COLUMN
Stories from GG’s Toy Box
By Grahame Grassby
Story 10 — Mal the Inflator
By the middle of 1996 the Bananas in Pyjamas consumer product range was well and truly launched with books, videos & CDs, clothes & accessories, wooden toys, melamine, greeting cards and backpacks all in the marketplace and selling like crazy.
We were having great sales success across all these categories but with one major exception; there was still no Bananas in Pyjamas plush toy available.
The Australian toy licensee for Bananas in Pyjamas toys including plush toys was Playcorp and as hard as their toy designer and factory in China tried, they just could not get the design of the plush toy right.
Over and over again a plush toy prototype went back and forth from the ABC in Sydney, to Playcorp in Melbourne, to the factory in China and back again with increasing frustration that the plush toy was not close to being right and therefore not getting sign-off approval from ABC Children’s TV.
And then, out of the blue, one day into our offices walked Mal Fraser-Clay.
Mal was pitching to the ABC the idea of an inflatable Bananas in Pyjamas toy and given the problems that Playcorp was having developing a plush toy, I was dubious that a walk-in start-up company would have any more success making inflatable B1 & B2 toys.
I instructed Merryl Mills, our licensing manager, to say no to Mal, to tell him that we were doing him a favour by not having him go through an approval hell, but Mal would not take no for an answer, he said that he was going to make a prototype at his own risk to demonstrate that he could produce an inflatable Bananas in Pyjamas toy and, on this basis, we let Mal proceed.
And Mal delivered in spades.
Mal’s inflatable Banana was approved for manufacture on its second submission to the ABC for approval and by Xmas that year Australian pools and bedrooms were awash with inflatable Bananas in Pyjamas toys and swimming flotation devices.
And this was not the end of the story but rather just the beginning because Mal became an essential element in the success of Bananas in Pyjamas in Australia and around the world.
Mal built the giant inflatable Banana:
And Mal proceeded to inflate his giant Banana wherever and whenever we wanted.
Mal was always there with his generator and ready to inflate.
This article originally appeared in Edition 11 of The Toy Universe Magazine
