• QUIZ WIZ
“QUIZ WIZ—YOU REMEMBER that?” asks Al Kahn. We are sitting in his memorabilia-dense office, which occupies an upper floor of an old art deco edifice on Ninth Avenue in New York City’s theater district. And I do, in fact, remember Quiz Wiz—a handheld electronic trivia game that, somehow, became a must-have toy sensation in the early 1980s. Basically a hunk of rectangular plastic, it had a numerical keypad, a tiny speaker that buzzed, and an attached booklet of trivia questions that you answered by pressing certain keys—the whole apparatus as primitive as a glass-screened cathode-ray TV. “I think I got one of those for Christmas one year!” I say to Kahn, the very rhyming name of the game activating in my mind Super 8-ish images of childhood, of chaotic Christmas Day unwrappings.
Spend any length of time with Kahn, and this sort of thing happens over and over. Sooner or later, you come to realize that this plump, profane, fast-talking 74-year-old from Brooklyn is the person responsible for bringing into existence, for better or for worse, countless toys, games, and gizmos that have embedded themselves—also for better or for worse—in your remembrance of things past.
For more than 40 years, Kahn has been one of the world’s great toy impresarios—founding and losing empires, making and losing fortunes. You surely do not know his name, but you likely owe part of your childhood happiness to him.
He doesn’t, mind you, invent these amusements, or even really make them. What he does is unearth obscure toy ideas, license them from their inventors, and then scale the things up into mass-produced global phenomena, making everyone rich in the process, most notably himself. In this way, he’s like an old-school A&R man discovering pop musicians and signing them to the label, or like the early 20th-century showbiz producers Lee and J.J. Shubert, who bought scripts and songs and churned out Broadway smashes from their headquarters at the Shubert Theatre Building, which, as it happens, stands just down the street from Kahn’s office.
In the days of Quiz Wiz, Kahn says, he traveled the world hunting for new ideas as head of product development for a toy conglomerate called Coleco. He had one of those all-inclusive Pan Am tickets of jetage lore, where you could fly anywhere in the world in first class: Just show up at the airport, flash your ticket, and walk right onto the 747, destination London, Vienna, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Then you ascended the spiral staircase and started drinking scotch and sodas at the bar outside the cockpit.
Kahn made a habit of visiting the world’s best toy inventors at least twice a year. High on this list was Eddy Goldfarb, who, in Kahn’s words, “is a fucking legend.” From his workshop outside Los Angeles, Goldfarb invented countless iconic toys. Those plastic teeth that clatter? That’s a Goldfarb. The plastic gun that shoots soap bubbles? Goldfarb too. The game KerPlunk? Yes. Stomper trucks? You guessed it. “It was always fun to present items to Al, because he got so excited about them,” recalls Goldfarb, who turned 100 years old in September and is still inventing toys. On a visit to Goldfarb’s place
