The Magic Market

As Christmas toy buying started with a rush last week, retailers predicted that 1959 will be the most successful year in the history of the U.S. toy industry. Total retail sales will reach $1,650,000,000, an 18% increase over 1958. Not only are toymakers selling more, but the big overall trend this year is toward higher prices for more elaborate and ingenious toys. Said a salesman at Dallas' Sanger Bros.: "An $8 toy isn't considered expensive at all any more."

Biggest seller among the high-priced toys is a $30, bright-eyed, 3-ft.-tall plastic doll built like a three-year-old girl. The Ideal Toy Corp.'s Patti Play Pal has surprised even its makers, who shipped 500,000 dolls, found her copied by at least six other makers selling their versions for as low as $7.99. The first big doll to really catch on, Patti owes her success to the industry's ability to make her light in weight (4 3/4Ibs.) and so lifelike that she can wear her owner's clothes. Other new favorites:

P:Remco Industries' Coney Island Penny Machine. The penny arcade game features a claw that picks up tiny plastic toys, drops them down a chute. List price: $12.98.

P: Renwal's Visible Man. A 16-in.-tall clear-plastic assembly kit of the human body from skin to skeleton, with veins, arteries, bones and body organs, Renwal's man can be taken apart and put together again. List price: $4.98.

P: Hubley Manufacturing Co.'s Tic-Toy Clock. The spring-driven plastic clock, with its mechanism visible, actually keeps lime, has big, colored parts that can be taken apart and put back together again. List price: $4.95.

P: Revell Inc.'s Westinghouse Atomic Power Plant. The build-it-yourself kit includes a reactor, steam generator, and power-transmitting equipment. List price: $6.95.

Space-toy sales this year are sparked by new touches of realism. Explains Remco Industries President Saul Robbins: "Instead of the old Buck Rogers fantasy of flapping from one planet to another with a vaporizing gun, we're emphasizing land-based space. Children have to have something they can understand. Outer space is too futuresque for them." To duplicate the thrill of a rocket launching, Louis Marx & Co., world's largest toymaker, is offering a Cape Canaveral Missile Base set (list price: $7.98), with a phonograph record of actual launching countdowns. Ideal's Electronic Fighter Jet (list price: $19.95) simulates a jet cockpit, with "radar" and shooting rockets.

Science games and kits this year have become so sophisticated that they promise to baffle many a father. Science Materials Center offers a high-priced ($18.95) digital computer circuit and demonstrates the principle of atomic theory with a Dynatron electrostatic generator ($19.95). Among the popular-science sellers: the Porter Chemical Co.'s Biocraft Biology lab (list price: $20), which includes a frog, a perch, and a crayfish pickled in formaldehyde, and the Fleet Manufacturing Co.'s Chick-U-Bator, a two-egg plastic incubator. Other eye-catchers: Margarete Steiffs stuffed frogs, starfish and turtles for children's TV seats; Boombass Co.'s one-man band mounted on a bouncing stick (list price: $39.95)

For the old reliables there are also new wrinkles, e.g., toy guns this year have built-in whine and ricochet sounds. For kids who have almost everything, Dallas' Neiman-Marcus has a $2,200 gas-engine-powered passenger train.

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