Bernard Loomis, who died June 2, was the marketing whiz behind Star Wars action figures, Hot Wheels, and a slew of products with tie-ins to cartoons, a form of marketing he pioneered, to the delight of children and the consternation of many of their parents.

Dubbed by one writer “the man who invented Saturday morning,” Loomis masterminded both “Strawberry Shortcake” and “Care Bears,” entertainment multiplexes that include TV shows, movies, books, and greeting cards, as well as action figures and accessories.

As a top executive for Kenner, Hasbro, Mattel, and other toy companies from the early 1960s, Loomis was involved with many of the most successful toys of his era, including Barbie, Baby Alive, and Chatty Cathy, the first talking doll. For a presentation to a movie director, Steven Spielberg, Loomis is believed to have coined the word “toyetic,” meaning, he said, “the property of being expressible in playable figures and hardware.” “Close Encounters,” Loomis told Mr. Spielberg, was not toyetic; “Star Wars” was – so toyetic in fact that the action figures and toys Loomis manufactured to director George Lucas’s specifications generated over $750 million. The “Star Wars” line was so popular that Loomis even sold futures on them. Wrapped up under millions of Christmas trees in 1976 were photos of “Star Wars” characters with a certificate promising delivery of an action figure the following May. It became a marketing legend and was the birth of a toy show business complex tsunami.

He had less luck with Duke the Wonder Dog and Steve Scout – toys that won’t generate a flicker of recognition today, but in an industry where speedy blastoffs and flameouts are the norm, Loomis had a remarkable track record. “He has been associated with the largest toy company in the world, at the moment it became the largest toy company, on three separate occasions,” wrote the Atlantic Monthly in 1986.

Remarkably, Loomis disparaged the role of market research in coming up with new toy ideas. “The trouble with research is that it tells you what people were thinking about yesterday, not tomorrow,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “It’s like driving a car using a rear-view mirror.”

He said he left toy giant General Mills, in 1984, because “they were into market research; I’m into guts.” In addition to “Star Wars” figures, Hot Wheels cars and animatronic bears and kids in various berry flavors, guts gave the youth of America the Snoopy Tooth Brush, Baby Alive (a batter-powered peeing doll,) the Play-Doh Barber Shop, the Tree House, the Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man, and Big Boggle, the five by five version, which (unlike most of the products he masterminded) he apparently invented himself.

Loomis was raised in the Bronx, minutes from Yankee Stadium, where he pursued stars like Lou Gehrig and Joe Dimaggio for their autographs. Money was tight – Loomis’s father was an entertainment agent for among others, Jackie Gleason, but it was Gleason’s lean years – and Loomis didn’t have many toys growing up. Instead, he devised a baseball simulation game based on a deck of cards, and memorized the Lionel train catalog, creating nationwide mock schedules. Later, at General Mills, he would be president of Lionel. But he told the Los Angeles Times, “I had more fun running trains in my imagination.”

Loomis was a big kid, and a precocious one; he skipped several grades, and went to work at age 11 parking cars at Yankee Stadium. After service in the South Pacific during World War II, he returned home and attended New York University. He found work at a Nyack manufacturer of hardware, and then as a toy company representative. In 1961, Loomis was hired by Mattel, then a fledgling toy company selling an enticingly busty doll named Barbie.

The first innovation was to create brand consciousness for toys through TV advertising. “Prior to Mattel, there were no branded toys,” Loomis told author Robert Spector in “Category Killers: The Retail Revolution and Its Impact on Consumer Culture” (2004).

He became national sales manager of the company and its main products, Barbie and Chatty Cathy, sold in the millions. In 1969, Loomis was in charge of launching Hot Wheels, the first toy launched with a national TV show, which ran Saturday mornings on ABC. The show was canceled when the Federal Communications Commission insisted it be booked by the network as an advertisement. A decade later, when a more permissive regulatory environment in Washington prevailed, both “Strawberry Shortcake” and the TV-toy marketing axis were born. Within a few years, the majority of Saturday morning fare included toy tie-ins and watchdog groups like Action for Children’s Television were livid that advertisers would target children.

Loomis, unsurprisingly, had a more sanguine view of the shows. “Consistently, evil is vanquished by good,” he told Los Angeles Times in 1985. “We’d have a great world if real evil took the beating it gets on Saturday morning.”

Loomis went into semi-retirement in the late 1980s, but continued to consult for the toy industry. With his daughter Merrill, he developed a line of dolls called the Quints that was later sold to Tyco. He lived in Connecticut and Palm Beach, where he peppered the local newspaper with letters to the editor on hot-button topics of the day; despite his wealth, he did not waver from the left leaning politics of his youth.

In his spare time, he did crossword puzzles and watched sports on TV. When there were several games at the same time he was interested in, he would stack several televisions on top of each other and watch them all, keeping notebooks full of statistics on each.

Bernard Loomis
Born July 4, 1923, in the Bronx; died June 2 of heart disease at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.; survived by his wife of 59 years, Lillian Prince Loomis, daughters Debra Jan Loomis and Merrill Loomis, and two grandchildren.