Hula Hoop Mania!

0:00Have you ever heard the story of the flight from New York to Minneapolis that vanished over Lake Michigan in 1950, or the group of hikers who died under mysterious circumstances, and incident that became known as the Diathlon Pass incident in 1959? Well, on the expedition unknown podcast from Discovery, host Josh Gates travels the world to investigate history's greatest unsolved mysteries, like the stolen objects taken by Nazis during World War II, or the final resting place of the Griffin, the very first ship to explore the Great Lakes. Travel the globe with Josh Gates to see investigate some of humanity's greatest feet and most iconic legends. And because we know you retrospective love history, we know you'll love this, history, we're the bit of mystery. So travel the world with Josh as he investigates these legendary tales. Listen to expedition unknown, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, and hoping it all works out? Well,

1:02with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll help you find options within your budget. Try it today at Progressive.com, Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Price and coverage matched limited by state law, not available in all states. It's March 5th, 1963, and another remarkable event is about to be uncovered by Arya, Rebecca and Ali, the retro specters. It's not often that things get patented five years after they've been a huge fad selling 25 million units in just four months, but that is exactly what happened when you have as rapidly adopted a trend as the Hulupe, which was finally intellectually protected today in history in 1963, an event presumably celebrated with much hips-withling gyration. Yes, and in Arthur's Spud Mellon's defense,

2:06for it was he who had filed a patent, he did file it almost four years earlier in 1959, and reading through the application, it sounds like he actually originally tried to file for it a year before in 1958, but abandoned that unclear reasons. The reason was probably connected to the fact that while the name Hulupe was a copyright, it was very, very difficult to patent the technology simply because it had been around for so long, and it was very difficult to come up with a way to describe in writing how your thing was special and unique. Yeah, there's a bit of a contested origin story to the Hulupe. There's at least one story credits its existence to an Australian woman living in L.A. called Joan Anderson, and her role, of course, so let me present the Australian case before we perhaps debunk it, let's see. She was visiting the Bons of Struth, and she was in Sydney in 1956, and she just back visiting family, and she noticed Australians twirling bamboo

3:08hoops around their waist for fun and exercise, and she became fascinated by that herself, and when she returned to L.A., she had a hoop shipped over and began demonstrating it to friends, helping kind of spread the idea informally at least. And during one of these sessions, she says a friend remarked that her movements resembled the Hawaiian Hulu dance, prompting Anderson to coin the name Hulupe, and seeing its potential, she goes further. She says, her husband Wayne approached Arthur Spud Mellon of Wemmo in 1958 and showed him the hoop and explained both the activity and the name, and Wayne had a gentleman's handshake of an agreement, and that deal helped set in motion, at least again, according to Anderson, the mass production of the Hulupe, which eventually became a cultural phenomenon in the US. I feel like it just, I just have to interject here and say that I think it's really important to highlight that Joan Anderson was a former swimwear model, and I think this is a, you know, a non-negligible part of the story that she goes about to Australia

4:12as its family, comes back, gets the Hulupe, she's suddenly demonstrating it at dinner parties in front of friends and family, and everyone's saying, you know what, I think this could catch on, and I think this kind of comes up later in the story of the Hulupe as well. What, just the fact of, it needs to be seen to be believed, once you've seen it, you want to get involved? Well, it needs to be seen on an Australian swimwear model, yeah. Did you see that was the first advert that ever appeared for it? It was from the Los Angeles Mirror, and the illustration isn't of a child, it's of a shapely woman, and it's explicitly described as being for the whole family. In fact, one of the suggested uses after playing games and exercising is reducing, you know, like, dieting, so really drawing attention to the woman's body. Yes, I mean, that sort of sexy element was always there, regardless of how it ended up in the hands of Arthur Mellon. In one of his obituaries, I read a quote from his wife, who said, Spud, because that was his nickname, Spud brought it home and showed it to me, so everyone's hands on this proto-hulupe. His wife said, he said it would be huge, but I said, you can't put that

5:15on television, they just banned Elvis Presley's hips from the Ed Sullivan show. There was this kind of sense of like, okay, we'll make it for kids then, is that what we're doing? But if that's the strategy, then really, you know, Spud Mellon and his co-founder of WAMMO, for that was the company that produced the Hula hoop, Richard Nure, were the right people to have it fall into their hands, because in an extraordinary career of novelty toys that tapped into the zeitgeist of 1950s America, they manufactured not only the Hula hoop, but the Frisbee, albeit marketed under a different name, the Pluto platter, we've talked about Pluto many a before, the Superbowl, the water wiggle, silly string, the slip and slide, and the hacky sack. I mean, that is a winning streak from two people who know what kids toys are, so I mean, you know, however the idea came to them, they were the right people to exploit it, I think. Yeah, and once again, they were really tapping into the cultural zeitgeist, because as we've mentioned before, Hula was front of mind for Americans at the time,

6:17because Hawaiian culture was having a huge moment in mid-50s America, we talked about, you know, China, but also teaky bars, ukulele music, and Hula dancing, these were all things that people were thinking about at the time and that was seen as quite cool, so as soon as you attach a word Hula to hoop, people are already thinking, yeah, no, I get this, this is cool. Yeah, and I think that is part of Nure and Mellon's genius, and the genius of WAMMO even to this day, I went on the site, and they're still appealing for people who have a good idea that maybe might want to work with them to send in their idea, and I went through the multi-step process of potentially submitting an idea just to see what would happen, and you get to the point where it asks you, is your idea either patented or patent pending? And if you say no, it kicks you out, and it says, thanks anyway, we're not interested. Basically, they're looking for people who have got to a stage where they've got a thing, they own it, no one else is in possession of it, and they can bring it to the world in the same

7:21way that they did so many times. Since they started out just as graduates, Nure and Mellon, they were so fascinating, they met in their teens and became graduates of UCLA, they left their jobs just to start up their own company making toys. The first thing was this powerful Ashwood slingshot, which they promoted through live demonstrations, and the name WAMMO came from the sound that the slingshot made when it hit its target. So that was where they started out, but they were always hugely entrepreneurial, right up until the point where they encountered this Hula hoop thing. Their genius was to make it out of a plastic called Marlex, which was rigid enough to stay upright when 12, but light enough to be inexpensive, and they sold it for almost nothing. It was like less than two bucks, and I think that is another part of why it became so successful because anyone could buy one. Yes, that recipe across all of the WAMMO portfolio is consistent. So seeking ideas from the public is something that they always did using in-house inventors to refine those ideas,

8:26creating a stable of around a dozen simple inexpensive products that could be sold cheaply, but that price nonetheless represented a price five times the cost of manufacturing and promotion. That's the sweet spot. So they're all made out of plastic, like the slip-and-slide, like it's giant, isn't it? And you know, it looks really cool. It's just a sheet of plastic with some water. And then the other part of their recipe as well was they were making mostly garden toys, summer toys. So they could market their products when advertising rates were cheaper in the spring and the summer because the toy market then has now was geared around Christmas, and also all the seasonal workers to make the things, because this was a time when factories in the States were actually involved in creating the thing, and it wasn't done in China. They had toy makers who were on layoff from Christmas. We've now out to do, so they'd come and make the Superbowl. So all of that was really, really clever, and just absolutely the right recipe to conquer the States when they had the right idea. Yeah, and the way that they got the fad going too, you know,

9:27Joan Anderson said that when she was in Australia, she'd seen these children playing quite spontaneously with these hoops. Obviously, Wamo wanted to get, they called non-spontaneous word of mouth thing going, and the way they did that was by holding demonstrations in playgrounds. This was something that you could do at the time. It was actually pretty commonplace for new toys. That's how the initial yo-yo craze of the 1930s got going. Literally salesmen going from school to school, getting kids interested, and then they go to the next town and suddenly it's craze in the next town as well. And that's basically how they did it, but I have to say, out fairness to your people, Aryan. Australia had already had its hoolahoop craze. The year before, coals had started selling plastic mass market hoops just like the hoolahoop. Curtsy on Australian toy maker called Toll Toys, they shifted around 400,000 of them in 1957, the year before they hit the market in the US, and 400,000 in 1950s Australia is a not inconsiderable amount of sales. But it has to be said, it was the Wamo version that took the craze global. I saw that the hoolahoop craze inspired four novelty singles in 1958, two of them were called the hoolahoop song. One was called

10:29Hoopla Hoolah, and there was a rockabilly number called Hoolahoop Boogie, which I think was particularly exciting. And I think one of the hoolahoop songs broke the top 40, so people were really going wild, and this must have been adult record buyers, surely. And of course, the delicious KP snack, which I still enjoy, in a way that's the legacy, isn't it? Because the hoolahoop itself. Yeah. It's not something that I use regularly, but I still eat packet hoolahoop very happily. Just whammy know about the existence of hoolahoop's. I reckon it's reached their death. Tomorrow. By the way, everyone, you can get free music online now. Ditch the ads and get a Sunday episode when you join club retrospectors. patreon.com slash retrospectors. At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing

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