Nextoy’s Robert Fuhrer discusses milestones for Crocodile Dentist and Gator Golf

Bob, it’s always great to catch up! Before we begin properly, is that a Gator Golf shirt?
It is! I’m wearing a Gator Golf shirt – I made these up for the Goliath guys a couple of years ago as a thank you for their terrific sales and marketing.

Beautiful. You know you’ve made it when you’ve got polo shirts of your games! Now, we’re here to talk about a couple of recent anniversaries for Gator Golf and Crocodile Dentist. Let’s start with the latter. How old is Crocodile Dentist this year?
It turns 35 next year.

Amazing. And how did that game come about?
It came from a drawing by one of our Japanese partners – a toy development group called Asahi. Nextoy has a rich history with Japan and Japanese partners and we represented Asahi. Later, they were bought by Casio and became Casio Creative Products. I oversaw everything outside of Asia with them. We ran that for years and then Bandai bought them – it’s a part of Bandai now, but I had a 27-year run with them – a pretty good run!

But yes, back then our job was to come up with ideas to partner on and they would engineer and develop them, or we’d look at things that were initiated on their side. Crocodile Dentist was initiated on the Japanese side – all from a drawing. And, gosh, I still remember exactly where I was when I first saw that drawing… I was at the Akasaka Prince Hotel.

And Asahi were going through ideas with you?
Yes, like a menu. We’d go through all these renderings – this looks interesting, that doesn’t, and so on. Now, of course, very, very few projects ever saw the light of day. But the Crocodile Dentist stood out, so we made a model.

Our first presentation of it was to Parker Brothers in Japan. It’s a funny story – do you know Little Shop of Horrors?

The musical with the big man-eating plant?
That’s the one. Audrey II was its name! Well, at the time Milton Bradley had a game out called Feed Me. It wasn’t an officially licensed Little Shop of Horrors game, but it had this big plant that you’d feed little pellets. At some point the plant’s mouth would snap shut.

So anyway, we presented Crocodile Dentist to Parker Brothers and within seconds, the Head of Product Development dismissed it as being just a copy of Feed Me. “Yeah, it’s just another Feed Me, okay.” It was swept away and we were onto the next thing.

Now, the second pitch we ever had for Crocodile Dentist was to Milton Bradley – to Mike Meyers from the US and David Fear and Miriam Mawle from the UK. So, we present it, and in the same amount of time it took Parker Brothers to dismiss it, David Fear said: “Oh my God, it’s a classic!”

“Oh my God, it’s a classic!” Brilliant!
It was an incredible moment – and when you look back, he called it accurately.

Dismissed immediately by one company, hailed as a “classic” by another.
It was unbelievable. Two of the experts in games at the time – the two top experts… But the real unsung hero behind Crocodile Dentist is a guy named Phil Grant. He was an industrial designer inside Milton Bradley. We’d previously worked together on a line called T.H.I.N.G.S. – it stood for Totally Hilarious Incredibly Neat Games of Skill. It remains one of my favourite projects of all time and that was actually our breakthrough product in 1985.

That’s when I first met Phil. We had a great run where for 10 or 11 years in a row we had a new game out each year with Milton Bradley – or Hasbro as they became. But Phil Grant was assigned to Crocodile Dentist and I credit him with making it a success.

What was it that Phil added to the concept that made it all click?
Well, a lot of the success of the game is due to the charm of the design. Phil designed it in such a way that you couldn’t remove the crocodile’s teeth with your fingers. You had to use the special tool. And he really nailed the character of the crocodile. I loved the original design. The version out today looks goofier – it has friendly eyes and one version has braces on the teeth. But the original model is what I call ‘the angry eyes’ version. When you’d play the game, kids were scared of the crocodile – but in playing the game, they had fun and overcame that fear. I love the original design and Phil did an amazing job.

Yes, the version out today is a little different, isn’t it? You push teeth down now rather than pull them out – and it has much friendlier eyes! Sadly, I’ve seen online that many of the copycat versions of Crocodile Dentist have gone back and embraced that original ‘angry eyes’ look.
You know, Crocodile Dentist is maybe the most copied game in the world. Maybe it’s too vast an effort to police copycats around one single item… It’s become a sort of a family tradition of ours that wherever one of us travels, we’ll find a knock-off Crocodile Dentist. I get sent lots of photos of them!

Terrible. Now, was Crocodile Dentist an immediate hit? When did you know it was something special?
I bought a home at that time and I always said it’s the house that Crocodile Dentist bought! But it was obvious pretty quickly that it was doing well – the Q3 royalty payment of that year was a number I’d never imagined possible at the time. But we were so occupied by what we were doing at the time, and we had this momentum, that we never really stopped to reflect on it. I’m only really appreciating its ‘status’ now.

Sticking with the croc theme, let’s move onto Gator Golf. This came out a few years after Crocodile Dentist?
Yes, and I can take more direct credit for Gator Golf! Shark Attack had just came out from Eddie Goldfarb. Then Crocodile Dentist came out and it was enjoying some success, so we asked ourselves: ‘How can we leverage this?’ You can change the colour, you can change the size, you can do the obvious things, but how do you really turn it into a franchise? And… We were stuck!

Couldn’t crack it?
Couldn’t crack it. We thought about a lot of things, but we were stuck… Then I go to Toy Fair and I go through the Milton Bradley showroom. They had this product – a failed product as it turns out – but it made a big impression on me: Shark Attack Bowling.

A spin-off of Eddie Goldfarb’s game?
Yes, it was a bowling game where the fish were the bowling pins and the shark had a friction motor in it. So the shark was the bowling ball and you’d aim it at the fish pins. It was invented by Eddie Goldfarb and I thought it was brilliant! I thought: ‘That’s how you do it! Sports!’

So I challenged our team – both the American guys and the Japanese guys – to find a way of bringing sport to Crocodile Dentist. We looked at everything… Tennis, baseball, soccer… And one of them was golf. I sat with Milton Bradley’s Phil Grant and Ron Weingartner to present these Crocodile Dentist sports games and when we showed the golf one Ron said: “Oh, it’s mini golf for the home!” And that was that. It turned 30 last year!

Amazing. And you mentioned Phil again there, was he just as pivotal in steering the design of Gator Golf as he was with Crocodile Dentist?
Absolutely. He came up with the system where you the ball would enter the gator’s mouth and then the gator would rotate. It’s changed over the years and is with Goliath today.

Both iconic games – and both boasting terrific TV ads!
Oh absolutely – Hasbro killed it on the commercials. We shouldn’t ignore that aspect in terms of what made these successful. In fact, when I first met my now son-in-law, he sang me the Gator Golf jingle. It was so catchy!

Ha! “Gator Golf, give it a whack! Gator Golf, he’ll throw it right back!” We’ll pop it in here so folks can check that out.

And I imagine that earned your son-in-law points with you!
Yeah, I mean, he got to marry my daughter!

Ha!
The Crocodile Dentist commercial was great too. And this was back when companies would do TV commercials for individual games. It’s not a smart investment anymore.

No, but you’re right – and we’ll put the Crocodile Dentist one in here too. It’s another winner!

So, Crocodile Dentist spawned Gator Golf. Did it steer your thinking around any other games at that time?
Yes – and it’s another game that’s still on the market: Mad Dog. Do you know Mad Dog, with Goliath?

I do!
That was a direct evolution of Crocodile Dentist. We developed it with Phil Grant and it had a lot of momentum, a lot of energy from the Hasbro side. So, that summer it went into tooling, but then there was a Pitbull attack on a child in the United States and so Alan Hassenfeld killed it internally.

Oh!
So we had this game that was all done, but Hasbro was out. I showed it to others but nobody wanted to do a game that, at the time, was going to be $20 retail. Now that seems funny, but it was seen as a bit of a deluxe game at the time.

Then Larry Bernstein, who was the Head of Marketing for Milton Bradley, got a job at Mattel. Soon after, he came directly to us and said: “I need some action games to start the Mattel games division.” One of them was Mad Dog, but you can’t start a line with just one game so we sold another one to them. But Larry didn’t stay there for long and they closed the game division soon after.

So Mad Dog came back to you again?
It did! And now it had more negative history attached to it, because Mattel tried it and dropped it right away. Not because of the product, but because they closed the games division.

So now it’s sitting on the shelf of my office in New York, in the New York Toy Building – we had a showroom with a glass window door. And one day, young Adi Golad looks through our window, sees Mad Dog on the shelf and comes into our office. This is during Toy Fair – and I had no idea who he was. Not a clue. He’s dressed, let’s just say, unimpressively. He’s with this guy in a suit – who I later found out was his brother. The big joke Adi and I have now in retrospect is that I paid all the attention to the brother and none to Adi!

Ha! But he wanted it?
He did! He was insistent. I had a little bit of a struggle with my Japanese partners because they didn’t want to work with a company they’d never heard of. But I won that battle because we didn’t really have any other options for it. But it landed there and it’s still in the line.

Amazing. Before we wrap up, is it tougher these days for a new game to go on to enjoy the kind of longevity that Crocodile Dentist, Gator Golf and Mad Dog have?
Yeah, those days – and that approach – have gone. There’s a big reliance on analytics and retailers like Target. And if things aren’t selling in the first couple of weeks, it’s very rare you’ll find the kind of support needed to make something an enduring success. I think it’s in part because the industry is largely run by business people, not product people, these days.

And look, it’ll still inevitably happen – we’ll have games come out today that will go onto become hits that endure… But it’s really hard these days. Goliath are a good example of a company that still has that spirit… They’ll invest in something and try to keep it alive. TOMY are another good example. They’re terrific – and old school in a way. You know Alpesh?

We’re big fans of Al.
He’s fantastic. And he cares about the product. That’s what you need – a forward-thinking innovator that cares about the product. If you have that, your game stands a chance to stick around.

Bob, I could chat to you for days. Huge thanks for taking the time – and congrats again on the anniversaries for these classic games.

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