A pretzel oven, two light bulbs and a Cincinnati toy company.

The Easy-Bake Oven was a Kenner Products toy before it was a Hasbro one. Kenner was a company from Cincinnati, Ohio: English Wikipedia dates its founding to 1946, while the collector site KennerCollector.com dates it to 1947, names the founders as the brothers Albert, Philip and Joseph Steiner, and says the company took its name from its original office on Kenner Street. Wikipedia dates the oven’s introduction to 1963, and The Strong National Museum of Play, which runs the National Toy Hall of Fame, gives the same year on its own site.

The idea came from the street. The Strong says that in the early 1960s pretzel vendors on New York City streets inspired toy makers at Kenner to make the oven. Wikipedia names the person who made the suggestion: Norman Shapiro, Kenner’s sales manager in New York, who proposed a toy version of the vendors’ ovens to the company’s executives. It says the work was led by the research and development vice-president James Kuhn, with major contributions from Ronald Howes. A United States patent for a “toy oven” (No. 3,368,063), filed by Kenner Products on 23 December 1964 and granted on 6 February 1968, is in the name of James O. Kuhn.

The heat source was ordinary household lighting. The Strong and Wikipedia both say the original oven used incandescent light bulbs; Wikipedia places one above the baking tray and one below it. The Strong says the toy came with special cake and cookie mixes, a recipe book, utensils and slide-through baking pans: a pan of batter went in through a slot at one end and, Wikipedia says, came out through a slot at the other. NPR’s food blog The Salt, writing in June 2012, described the 1963 original as about the size of a toaster and moulded out of turquoise plastic, and reported that curators at the National Building Museum had placed an original 1963 oven in its House & Home exhibition.

Advertising tied the toy to its maker’s own mascot. Wikipedia says Kenner created the Gooney Bird in 1962 as part of its company logo, printed on its product packaging alongside the slogan “It’s Kenner, It’s Fun!”, and that in 1968 Kenner asked the Muppet creator Jim Henson to build a Muppet version of the bird, which appeared in Easy-Bake Oven commercials. KennerCollector.com says Kenner marked the oven’s thirtieth birthday in 1993 with a publicity event at a Cincinnati hotel.

General Mills, Tonka and Hasbro.

The oven changed owners along with its maker. Wikipedia says General Mills bought Kenner in 1967 and spun it off, together with Parker Brothers, as Kenner Parker Toys in 1985; that Tonka acquired Kenner Parker in 1987; and that Hasbro bought Tonka, with Kenner and Parker Brothers, in 1991. Hasbro has owned the Easy-Bake Oven since 1991. Wikipedia says Hasbro closed Kenner’s offices and merged its products into the wider company in 2000, and brought the Kenner name back in 2010 for a line of Star Wars figures. The oven itself carried on under the Hasbro name.

The shell changed with the kitchens around it. The Strong says the oven debuted in turquoise and pale yellow, and Wikipedia says it was designed to resemble a conventional oven. Wikipedia records a “Premier” model in avocado green or red in 1969 and a “Mod” model in yellow or light green in 1971, and says a later model resembled a microwave oven. The Associated Press, in a September 2011 report carried by USA Today, said the toy had come in the kitchen-décor colours of the 1960s and 1970s, and that an earlier model had a carrying handle and a fake stove top. Wikipedia says Kenner also licensed the oven abroad, including to Nakajima Corporation in Japan, which sold its version as Margaret’s Cooking Oven.

Under Hasbro the range widened. Wikipedia lists the Easy-Bake Oven and Snack Center of 1993, a 2002 variant called the Queasy Bake Cookerator, and the Real Meal Oven of 2003, which used a heating element and larger pans. A front-loading model released in 2006 was recalled in 2007 in a voluntary recall announced with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Strong inducted the Easy-Bake Oven into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2006.

The light bulb went in 2011. ABC News reported on 19 September 2011 that Hasbro was dropping the bulb as efficient lamps pushed aside traditional incandescent bulbs, and the Associated Press described the new Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven as the toy’s eleventh redesign, built around a heating element much like that of a traditional oven. The AP report was filed from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where Hasbro is based.

Design and documentation.

Toy and game packaging does a different job from most retail packaging, because the box is often the first thing a child sees and the last thing an adult reads before buying. Many toys are sold in a window box, a carton with a cut-out panel covered in clear film so that the product itself can be seen on the shelf. Card and party games more often come in a tuck box, a small folded carton with a flap that tucks in at the top, sized to fit in a pocket or a drawer.

Board games and larger toys tend to use a two-piece box with a printed lid, and the lid has long carried photography or illustration of people playing, so that the picture shows how the game or toy is used as much as what is inside. A logo on a toy or game box usually has to work at several sizes: across the front of a lid, along a narrow side panel when the box is stacked, and on the pieces, cards or the product itself.

Each guide that follows looks at how one name has been carried on its boxes, logos and advertising over time, and who has owned that name along the way.

From kitchen colours to a real-appliance look.

The Easy-Bake identity has long borrowed from the full-size kitchen. The 1963 oven came in turquoise and pale yellow, and Wikipedia describes the avocado green of the 1969 model as a common shade for kitchen appliances at the time. The 2011 redesign took the same idea further. The Associated Press quoted Hasbro’s vice-president of global brand strategy and marketing, Michelle Paolino, saying the company “wanted it to look more like a real appliance, not a plastic toy”, and described the Ultimate Oven as all curves, purple and snazzy graphics. Patricia Hogan, a curator at The Strong, told the AP it looked “sort of like an Art Deco toaster with wings — a purple one.”

Colour became a public question the following year. CNN reported on 18 December 2012 that Hasbro would unveil a black and silver Easy-Bake Oven after meeting McKenna Pope, a New Jersey teenager whose Change.org petition asked the company to offer the oven in gender-neutral packaging rather than the pink and purple of the Ultimate Oven’s box. Hasbro told CNN the black and silver design had been in development for eighteen months, and pointed out that the oven had been offered in a variety of colours since 1963, including teal, green, yellow, silver, blue and purple. Wikipedia says the redesigned product was due to be unveiled at the New York Toy Fair in February 2013.

Across those changes the two-word name has stayed the same, while the oven body has moved from turquoise and pale yellow through avocado green and microwave styling to purple, and then to black and silver. The maker’s name on the box has moved too, from Kenner and its Gooney Bird to Hasbro.

For a design guide, Easy-Bake shows how a toy appliance can keep one name through a chain of corporate owners and a run of colour changes that followed real kitchens. Compare it with Play-Doh, another Cincinnati name that passed through Kenner to Hasbro, and Nerf, a Parker Brothers line that reached Hasbro in the same 1991 purchase. For this guide we use turquoise, pale yellow and avocado with a display sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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