This is the 39th in an exclusive series of 50 articles, one published each day until July 20, exploring the 50th anniversary of the first-ever Moon landing. You can check out 50 Days to the Moon here every day.
Amid a dusty landscape anchored by a futuristic space outpost, two children, one white and one black, play among a fleet of lunar vehicles. The year is 1968—one of the most divisive and racially charged in recent U.S. history—yet here, on the Moon, harmony reigns.
A voiceover intones, “We’ll all live here soon,” this “exciting place/the world of space/as all the astronauts know/this world is swell/it’s made by Mattel/with it, how far can you go?”
The scene is an ad for Major Matt Mason, “Mattel’s Man in Space,” an extremely popular but short-lived action figure whose rise and then rapid disappearance neatly mimics popular culture’s obsession and then rapid boredom with the mania around the Moon race itself.
The story of how Mattel created the hit product line reflects a surprising symbiosis between the effort to get to the Moon and the challenge of captivating the space-obsessed youth of the 1960s.
First, there was a surprising talent pipeline from the aerospace industry into toys. Mattel, which was the leading toymaker of the post–World War II era, led the way. In 1956, a year before Sputnik and the start of the space race, its founders hired a young engineer named Jack Ryan from Raytheon to serve as its VP of research and development and oversee design. At Raytheon, Ryan had worked on both the Sparrow and Hawk missile systems.
“Jack transformed the toy industry by bringing scientific standards and new materials and processes to manufacture products that hadn’t been done before,” Roger Croyo, a longtime Ryan confidante, told Jerry Oppenheimer, author of Toy Monster, an unauthorized history of Mattel. “I think all of the aerospace engineers have a feeling that if they get tired of that they can always go into toys and it wouldn’t be as challenging,” said Jay Smith, who joined Mattel as a product development engineer after a stint at the defense contractor TRW, where, among other things, he did vibration analysis for the lunar module descent engine for Moon landings. “But I think the opposite is true—the mindset is so different and the cost constraints are so tough. You have to produce a whole toy for what a couple of nuts and bolts cost in the space program.”
As for the toys themselves, Ryan and his crew clearly sought inspiration from early designs that had been publicly shared. In 1961, work began on the Apollo Space Suit Assembly (later known as the Extravehicular Mobility Unit) so astronauts could safely venture out into space. Hamilton Standard won the contract, and early mockups from 1962 depict an accordion-like design at major joints. The final Apollo spacesuit, which was made by Playtex, not Hamilton Standard, looked much different, but Mattel’s design for Mason retained the contrasting colors of those early joints, which both looked cool and reinforced the idea that Mason, at six inches, could provide more fun than Hasbro’s GI Joes twice his size.
Astronaut Matt Mason was a memorable hit. Oscar-winner Tom Hanks, who produced an HBO series on Apollo, From the Earth to the Moon, as well as starring in Apollo 13, was 13 at the time of the first Moon landing. For Hanks, Mason “was a great astronaut: a full-on, lifelike astronaut, made with rubber and wire, kind of like Gumby. He was bendable and posable.” Hanks talked about Matt Mason back in 1995. “I went through a few of them because after a while the wires get all twisted.” Mattel did have some problems with Mason’s reliability (as well as with paint wearing off Mason’s suit), but not bad for a toy that sold for $2.97. (That’s about $23 in today’s dollars.)
But even before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had walked on the Moon, Mattel had abandoned its initial efforts at verisimilitude and made Mason’s world more about science fiction—it introduced several alien characters—than lunar exploration.
Charles Fishman has the day off. Fishman, who has written for Fast Company since its inception, has spent the past four years researching and writing One Giant Leap, his New York Times best-selling book about how it took 400,000 people, 20,000 companies, and one federal government to get 27 people to the Moon. (You can order it here.)
For each of the next 50 days, we’ll be posting a new story from Fishman—one you’ve likely never heard before—about the first effort to get to the Moon that illuminates both the historical effort and the current ones. New posts will appear here daily as well as be distributed via Fast Company’s social media. (Follow along at #50DaysToTheMoon).