Electric Football And Munro Games

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Electric football Munro Day Nite Fooltball

Munro’s 1972 Day/Nite Electric Football Game.

Electric football has many great stories, and one of the stories we’re most proud of in The Unforgettable Buzz is that of Canadian toy maker Munro Games.

A 1963 Munro table hockey game. Sears Wish Book.

In a fortuitous turn we were able to make the acquaintance of Don Munro Jr. in the late 1990’s (a big “thank you” to table hockey historian Rob Raven). Mr. Munro’s father founded Munro Games in the 1930’s, with the company establishing itself as a serious toy maker through the high-quality table hockey games that it made during the 1940′s and 1950′s.

By the early 1960’s Don Jr. and his brother Bill were running Munro Games. By that time the company was the main table hockey game supplier for Sears, and was also making table hockey games for Tudor and Norman Sas.

Bill eventually grew tired of the toy business, so Don partnered with a Buffalo aerospace engineering firm called Servotronics, Inc. The owner of Servotronics was looking to diversify, and toys were a profitable endeavor as the 1960’s came to a close.

The Servotronics’ owner also liked making bold decisions, thus Munro Games blitzed into electric football in 1971 with only minimal preparation. But within a year they had created the legendary Day/Nite game, which was the first electric football game with floodlights. It was also the largest electric football of the time (40” long).

Munro’s grand entrance into electric football happened to coincide with one of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression – the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. Even the major toy companies suffered enormously during this time, and Munro Games was quickly adrift in a sea of red ink.      

Munro Games would never recover, soon joining the long list of defunct toy makers. Don Munro had a front row seat to his company’s rise and fall, which he thoughtfully recounted for us in The Unforgettable Buzz. 

Unfortunately, Mr. Munro passed away not long after speaking with us. So it’s been our hope for many years now that we would one day be able to tell his story. It’s had to believe that that day isn’t very far away anymore. And the Munro story is one that is not to be missed.

 

Earl & Roddy

 

Electric Football’s Dream Machine – The Tudor Rule Book

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1967 Tudor Rule Book

Electric football, from the early 1960’s on, was associated with the NFL. Actually, for most of us the equation looks like this:  

Electric Football = NFL

There aren’t many other toys or games that carry such a strong association with a major sport.  Table hockey will always be the NHL, and Madden will always be the Madden, but beyond that…comparisons get pretty thin (in other parts of the world the game Subbuteo = soccer)

One of things that made Tudor electric football special was the catalog that came in each game. In the center of the catalog were four amazing color pages that showed off the latest NFL games, and of course, the latest line of Tudor NFL teams.

Whether intentional or not, Tudor created a portable dream machine that was easily hidden in notebooks at school. No math problem could ever match the tough calculus of 49ers in white or dark. Or maybe the Cowboys in dark. Nah, they can wait…how about those cool looking Steelers with the yellow apron?

Teams on the order form were checked, unchecked, then checked again until the paper was almost worn through. Such were the impossible choices that needed to be made before sending your order to Brooklyn.

One of the important things that Tudor’s miniature NFL did was keep you interested in electric football year after year. Tudor didn’t have to sell you a new game each year to keep you playing. A new team or two on the field each year was all you needed.

So long after other toys had found a permanent place in the attic, we’d keep playing electric football. It was always fun, and there was always something new to dream about. And that’s why so many of us are still at it – we discovered we can still fulfill our team dreams some 40 years later.

 

Earl & Roddy

Tudor 1973 NFL Rule Book Electric Football

Tudor’s 1973 Electric Football NFL Rule Book

Electric Football…Where It All Started – the 1949 Tudor No. 500

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The 1949 Tudor Tru-Action No. 500 Electric Football Game

Electric football…this is where it all started. On the Tudor Tru-Action No. 500, which was first displayed at the New York City Toy Fair in March of 1949. By the fall, the No. 500 was being sold throughout the eastern part of the country in both toy and department stores.

Most of the stores that carried the game found themselves restocking the No. 500 multiple times in the lead up to Christmas. And eventually there were no more games to order. Tudor had completely sold through its first year’s run of electric football games.

No one was more surprised than Tudor President Norman Sas. He and Tudor Vice President Joe Tonole had high hopes for the game, but those hopes were entirely surpassed as 1949 came to a close. Sas and Tonole now had to see if electric football was just a one-year wonder, or if the game had staying power.

As 1950 began both men were optimistic, yet cautious. The toy business was, and still is, renown for its fickle nature. Could electric football repeat its success of 1949, or would Sas and Tonole be looking for a new toy to take its place in 1951?

Tudor’s story will unfold very soon in The Unforgettable Buzz. Stay tuned…

Earl & Roddy

Book Update And Sample Page

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Electric football is one step closer to having its history published. The Unforgettable Buzz is at the printer, getting its ankles taped and shoulder pads on. It’s also getting a little spinal adjustment, making sure that the book stays in the electric football starting lineup for a long time to come.

Being the superstitious lot that we are, we’re reluctant to say anything more. But at this moment, The Unforgettable Buzz is closer to being a reality than it has ever been. We’re incredibly excited — the final product has far exceeded our dreams and expectations.

It won’t be much longer. Thanks to everyone for your persistent patience and support.

 

Earl & Roddy

Electric Football Article on FoxSports Wisconsin Web Site

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Photo courtesy of Lynn Schmidt and MFCA

There’s a lengthy and thoughtful article about electric football up at on the FoxSports Wisconsin web site. Definitely check it out. A great read, and great information! There is also a link to the article if you click on the photo ———->

Buying NFL Teams at The Tudor Factory in Brooklyn – A First Hand Account

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Posted below is an amazing account of a visit to the Tudor factory. It was written by John Morano in 1996 and appeared in a Miggle newsletter – we remember it well. This is a copy of the original text, which has been shared with us by Frank Salles.

Frank is part of the story too, as it was he and John who made visits to the factory. They actually made three trips — one while Tudor was still a functioning company, and two other visits after the contents of the factory were moved to Chicago.

It’s a riveting “must read” for any electric football fan. Thank you John and Frank for sharing your excellent adventure!!

Cover of The Unforgettable Buzz

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Cover design by Michael Kronenberg.

Electric football’s story will soon be told. It won’t be long before “The Buzz” arrives…..

The First Official NFL Electric Football Game – Gotham’s G-1500

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electric football gotham NFL G-1500

The first official NFL electric football game – the majestic Gotham G-1500

Electric football and the NFL first came together on the Gotham G-1500 model in 1961. It was a groundbreaking game on many levels. It really was, in modern terminology, a game-changer, and set the stage for all that came after it, including Tudor’s miniature NFL.

Gotham’s sideline grandstand, complete with a players’ bench and NFL shield.

The story of how Gotham beat Tudor to the NFL is explored in great detail in The Unforgettable Buzz. In a surprising sequence of events, Norman Sas’ business judgement lets him down. But without that letdown, the Tudor NFL line that we know and love may have never come into existence.

Here are the electric football “firsts” from the Gotham NFL G-1500:

  1. First officially licensed NFL electric football game.
  2. First “big” electric football at 36″ long.
  3. First game with a sideline grandstand.
  4. First player “uniforms.”
  5. First electric football game to be shown in full color in the Sears Christmas Book

With all of these firsts, the game made a huge impact in the world of electric football. It set the course for all that was to come over the next decade. Without the Gotham G-1500, we might not still be talking about electric football in 2013.

 

Earl & Roddy

Sample Page From The Unforgettable Buzz – Joe Namath

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Electric football fans will soon have a book to call their own. The design of The Unforgettable Buzz is complete and we’re preparing the book for the printer. The final stats of the book are this: 652 pages long, more than 300 photos, and 45 pages of notes. It is a big book.

It wasn’t our intent to create such a lengthy volume. But we discovered early on that it was impossible to write a comprehensive electric football history without weaving the game into the timelines of pro football and the toy world of the Baby Boomer generation (see the page above). The result, we like to think, is the most complete and compelling “toy story” ever written.

We couldn’t have done it without the support of all our friends in electric football. You’ve really helped us push on to this very pivotal point. Many, many thanks. It won’t be long!

Earl, Roddy & Michael

 

Getting Closer…Back Cover and More

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“This is such a great book. Historical, colorful, and warm. It immediately took me back to those incredibly special days of my childhood.”

– Rick Burton, David B. Falk Professor of Sports Management, Syracuse University

The back cover of The Unforgettable Buzz

As you can see, we not only have a back cover for The Unforgettable Buzz, we already have comments. Some very nice ones at that. So, yes, if a reviewer has read the book, it means that we’re very, very close. There are still some final things we’re working out — we’ll keep you posted.

Thanks for all of your support!!!

 

Earl, Roddy & Michael

The Toy Factory — 176 Johnson Street in 2013

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The web page for condo sales at The Toy Factory in Brooklyn. Tudor’s factory is now building of high-end condos.

As a writer, it’s always disconcerting to find your words in a place where they’re not supposed to be. That happened a number of years ago when I typed “176 Johnson Street” into an Internet search engine. Shockingly, up came a page for the The Toy Factory Lofts in Brooklyn.

The first shock was that Tudor’s old factory had been converted to condos. Expensive ones at that, and this page was the entry point for shopping for one of them.

The second shock, and this was more of a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, was that when you clicked on the “History” tab, there were my words. And there was also an image that we had given to Miggle Toys.

The text and the photo had been stripped right off the Miggle electric football history page — in toy “talk” from the time of Norman Sas, they had been “borrowed.” Almost verbatim. And there wasn’t even an attribution. Whoever created the content for the page decided that my words fit their purposes…and to hell with all that copyright and permission nonsense. The Internet was a brave new world and there were condos to sell. Who has time to “do the right thing?”

I fired off an e-mail but the page was long dead (it’s totally gone now). For a long time I wrestled with how I felt about the commandeering of my text. If they just would have asked, I would have been honored to have my words tied to the building where Tudor once resided. I might have written something for them myself.

The shock and dark vibe has faded away, and as posted recently, I have visited the building. That my words ended up being tied to the Tudor factory — even in anonymous form — is pretty cool.

But we did learn something from it all, and we made certain to ask permission for all the images we used in The Unforgettable Buzz. Tracking down the proper owners for some images took years, and in the end, our vigilance cost us money because permissions usually aren’t free. Making this outlay more painful was the fact that most owners would probably never have any idea that we used their images in our book.

But we remember well how it felt when somebody used our work in a totally unauthorized way. Yes, we’re now in the brave new world of social media. But it doesn’t mean we should forget common decency — or how to do the right thing.

Earl

Electric Football History – Video of the Miggle NFL Team Room

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Electric football has many special items and places. This certainly ranks as one of them. It was Miggle’s NFL team room — the room where all the bags of NFL teams were stored, and where all the NFL team orders were filled. We were lucky enough to see it back in 1996. It’s definitely a piece of toy history now.

 

Earl & Roddy

 

Music – The Molten Core (Long Edit)  - Aalborg Ambient Soundtracks

Lee Payne – Tudor and Electric Football’s “All-Pro” Designer

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Lee Payne working late in Tudor’s Toy Fair Showroom.

Electric football’s evolution through the years will be chronicled thoroughly in The Unforgettable Buzz. And the person who contributed more to the game’s evolution than anybody else will feature prominently in our book. That person was Calvin “Lee” Payne.

Lee Payne wasn’t even on Tudor’s payroll when he first started working on electric football. But the gifted graphic designer would become Tudor’s first-ever Director of Product Development. The list of Lee’s contributions to electric football is long. For now we’ll keep it brief:

  •  Created Tudor’s first generation of 3-D players (and subsequent generations).
  •  Designed Tudor’s first large game and all of the company’s significant NFL games, including the Sears’ Super Bowl.
  •  Created and photographed the dream-inducing images for Tudor’s Rule Books during the 60’s and 70’s.
  •  Designed Tudor’s colorful packaging and boxes, NFL included.
  •  Responsible for the design and set up of Tudor’s New York Toy Fair showroom.

And this is just scratching the surface. We promise that The Unforgettable Buzz will get you fully acquainted with Lee’s stunning legacy. Almost every part of an electric football game has Lee’s fingerprints on it.

 

Earl & Roddy

Opening Tudor’s Electric Football Injection Mold For Bases – Miggle Warehouse Video

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Electric football games have lots of parts, with one of the most important parts being the bases the players run on. During our Miggle warehouse tour Kathy was kind enough to have one of the old Tudor base injection molds opened up so we could peek inside.

This mold had come all the way from Brooklyn, and what a surprise was found inside. It was possible to date the mold to 1972. How could we date it? Half of the bases in mold were clearly standard “deluxe,” or rookie bases. In the other half of the mold, the bases only had two sets of “legs,” and they were on the rear of base. In the front of the base, on the top, there was a round knob. This would have been punched out to create a hole. The hole was there for the mounting of the original 1972 TTC “red legs.”

An amazing find. There appeared to be “diverter” in the mold, allowing he plastic to be delivered to one half of the bases, or the other. So this mold probably was in use beyond 1972 – at least the standard/rookie half.

Earl & Roddy

Favorite Reads — The Real Toy Story by Eric Clark

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Electric football is the main focus of The Unforgettable Buzz, but the toy industry and its inner workings play a major role in the story of Norman Sas, Lee Payne, and Tudor Games.

One of our favorite reads on the business of toys is Eric Clark’s The Real Toy Story, which has just been released in paperback by Simon and Schuster. It’s a wide ranging book, with Mr. Clark touching on the toy world of the past (Tudor’s world of the 50′, 60′s, and 70′s), as well as the changes that thrust toys into their current economic state, of shall we say, flux.

Reading The Real Toy Story reinforces how amazing it is to still have electric football around some 64 years after its introduction to the toy world. The book also reinforces what an amazing 40-year run Norman Sas had with Tudor. Few and far between are the toy companies who have equaled Norman’s achievements.

We highly recommend The Real Toy Story. Mr. Clark has done a masterful job of putting the pieces of the toy industry together.

Earl

The Real Toy Story @Amazon

Miggle Warehouse Tour Part II — Base Injection Molds

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In this segement Kathy shows us an old Tudor injection mold that came from Brooklyn. It’s a mold for bases. They are incredibly heavy, as you can see, it takes a fork lift to move the mold from one area into another. There is a second part of this video, which we will be posting on Friday. There was a surprise inside when the mold was opened. Seems Tudor may have only used it for a single season.

Earl & Roddy 

The Seventeen Year “Touchdown” — The Unforgettable Buzz

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The cover of our 1996 “teaser.”

We are in the home stretch of finishing up The Unforgettable Buzz right now. Our best images are all locked in place, the text is “final,” and advance copies will soon be in the hands of some very special commentators. Hopefully we’ll get some pithy quotes for our back cover and web site.

It’s been difficult and thrilling at the same time. And it seems like a long time since we started this final push last summer. But really, this period is just a blip compared to the colossal journey the book has proved to be.

We can trace it back to the first letters we exchanged, or the first phone calls we exchanged, but really the first overt proclamation to write a book came in the four page “teaser” we took to Chicago in 1996.

Page 1

Looking at it today it seems so incredibly crude. Long forgotten is how much hard work went into getting things to look that “crude.” Graphics packages themselves were crude, and even getting photos scanned was a costly and elaborate endeavor. A friend of ours who worked in graphics designed it, and we spent hours at a terminal in Kinkos completing it. (Only the Kinkos computers had graphics packages…DOS was still on the home computer.)

Regardless of how it looks today, this was the first deliberate statement of our intention to write a book about electric football. We didn’t think it would take this long, but the final realization of our dream is not for away now. We’re excited and proud, and so grateful that Michael Kronenberg found his way to us. Even though he’s the “new guy,” we now can’t imagine this book without him.

Thanks to everyone who’s stayed along for the ride. We can’t wait for you to see it and read it!

 

Earl & Roddy

1973 Tudor Rule Book

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Tudor 1973 NFL Rule Book Electric Football

Tudor’s 1973 Electric Football NFL Rule Book

This was one of the most popular Facebook posts we ever did. It’s the 1973 Tudor Rule Book, featuring a color page with all of the NFL teams, and also Tudor’s new NFL No. 655 Championship model. It was the only game Tudor ever made that came with four teams.

The Unforgettable Buzz’s Tour of The Miggle Toys Warehouse

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Electric football was resurrected by Miggle Toys of Chicago in the early 1990′s. We were lucky enough to have gotten a tour of the Miggle warehouse in 1996.

Our tour guide was warehouse manager Kathy Holford, who was one of our favorite people in all of electric football. Kathy, unfortunately, has since passed away. But we are forever grateful to all the information she passed onto us. She made major contributions to The Unforgettable Buzz.

He’s part of what we saw…more to come in the future.

 

Earl & Roddy

Electric Football NFL Team Dreams – The Dundalk “Find”

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The one-of-a-kind Dundalk “find.”

Electric football collecting in the pre-eBay era was very much a “prospector’s” type of existence. Instead of a single click bringing up an online collectibles’ cornucopia, there were lots of long drives to toy shows that didn’t offer up a single dealer with an electric football game.

Large regional shows were your best bet, as dealers would often bring as much inventory as they could carry. And on the bonus side, when you did find a toy dealer with an electric football game, especially a big game, they were eager to get rid of it. You could even “bundle” other things because you were relieving the dealer of a large item that wasn’t in great demand.

You also ran print ads that seemed to be ignored by the entire population of North America. One of the “best” ads I ever ran was in the Dundalk Eagle in suburban Baltimore. During the post-war period of the 50’s and 60’s the community of Dundalk had a massive steel mill, a GM plant, as well as a number of shipyards and heavy manufacturers to keep the populace shopping at Sears and Ward. And it even had Johnny Unitas Colt Lanes, a bowling alley with a large Colts’ horseshoe in its façade. I was pretty sure that Santa left a lot of electric football games in Dundalk through the years. 

I’d had some nibbles and minor finds, and then I got a call from somebody who claimed to have 28 Tudor NFL teams. We established that they were all black shoe teams, so I was pretty excited, but also trying to temper my hopes. One thing I’d learned in my detective work was that things weren’t always as described.

And things weren’t as described this time…they were much better! I couldn’t believe what I was looking at on the dining room table. It took my breath away – a 28 drawer storage container filled with Tudor teams. Some of the teams even had 15-18 players. My normal rate then was $5 per team (it was 1994), but when I saw what they had, I offered a flat $160. Which they gladly took.

There were no large teams, but they were all black shoe, Hong Kong and Haiti in variety. They had been display teams — all of the players stood on TTC bases that had the directional dials removed. It was a find like no other, and one I would never equal. eBay would soon see to that.

I still have most of the teams, and they’re sitting in the exact same drawers they came in. Anytime I pull them out I still remember the excitement of the day I put them in the back of my car and drove home from Dundalk.

 

Earl