The board grew out of Pilot’s magnetic display panel.

Magna Doodle is a toy built around a component made by a pen company. English Wikipedia says the drawing board was developed in 1974 at Pilot, the Japanese writing-instrument maker, and Japanese Wikipedia gives the same year, naming the company by its earlier title, Pilot Man-Nen-Hitsu, the predecessor of today’s Pilot Corporation. Japanese Wikipedia describes the idea as a writing surface that could stand in for a blackboard and chalk without producing dust. Pilot Pen Corporation of America, the company’s US arm, said in a 2006 press release that the board was first conceived as a presentation board for use in cleanrooms.

The technology is recorded in a patent. Google Patents lists US Patent 4,143,472, “Displaying magnetic panel and its display device”, assigned to Pilot Man-Nen-Hitsu, with a Japanese priority date of 11 April 1977, a US filing on 29 December 1977 and publication on 13 March 1979; the named inventors are Yasuzo Murata, Takeo Yokoyama and Hiroshi Murata. A 2004 federal court ruling in Connecticut confirmed that Pilot Corporation of America owned that patent and that it covered the drawing screen used in the Magna Doodle.

The same ruling describes how the screen works. It is a lattice of small hexagons, each holding iron filings suspended in an opaque fluid that is thick enough to hold the filings against gravity but not against a magnet. A stylus tipped with a magnet pulls the filings to the surface to leave a dark line, and an eraser bar sweeps a magnetic rod across the back of the screen to pull them down again. Japanese Wikipedia adds that the cells are kept in place by a honeycomb spacer between two clear plastic sheets.

Purple script, a red oval and a yellow field.

The court ruling is also a rare written record of the toy’s packaging. Judge Stefan Underhill’s ruling of 9 November 2004 says that the last Magna Doodle sold by Fisher-Price carried the name “Magna Doodle” in stylized purple script, with the words “The Original” in a red oval above it and a slogan below. A red banner reading “Classic” ran along the bottom of the face of the package. In a consumer survey described in the ruling, the logo was shown as purple stylized writing on a yellow background.

The ruling records how much of that look sat in the name and how much in the box. When Fisher-Price introduced its replacement product, the Doodle Pro, the court found that it and its packaging were nearly identical to the last Fisher-Price Magna Doodle, and that the main difference was the logo: the Doodle Pro name was also set in a stylized purple script, though not in the same lettering, and without the oval, slogan or banner. The prototype packages Ohio Art prepared for its own Magna Doodle, the ruling says, carried the same logo as the last Fisher-Price version, including “The Original” and the slogan.

Licensed line extensions were named in the contracts too. The ruling quotes a 1994 amendment to the licence that defined the licensed marks as “Magna Doodle”, “Maggie Doodle”, “Magna Doodle Dan” and “The Art of Imagination”, along with any other marks Tyco later used for the line under licence. English Wikipedia notes that a Magna Doodle appears throughout the television comedy Friends, on the wall of the apartment shared by Joey and Chandler, with messages that change across the series.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are classic toy names: drawing boards, building sets, craft kits and construction toys that many families have known across more than one generation. Toy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names still run by the company that started them to labels that have passed through several owners, and to marks that are licensed out to other manufacturers for years at a time.

A toy brand’s identity is usually carried less by any single product than by a name, a logo, a box and a handful of colours, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its manufacturing or licensed the mark to someone else. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, who makes the toy today and where it is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners and licensees over time, where its toys are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Pilot keeps the mark; toy companies license it.

Magna Doodle has always been a licensed brand rather than one owned by a toy maker. The 2004 ruling says Magna Doodle products had been on sale since 1978, that the mark had not always been owned by Pilot Corporation of America, and that the product had not always been made by Fisher-Price. English Wikipedia says Pilot registered “Magna Doodle” as a US trademark in 1986. On 1 January 1992, the ruling says, Pilot gave Tyco an exclusive licence to use the mark on drawing toys covered by its patent, on condition that Tyco bought all of its panels from Pilot and used the mark only in ways Pilot approved.

In 1997 Mattel merged with Tyco, and Mattel’s subsidiary Fisher-Price took over the agreement. According to the ruling, Fisher-Price then disputed the price of the panels, did not place an order by the annual deadline in October 2003, and the agreement ended on 31 December 2003. Pilot licensed the mark to The Ohio Art Company on 5 May 2004 and sued Fisher-Price and Mattel over the Doodle Pro; the court denied Pilot’s request for a preliminary injunction. In France the outcome differed: Pilot Pen Corporation of America announced on 21 November 2006 that the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris had ruled on 27 October 2006 that Mattel France’s use of the Magna Doodle and Doodle Pro names infringed trademarks held by Pilot, and noted that Mattel France had appealed. The same release said Ohio Art was authorised to make and distribute the toy in Europe, where it was sold under the Playskool brand, under Vivid in the UK and under Ohio Art in the US.

English Wikipedia says Ohio Art later dropped the licence and that the current licensee is Cra-Z-Art. In Japan, Japanese Wikipedia lists Pilot’s own magnetic boards under other names, JIKKY and Memole.

For a design guide, Magna Doodle shows how a brand can live in a name, a script logo and a few package devices while the companies making it change around it. Compare the magic-screen drawing toy in our Etch A Sketch brand guidelines and another picture-making toy in our Lite-Brite brand guidelines. For this guide we use script purple, board yellow and oval red with an upright script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Magna Doodle’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.