RETAIL TRADE: The Little King

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Ladder for Children. Toymaker Marx discovered early that children like to play with the things they see around them, and most of his toys are as realistic as he can make them, whether they are trains or cars, carpet sweepers, miniature stoves or boats. But he has little patience with psychologist-blessed "educational" toys that are sold not as playthings but as "combinations of coordination influences." Snorts Marx: "The ones who buy them are the spinster aunts and spinster uncles and hermetically sealed parents who wash their children 1,000 times a day."

There is an increasing demand, however, for build-it-yourself toys that develop a child's imagination and dexterity. Marx, for example, has a station wagon whose transparent-plastic V-8 engine comes in 64 colored parts for the child to assemble himself. To teach his own children about the human body, Marx this year imported from Japan life-size life-like male and female papier-mache figures that can be taken apart, organ by organ. Next year Marx plans to make smaller versions (probable price: $14.98).

Toydom's Ford. Even his competitors admit that Louis Marx is the Henry Ford of the toy industry. Like Ford, Marx has used mass production and mass distribution to turn out cheap toys, e.g., electric trains had seldom been sold for less than $10 before Marx brought out a sturdy $3.98 train in the early '30s. Today, some 75% of Marx's toys sell for less than $5.

In the highly competitive toy industry, where piracy is almost second nature, the race is to the swift, the daring and the shamelessly self-imitating. Marx is all three. "There is no such thing as a new toy," he says. "There are only old toys with new twists." With a new mechanical twist, last year's submarine becomes next year's rocket ship; a flop may be face-lifted to stardom. After a 25 truck had saturated the market in the mid-'30s, Marx loaded it with plastic ice cubes (then a new product), called it an ice truck and had a new hit. With a new twist on an old friction motor, Marx three years ago was able to redesign an old firehouse so that it catapulted a hook and ladder through closed doors. He used the same motor last year for a heliport that shoots a helicopter to the ceiling.

In 1928 Marx got the greatest idea in toydom's history. Rounding a corner in Los Angeles one day, he stopped to watch a Filipino whittle away at a circular block of wood, attach it to a string and then bounce the block up and down the string, as his fellow-countrymen had been doing for as long as anyone could remember. The Yo-Yo, transformed by Marx from a primitive, island plaything into a universal preoccupation, sold more than 100 million and is still going strong.

Since most toymakers "knock off" (i.e., copy) their competitors' products, new toys are as elaborately guarded, and as inevitably filched, as Detroit's new car designs. Doll manufacturers solemnly lead buyers to a vault and there show them a Betsy Wetsy or a Tiny Tears. At Manhattan's Toy Fair last March, one manufacturer chained his gun to a radiator so no one could make off with it. The Ideal Toy Corp. sequesters its 18 designers in a closely guarded room that can only be reached by a secret passageway.