Dave’s Cool Toys Blog

Archive for May, 2009

If you’ve visited my Toy Trivia web page, you might know that Play-Doh was originally created as a wallpaper cleaner. It wasn’t long before it became apparent that it was a great modeling clay and it was quickly marketed as Play-Doh Brand Modeling Compound in 1956. Play-Doh was granted U.S. Patent No. 3,167,440 for a "plastic modeling composition of a soft, playable working consistency". The ingredients are a closely-guarded secret, but Hasboro has revealed a few… water, salt and flour. It doesn’t contain peanuts, peanut oil or milk. You can visit the official Play-Doh website here.

If you’d like to know exactly what makes Play-Doh the versatile stuff it is, visit this page on HowStuffWorks.com to learn more about starches, surfactants, and inhibitors than you ever needed to know.

National Play-Doh Day is September 18th. To date, over seven hundred million pounds of Play-Doh have been sold. Factories produce about 95 million cans of the compound every year. More than 6,000 stores in the United States carry the compound, and it’s sold in 75 countries.

I don’t think anyone would argue that Play-Doh has one of the most distinct odors that conjures up hours playing with the mushy stuff as a child. I’ve been trying to find out exactly what that smell is, but the closest I’ve been able to come is almonds or marzipan. Supposedly the almond odor was added to cover up the "industrial" odor from the ingredients. Doesn’t sound right to me. It is possible that it’s just a lucky combination of the ingredients. At any rate, I love the smell of Play-doh, but not quite this much… the Demeter company has created Play-doh Cologne Spray for that "fresh, just-out-of-the-can" aroma.

On our Fun Stuff To Do page, we have featured recipes for such things at Silly Putty. But one thing we haven’t had (yet) is a recipe for Play-Doh. I’ve done some research and found one here. In the future, I’ll try it out and post the results here. I also found this page with a bunch of recipes.

If you have run out of ideas for your Play-Doh Fun Factory, try this amazing idea… making cookies! This woman made space invader cookies using the Play-Doh Fun Factory. What a great idea. The possibilities are endless. I would try this one, but I don’t have the patience.

Need more Play-Doh? From now until May 31, 2009 (hurry) amazon.com is running a great promotion for a free Play-Doh Case of Colors with the purchase of the Play-Doh items at this link.

We’ve featured one of the amazing Sony Bravia commercials on this blog before. Another great one is the Play-Doh Bunnies commercial using stop-motion rabbits in a live street setting in NYC. It is absolutely amazing. Watch it here…

Dave’s Cool Toys