to compete with the screen. It was to own intellectual property powerful enough to live on any screen, in any format, in any decade. A toy could become obsolete. A story couldn't. Not if it was embedded deeply enough in culture. The Wizards of the Coast acquisition in 1999 was the clearest expression of that strategy. Magic. The gathering had launched in 1993 at a gaming convention in Dallas. By the time Hasbro bought Wizards for $325 million, Magic already had millions of active players worldwide. The game's model was self-reinforcing. New card sets released every few months. Each one shifting the competitive landscape. Each one giving players a reason to spend again. There was no finish line. No point at which a player could say they were done. That spending cycle didn't depend on a Christmas season. It didn't depend on a hit movie or a cartoon. It ran continuously. Year-round. Driven entirely by the community of players who had made the game central to their lives. Dungeons and Dragons came with the deal. Wizards had acquired its near-bankrupt publisher TSR Inc. in 1997. Two of the most enduring imaginative universes in American entertainment now sat inside the same company that made Mr. Potato Head. Meanwhile, Hasbro responded to the rising tide of cheap imported toys by moving its own manufacturing to China. Not to compete on price, but to protect margin. The value stayed in the IP, the design, and the marketing. The factory was just infrastructure. By the mid-1990s, Hasbro was the largest toy company in the world. The threat from video games had not disappeared. But Hasbro had positioned itself to survive it. Then came Brian Goldner. Goldner joined Hasbro in 2000. He understood something about the company that not everyone inside it did. Hasbro's brands were not toy brands. They were entertainment brands that happened to be sold as toys. G.I. Joe, Transformers, Monopoly. These weren't products. They were universes. And universes, properly managed, could generate revenue from films, television, digital games, licensing, and merchandise simultaneously. In 2007, the first Michael Bay Transformers film opened. It made over $700 million at the global box office. Transformers toy sales surged. The connection between screen and shelf had never been clearer. Goldner became CEO in 2008. He added chairman in 2015. And he began building Hasbro into something that looked less like a toy company and more like a media conglomerate with a toy division. G.I. Joe. The rise of Cobra hit theaters in 2009. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic launched in 2010 on the Hub Network. A cable channel Hasbro co-owned with Discovery Communications. The show became a cultural phenomenon, drawing an audience far beyond its target demographic. In 2018, Hasbro acquired the Saban Properties portfolio – Power Rangers and its associated brands – for $522 million. Then, in 2019, Goldner made the largest single bet in Hasbro's history. He paid $4 billion for Entertainment One. E1 was a Canadian-based production and distribution company with a substantial content library. Peppa Pig, PJ Masks, The Walking Dead, Grey's Anatomy, Trailer Park Boys. The plan was to turn E1 into Hasbro's internal studio. Instead of licensing its IP to other studios and splitting the revenue, Hasbro would produce its own Transformers films, its own Dungeons & Dragons adaptations, its own magic, the gathering content, and keep the full return. The logic was sound. The timing was catastrophic. In early 2020, COVID-19 shut down film and television production across the entire planet. Not for a week. Not for a month. For the better part of two years. E1's pipeline – the pipeline that was supposed to justify a $4 billion purchase – went silent. In August 2020, Goldner disclosed publicly that he had been undergoing cancer treatment since 2014. On October 10, 2021, he stepped away from his duties to take medical leave. Two days later, on October 12, 2021, Brian Goldner died. He was 58 years old. He never found out how the bet turned out. Chris Cox became CEO in January 2022. He had come from Wizards of the Coast, where he had served as COO and watched Magic. The gathering grow into one of the most valuable gaming franchises on Earth. He understood IP. He understood community. He understood what Hasbro's core assets actually were. What he inherited alongside those assets was a balance sheet carrying the weight of the E1 acquisition. A film and television unit that had been gutted by the pandemic. And a board under pressure from activist investors demanding cuts. The assessment was hard but fast. E1's non-Hasbro content – the Grey's Anatomy distribution deals, the Trailer Park Boys catalog, the Walking Dead rights – had no strategic value to a toy and game company. It was dead weight at a moment when the company needed to move quickly. In August 2023, Hasbro sold the E1 film and television business to Lionsgate for approximately $500 million. Hasbro kept Peppa Pig, PJ Masks and the Hasbro branded content. Everything else went. The math was not pretty. $4 billion in. $500 million out. Nearly $3.5 billion gone over four years. Then, 1,900 employees received notices. 20% of the global workforce. Gone by the end of 2023. The stock dropped roughly 20% across the year. Analysts debated whether Hasbro had permanently damaged itself. The answer came in 2024. Revenue fell 17%, expected given the E1 exit. But adjusted operating profit reached $839 million, a company record. Operating margins hit 20.3%, also a record. Hasbro cut $370 million in costs and generated $847 million in operating cash flow. Wizards of the Coast had posted $816 million in revenue in 2020 alone, a record year built almost entirely on Magic. The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Magic's 40 million active players worldwide were generating over a billion dollars annually from a single franchise. Dungeons & Dragons celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2024. The film adaptation, Honor Among Thieves, released in 2023 to strong reviews. The core brands, Nerf, Monopoly, Transformers, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Peppa Pig, were still standing. Hasbro had paid $4 billion to learn something Steven Hassenfeld had understood in 1980. Cut what doesn't work, keep what does, and don't confuse the size of a bet with the quality of one. Hasbro is still here. That matters more than it sounds. Most toy companies from the 1920s are not. The ones that survived didn't do it by staying the same. They did it by being willing to become something different every time the market demanded it. And by holding onto the few things worth keeping. The headquarters is still in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. For now, a planned move to Boston is underway, which will end over a century of the company's presence in the state where two teenagers decided to line pencil boxes with fabric scraps. Rhode Island built Hasbro. Hasbro is leaving. The brands, though, are exactly where they were. G.I. Joe, Transformers, Monopoly, My Little Pony, Mr. Potato Head, Nerf, Peppa Pig, Magic, The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons. The names have outlasted the family that built them, the executives who nearly destroyed them, and every technology that was supposed to make them obsolete. Magic. The Gathering alone now generates over a billion dollars in annual revenue. 40 million active players worldwide. New card sets release every few months. Every release shifts the competitive landscape. Players who have been in the game for 20 years still buy booster packs. The platform toy model that G.I. Joe introduced in 1964, buy one thing, then keep buying everything connected to it, is the same logic running inside every card game in Hasbro's portfolio. Some things don't need to be reinvented, they just need to be recognized. The originals are still out there. A Daishai Joe figure from 1964, still in its original box, sells for anywhere between $500 and $2,000 at auction, depending on condition. A first-run Optimus Prime from 1984, the Diaclone-era mold, box intact, routinely clears $2,000 to $5,000 at heritage auctions and specialized collector markets. There are conventions built entirely around these objects. BotCon ran as an annual Transformers collector event from 1994 to 2016. Jocon drew G.I. Joe collectors every year for decades. The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, holds original examples of both lines in its permanent collection. The people buying these things are not just nostalgic, they are buying precision. The original G, Aubrey Joe, had 19 points of articulation. Each joint engineered to move the way a human body actually moves, cast in hard plastic built to tolerances that many modern budget figures don't meet. A 1964 figure with its original uniform, weapon, and dog tags is a physical record of a moment when a toy was made to last, not to be replaced by next year's version. That standard didn't come from a business decision. It came from Don Levine, a Korean War veteran who wanted the figure to feel real. Levine left Hasbro years later and co-founded a company called Real Heroes, Inc., which made toys honoring actual first responders, firefighters, police officers, nurses. He believed that what children held in their hands shaped what they thought was worth admiring. Don Levine died in 2014. He was 86 years old. The corner of Bowen and North Main on Providence's east side, where Hillel and Henry Hassenfeld built their first factory, holds nothing from that era. The building is gone. The family too has moved on in its own way. Alan Hassenfeld, Merrill's son, Steven's brother, the man who led Hasbro from 1989 to 2003, spent the years after his tenure in philanthropy. He worked on genocide prevention efforts related to Darfur. He established the Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute at Brown University. He carried forward in a different form, the same instinct his grandfather Henry had shown when he helped bring family members out of Poland in 1903. The sense that when you have the means to help someone get out, you help them get out. Alan Hassenfeld died on July 8, 2025, in London. He was 76. He was the last member of the Hassenfeld family to have held a leadership role at the company his great uncles founded with eight family employees and a corner factory over a century ago. Somewhere in Rochester, New York, inside a glass case at the Strong National Museum of Play, there is a G.I. Joe figure from 1964. The plastic has yellowed slightly at the edges. The uniform is still intact. The dog tags are still there. All 19 joints still move. No battery. No app. No subscription. No sequel. Just a name on a small plastic tag. A name that nobody in a Providence factory in 1923 could have imagined. Invented by a man who refused to use a different word. Built by a company that started with fabric scraps and somehow never stopped. See you in the next one.