Johnny Carson and Eva Gabor play Twister - May 3rd, 1966

On this day in 1966, late-night talk show host Johnny Carson and actress Eva Gabor demonstrated how to play a new party game called Twister.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that tracks the twists and turns of everyday history.
I'm Gabe Lucier, and today we're talking about the time

(00:21):
when Johnny Carson saved the game Twister by showing the
American public that it wasn't as salacious as it first seemed.
The day was May third, nineteen sixty six. Late night

(00:43):
talk show host Johnny Carson an actress Ava Gabor demonstrated
how to play a new party game called Twister during
a segment of the Tonight show. They spread out the
game's plastic mat on the studio floor, took off their shoes,
and did their best to follow the instructions. Carson's announcer,
Ed McMahon was tasked with working the game's spinner and

(01:06):
with calling out the directions it dictated, like right foot
red and left hand green. Within a few minutes, Carson
and Gabor were hopelessly entangled, and the audience, both in
the studio and at home, was in stitches. Few knew
it at the time, but that on air demonstration was
a make or break moment for Twister. The game had

(01:28):
largely sat unsold on store shelves since its release the
previous year. Some customers were confused by the premise, while
others thought the idea of mingling limbs on the floor
was too lewd a premise for what was billed as
a family game. Twister's reception was so poor that its manufacturer,
Milton Bradley, had already given up on it and didn't

(01:51):
intend to produce any more copies. However, the pr firm
that was promoting Twister had already booked a demonstration on
one of the country's most popular shows, and nobody told
them that the game was as good as dead. The
tonight show segment was produced as planned, and by the
following day it was clear just what a lucky break

(02:11):
that was for Milton Bradley, for the game's inventors, and
for partygoers worldwide. The story of Twister began in nineteen
sixty five when Minnesota ad man RAYN. Geyer was hired
to work on a local back to school promotional display
for Johnson Brands shoe polish. He wanted to include a

(02:32):
mail in offer for some kind of game where kids
used their feet to play. He envisioned a large checkered
matt with colorful squares in a four x six arrangement
on which players would step as they played. Geyer grabbed
a big sheet of cardboard and whipped up a crude
prototype right there in the design firm office. Then he
called in eight of his coworkers to test out the game,

(02:55):
which he called King's foot See. It was similar to
Tic Tac Toe or or Connect four, except players worked
in teams of two and used their feet to claim spaces.
As Geyer later explained, quote, it didn't make any difference
what the game was at that point, because we began
to laugh so hard that it was obvious we were
onto something. The game was a riot, and I immediately

(03:18):
knew this was more than a promotion for shoe polish.
Not long after, Geier pitched King's Footsie to one of
his clients at three M, the maker of adhesive office products.
At the time. The company was trying something new by
offering a line of premium strategy games, but a game
you played with your feet didn't exactly fit the bill,

(03:40):
so three M took a pass. Geyer realized he had
reached the point when it did matter what the game was,
so he hired an artist and a toy designer to
help further develop the concept for a game where people
acted as the game pieces. It was artist Charles Foley
who suggested that players should place their hands as well
well as their feet on the game mat, which now

(04:02):
featured multicolored polka dots instead of squares, and it was
toy designer Neil Ravens who hit on the idea of
putting six circles of the same color in four rows,
thereby ensuring that players would always become entangled sooner or later.
Besides the mat, the only other game piece was a spinner,
which told the player to put either a hand or

(04:24):
a foot on a particular colored dot. The goal of
the game was simply to outlast everyone else. The winner
was whoever followed the spinner's directions the longest without their
elbows or knees hitting the ground. The team called the
game Pretzel, after the unique shapes that people twisted themselves
into while playing it. Altogether, the team came up with

(04:46):
eight possible game ideas to pair with Geyer's mat, but
the clear winner of the bunch was Pretzel. A hilarious
test of coordination, flexibility, and personal space Geyer, Foley, and
Ravens approached Milton Bradley Company with their idea. The board
game maker was riding high on hit products like Yachtze

(05:07):
and The Game of Life, but there was nothing quite
like Pretzel in its lineup. The company's head of development, Meltaft,
thought it could be a huge seller, but the other
executives at Milton Bradley weren't convinced. They worried that parents
might object to boys and girls playing the game together,
which of course would put Pretzel at a disadvantage compared

(05:27):
to other less compromising games. Nonetheless, with Taft's endorsement, the
company agreed to take the risk. The only problem was
the name Pretzel wasn't available to use, as there was
already a toy dog called Pretzel on the market. The
marketing team at Milton Bradley eventually settled on Twister as
a replacement. Geyer, who was a Midwest native, was not

(05:51):
a fan of the new moniker as it reminded him
of tornadoes, but in the end he was outvoted and
the name Twister stuck. One of the things that can
convinced Milton Bradley to roll the dice on Twister was
the low cost nature of the game. Unlike traditional board
games that required detailed printed boards and copious metal and
plastic tokens, Twister only had two components, a vinyl mat

(06:15):
and a plastic spinner. The only part of production that
was even slightly difficult was figuring out how to cheaply
print large colored dots onto big plastic sheets. The answer,
as it turned out, was to outsource the job to
accompany the printed shower curtains. Everything was going smoothly until
Milton Bradley began to advertise the game to retailers in

(06:37):
the fall of nineteen sixty five. Right away, the company's
worst fears were confirmed, as multiple buyers expressed discomfort with
Twister's intimate style of gameplay. To make matters worse, other
toy makers began referring to the game as sex in
a box, making Twister into an industry joke that turned
off retailers even more. Milton Bread badly tried to downplay

(07:01):
the game's sexual overtones by putting cartoon characters rather than
real people on its packaging, But no matter how innocuous
the box art, parents just weren't having it. Twister barely
sold it all during its first few months on the market,
but the real killing blow came when Sears Roebuck declared
the game too inappropriate to be included in its famous

(07:23):
Christmas catalog. Not long after, rain Geier got a phone
call from Meltaft telling him that all promotion and manufacturing
of Twister would be halted in the new year. The
remaining stock of Twister continued to gather dust on store
shelves for the first few months of nineteen sixty six.
Milton Bradley had already written it off as a loss

(07:46):
by then. In fact, the company was so done with
the game that it hadn't bothered to cancel the remaining
promotions it had already planned for it. As a result,
Johnny Carson wound up giving an on air demonstration of
a game that was a it out to be discontinued. Remarkably,
that oversight turned out to be Twister's saving grace, because

(08:07):
when roughly twelve million viewers tuned into the Tonight Show
on May third, they realized just how fun and wholesome
the game could be. Carson's guest that night was Hungarian
American actress Ava Goobor, the glamorous star of the hit
TV show Green Acres. She accepted the host's invite to
demo the strange new game, and before long, the two

(08:29):
of them were down on all fours, trying desperately not
to fall on top of each other. The audience laughed
all the way through the segment, and when it was over,
rather than being scandalized, they wanted to try the game
for themselves. The day after the show aired, customers flooded
toy stores all over New York in search of Twister,
but because Milton Bradley had suspended production, there weren't enough

(08:51):
copies to meet demand. That would quickly change, though, as
the company immediately reversed its decision and began pushing Twister
harder than ever. In the weeks ahead, the game was
profiled on other popular shows of the day, as well
as in newspaper ads, where it was touted as quote
the sensational new party game seen by millions on TV.

(09:14):
The marketing blitz paid off, with Twister becoming the must
have game of the nineteen sixty six holiday season. Milton
Bradley cranked up production and began turning out forty thousand
copies a day to meet demand, but it still wasn't
enough to keep pace with sales. The game had attracted
fans of all ages, from kids to adults, but its

(09:35):
biggest demographic by far was teenagers. Milton Bradley rode that
wave of hormones all the way to the bank, and
by the end of nineteen sixty seven, more than three
million copies of Twister had been sold. The once taboo
game had secured its place on American store shelves and
in wood paneled basements, where it would continue to be

(09:57):
trotted out at parties for the rest of the Swinging
six and beyond. As for the game's co creators, they
had a falling out over royalties and parted ways as
a design team. Foley and Ravens later re teamed for
several other projects, including the first ever set of plastic handcuffs. Meanwhile,

(10:17):
rain Geier formed a new team and continued working on
other toy development concepts. In nineteen sixty nine, he stumbled
upon another winning idea for indoor play, the Nerf Ball. Ironically,
both Twister and Nerf are now owned by the same
toy company, Hasbro, but as of twenty twenty three, only

(10:39):
Twister has the honor of being enshrined in the National
Toy Hall of Fame. The game was inducted in twenty fifteen,
along with the Super Soaker, water Gun and the Humble Puppet.
With an estimated sixty five million people having played Twister
at one time or another, I'd say the game deserves
to be called one of the all time greats. Yet,

(11:00):
as popular and as playable as it is, Twister never
would have gotten off the ground without Johnny Carson and
Ava Gabor leading the way. So the next time you're
at a party and someone breaks out of Matt, be
sure to flick that spinner once for them. I'm Gabe
Lucia and hopefully you now know a little more about

(11:21):
history today than you did yesterday. You can learn even
more about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and
Instagram at TDI HC Show. You can also rate and
review the show on Apple Podcasts, or you can send
your feedback directly to me by writing to this Day
at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays and Ben

(11:43):
Hackett for producing the show, and thank you for listening.
I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day
in History Class.