Bop-It!
ADWEEK|October 8, 2018

How A Riff On A Tv Remote Control Led To A Groundbreaking Interactive Toy.

Robert Klara
Bop-It!

In 1993, toy inventor Dan Klitsner was sitting in his San Francisco studio, looking for a hit. Sure enough, he would find one—one of the most successful and enduring toys of the era—but it would take a while to nail it. Or, we might say, to bop it.

Klitsner’s idea was to encourage kids parked on the sofa in front of the TV to actually move a little. His solution was called the Channel Bopper, a hammer-shaped remote control that required physical actions to control the TV—whack the hammer to change the channels, twist a knob to adjust the volume, and so on. “It was to make kids move when changing the channels—that was the idea,” Klitsner recalled on a recent afternoon, riding a bus over the Golden Gate Bridge. “Pull, twist, bop—those three commands.”

Regrettably for the young inventor, though, scouts for the toy companies weren’t nibbling. After tinkering with his prototype a bit more—including an ill-fated experiment in adding an LCD screen—the idea hit him: What if he reversed the whole scheme to have the game control the kid instead of the kid controlling the game?

This story is from the October 8, 2018 edition of ADWEEK.

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This story is from the October 8, 2018 edition of ADWEEK.

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