The New York Toy Fair is more than 100 years old. First held in 1903, it began as an actual trade show where toy manufacturers (all 10 of them) displayed their wares and shop owners decided what to buy. This format continued for decades, and even developed its own dedicated building, but as with many trade shows, the internet has ruined the surprise factor, and buyers now must make decisions even earlier due to longer shipping times. While it’s not a vital show for planning holiday spends any more, Toy Fair maintains the power of sight and sound. Seeing all the toys sprawled over the Javits Center, roaring, beeping and tooting is an experience like no other.
For some reason, I spent the entire four days at Toy Fair, which ran March 1-4 (usually I do only a couple of days). The fault was my own for not doing better planning – booth tours need to be scheduled ahead of time, and mine ended up being spread out over the whole four days. That gave me a lot of time to think about kid toys, adult toys, licensing and collecting.
Toy Fair has had a patchy schedule like most events post pandemic. The 2020 show was held in a world where we didn’t know what masks were, one of the last events of the pre-pandemic world. 2021 and 2022 were cancelled but the show moved to a fall date in 2023, then announced it would move to New Orleans. This was met with universal outrage from the toy world, which likes going to New York City, so Toy Fair moved back to late winter in New York for better or worse.
The timing remains problematic for business, as Forbes relates:
The New York Toy Fair has evolved into primarily “a media event and a prime stage for creating a spectacle and building hype for new product launches – and companies of all sizes are taking advantage of that,” James Zahn, Editor-in-Chief of The Toy Book said.
But the days when New York Toy Fair was the main place were toy orders were placed are over, Zahn said, Most of the products being shown at Toy Fair have already been shown to retail buyers at the fall toy previews in Los Angeles in September and the Nuremberg toy show in January, Zahn noted, The migration of toy showrooms to California, has also affected the New York Show, he said, Some notable toy companies didn’t exhibit in New York this year, Zahn said. “MGA Entertainment, Jakks Pacific, and Zuru are among the biggest missing, and for good reason: they have beautiful, permanent showrooms in the Los Angeles area to welcome buyers year-round,” he said.
The number of companies with permanent or temporary showrooms in Los Angeles has grown from around 60 in 2023 to about 200 last year. “It might be unpopular to say in some circles, but Los Angeles is cannibalizing New York,” he said.
The 2025 show was smaller, as reported in Publishers Weekly:
There were notably fewer exhibitors this year. The Toy Association, which produces the event, said there were close to 850 companies showing kids’ products at the show. That compares with just over 1,000 in 2023, 2019, and 2018. The 2020 Toy Fair, affected by the coming pandemic, had 890 exhibitors, as the significant contingent of Chinese toymakers were already under lockdown at home. There was also a decrease in the number of publishers exhibiting this year, but those who attended told PW that they were pleased with the show. They reported making inroads with significant new accounts, connecting with potential new licensors, meeting with existing partners, and writing orders.
Hype and spectacle are now the main products on offer at Toy Fair, but it remains a must-do for the “toy collector media,” a motley band of websites that cover mostly action figures, with specialists in Legos, Star Wars, superheroes, Transformers and the like. NYCC and SDCC are now big events on the toy calendar, and Mattel and Hasbro now throw their own events, mostly online. The hype platform keeps growing.
As I mentioned the other day, there is scarcely an IP that has not been licensed to hell and back between action figures, POPS, games, plush, 3 inch figures, 5 inch figures, 24 inch figures. If there is something you once enjoyed, there are probably several toys for it. It is perhaps not shocking that more adults than children now buy “toys” – showing off your fandom, whether with a $1200 statement piece self-transforming robot, or a little Sprigitato next to your monitor (home or workplace) is one of the ways we proclaim our identity.
But there are so, so many brands. As I looked at all the mash-ups and universes (SANTAVERSE from Elf on the Shelf) I wondered, have we gone as far as we can go? Hasbro offers a line called Mix-Mashers which offer their licensed toys with interchangeable parts. FINALLY you can put Darth Vader’s arms on Thanos’s torso, with Spider-Man’s head stop it all.
Funko offered a realm called “Bitty City” where their line of Bittys (teeny little Pops no more than an inch high) can all mingle in a village, one IP in peaceful existence with another.
Hasbro and Mattel – longtime fierce rivals – offered their own epic crossover, somewhat akin to the latest Marvel/DC team-up. Play-Doh Barbie is a somewhat simplified Barbie (owned by Mattel) that can wear clothes made from Play-doh (a Hasbro classic.) What’s next, GI He-Man?
Of course, this is just a corporate version of what actual children do all the time, mixing up all their playthings in one universe, i.e. Toy Story. While it’s not surprising that big companies are doing the pre-imagining, children have been sticking Play-Doh on their dolls since time immemorial. There are no copyrights in the playroom.
But the mash-ups seem more frantic than ever. Spider-Man Magic The Gathering cards are a thing that exist, as is Pokemon Monopoly. Things that once seemed rare and novel are now just dizzying. (I still treasure my old Star Wars Monopoly set, one of the first such crossovers)
With the world in chaos, comfy, cozy, and huggable were everywhere. Squishmallows, huggable toys from recognizable characters, have been huge for a while, and every company had some version of a plush pal you can squeeze.
As for spectacle on the show floor, Mattel took over the River Pavillion for an 80th Anniversary showroom revealing Barbie, Disney Princesses, Jurassic World, WWE and Minecraft (one of the hottest licenses there.) Hasbro had an off site showroom for many years, but moved to the show floor for the first time, with their classic lines of Star Wars, Marvel, GI Joe, Transformers and My Little Pony.
It was at the Hasbro booth that millennials and up encountered the harshest reminder that the old gods are dead. One of those gods is paper money. Noting that kids today have no idea what to do with paper money, Monopoly rolled out an App Banking version that uses ATM cards and other more digitized elements. Park Place and Tennessee Avenue have been updated to Ice Cream Skating Rink and Hovercraft Racetrack. It all seemed a bit garish, but the game can now be finished in a shorter time, and there is no cheating: an app does all the math.
Technology can still fire the imagination though: the hit toy at the show was Primal Hatch from Spin Master, a dinosaur egg that hatches a T-Rex.
At $59.99 you won’t want to miss the one time hatching, but then you need to interact with the toy for it to grow up and behave – with eyes that change color to show its mood. Training and feeding toys properly is an idea that goes back to the Tamagotchi – still going strong at the Bandai booth.
Lego didn’t allow any reporting on their new sets but if you can imagine more Marvel, DC, Star Wars, and Ninjago sets, you get the idea. For the “public” there was Central Park, a large area in front of the Lego compound that showcased their adult-focused Botanical flower line, complete with benches and fake fountains. This was an amazingly peaceful place to hang out, surrounded by fake trees and grass, and I spent quite a bit of downtime there, relaxing over ice cream with a pal.
Spin Master did it one better with live puppies! An adoption event reminded us that the real world feels best of all and real critters also need care and feeding
Jazwares, home of the Squishmallows, won for best event (that I was invited to, anyway) with a collector event that featured new toys from “The Vault,” an appearance by AEW’s Orange Cassidy (as a wrestler whose gimmick is not reacting to anything, his reveal was lowkey), and finger food. A cappuccino machine and a generous toy giveaway cemented goodwill among flacks and hacks.
As I wandered the halls, I couldn’t help but think of the ups and downs of various properties over the years. Marvel toys are still playable but the MCU sheen has dulled. Star Wars is in even sadder shape. While the Mandalorian was a huge hit, all of the subsequent TV shows have failed to showcase characters you want to put on your desk. I guess we’ll get a nostalgic “Andor Prison break” set from Lego someday, but that’s a long way from here.
Pokémon was one of the hottest properties on display, on the heels of the announcement of the new game Pokémon Legends Z-A. The characters are adorable and suited to almost any kind of toy, and my fave, flower-cat Sprigitato, was everywhere.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers were back at Playmates after being at Bandai, Disney and other companies. Playmates chose a refreshingly back to basics approach – simple toys, masks and weapons. Starting out lowkey is a good way to create more shock and awe down the road.
By contrast Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has always been at Playmates, and it’s the toys that really launched the popularity of the line: $1.1 billion worth of Turtles toys were sold between 1988 and 1992. Lest we forget, Eastman and Laird created the comic book as a parody of Frank Miller’s Ronin and Daredevil and yet somehow, the idea of four pizza-loving turtles named after Renaissance painters has lasted for more than 40 years and is as popular as ever. The power of imagination takes strange turns.
My other observations are pretty obvious: people like cats. People think farting is funny. Yo-yos still require skill. Crayons are a good way to spend time. Manga and anime toys are spectacular – Akira Toriyama and Eiichiro Oda are character designers of unsurpassed genius.
Toilets were a frequent theme and I’m told that “Skibidi Toilet” a YouTube series about a head that sings in a toilet set in a global armageddon – is one of the hottest new characters. For any childless olds still here, this brutalist animation mixes the barren dystopia of Aeon Flux with the smash cut nihilism of Adult Swim and the machinima look of video games. Throw in some toilets and you have untold millions of views. And of course, it has a Funko Pop.
In all the tumult, you can still find the one or two things that seem made just for you. NECA’s line of figures based on Ben Cooper Halloween costumes will send any Boomer into a nostalgic haze, and speak to the eternal Halloween in our soul.
But it was at Super 7 that I saw the toys that I wanted the most. I guess they’ve been out for a while, but I somehow missed that they had made 7” figures based on the Beastie Boys Sabotage video. That’s right, Nathan Wind (Cochise), Alasandro Alegre (The Chief), and Vic Colfari (Bobby, “The Rookie”) can sit right on your desk. Like Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, it’s a triple level of satire – cheesy actors playing cheesy characters in a particular genre that defines an era – that I find irresistible.
I WANT THESE TOYS.
So yeah, that was Toy Fair 2025, a palace where the Creature from the Black Lagoon riding a tricycle is the most natural thing in the world. Next year Toy Fair returns to mid-February, a time frame that once left attendees battling two foot blizzards, but in these globally warmed days it will be a frolic.
Just a few more themed galleries:
Butts and things that smell:
Cats and cute animals remain popular
Godzilla and friends
Toys based on comics covers or including comics covers are a thing. But it should be noted, Banshee’s first appearance was NOT in Giant Size X-Men #1!
Odds and Ends:
