A Lifetime of Making
Toys, Games, and PlayAn Interview with Jacob R. Miles III

A veteran media, entertainment, and toy industry executive, Jacob R. Miles
III has held executive positions at Kenner toys, General Mills Entertainment Group, Tonka toys, Hasbro, Cultural Toys, Urban America Television,and Urban Cool Networks and, over the last forty years, has worked with
fourteen Toy Industry Hall of Fame inductees. An original member of Kenner’s Star Wars toy team and an avid Star Wars toy collector, he has been
involved in developing and manufacturing such American toy and children’s
entertainment brands and figures as Six Million Dollar Man, Stretch Armstrong, Play-Doh, Sega Game Systems, the Baby Alive doll, Tonka, Pound
Puppies, Hollywood Hounds, Ghostbusters, Alien, Strawberry Shortcake,
Care Bears, Batman, and Superman. Miles has also helped develop television and film products based on content from Lucasfilm, The Jim Henson
Company, DIC Entertainment, Disney, Warner Bros., Film Roman, NBA,
MLB, NFL, American Greetings, Motown, and Hallmark Entertainment
among others. As an award-winning entrepreneur and now analyst of global
media and entertainment trends, strategies, and diversity, Miles has beenfeatured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Business Week, Black Enterprise, PBS, and numerous books, magazines, and newspapers. He currently
serves as CEO and chairman of MAP Esports Network Inc., a multimedia
platform and network that provides esports and robotics-based media andplay learning centers and services for disadvantaged and at-risk youth as wellas mainstream communities. Key words: culturally diverse toys; toy designand development; toy industry; toy manufacturing

American Journal of Play: Tell us about your childhood and your own earlyplay experiences.
Jacob R. Miles: I grew up in the Millvale housing projects of Cincinnati in the
1950s and 1960s. I come from a big family with parents that took greatcare of my siblings and me. Due to the civil rights movement and gang
violence happening at the time, I became aware of racism and violence at
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American Journal of Play, volume 13, numbers 2 and 3 © The Strong
Contact Jacob R. Miles III at jmiles@mapesports.com

A Lifetime of Making Toys, Games, and Playa young age. However, my family stayed positive through these struggles.
My family was like a tightly fitted knot: no matter the difficulties we faced,nothing ever tore us apart. What truly united us was our dream for a morepeaceful life. I didn’t have many toys except for marbles, baseball cards,
and pick-up sticks. Oftentimes it was unsafe for me to play outside, so I
spent most of my time indoors reading and dreaming. If I was able to be
outdoors, I played football.
AJP: How did these experiences inform your own work in the toy and games
industries?
Miles: The challenges I faced during my childhood equipped me with thestrength I needed to excel later in life. To distract myself from the violence outside, I started drawing, which led to more mechanical drawing
and drafting, which eventually led to my career as an engineer. It’s odd tosay, but experiencing turmoil in my community taught me perseverance
and coping skills that I would later use in my career.
AJP: How did you get started into the toy industry?
Miles: Before my time in the toy industry, I was working as an assistant liaisonengineer at a machine tool company called Gray Company. After several
years, I decided that I wanted more out of my career. I didn’t want to be justan engineer behind the scenes. I wanted to be an executive. I asked the vicepresident of engineering at the company how I could get his job one day,and he explained that because of racial prejudice and the lack of growth in
the industry, I wouldn’t be able to move up much further at the company.
I asked him what he would tell his son to do in these curcumstances. This
led to his connecting me with the Steiner Brothers, the founders of Kenner Products. They introduced me to the limitless possibilities in the toy
industry. After that, I joined Kenner Products as a manufacturing liaisonengineer in 1975.
AJP: What was it like working at Kenner? What projects were you involved in
and what were your roles?
Miles: Kenner was located at 912 Sycamore Street in Cincinnati when I firststarted working there. It was an old building with several Steiner familybusinesses located there. Toys, novelty items, soap, and beverages. There
was a mural on the building of a kid playing marbles, one of my favorite
games as a kid. I thought then—and still feel today—that the toy business is
one of the most entrepreneurial jobs in the world. You are always working
on new ideas, new materials, new processes. No matter what, you just had

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to figure it out and do it relatively quickly. As we say in the toy industry,
they are not going to move Christmas, so we had to turn that idea into a
product in time for Christmas.
		 I arrived at Kenner in 1975. At that time, we manufactured most things
ourselves. As a product liaison engineer, I worked with the product development engineering team in the office and then spearheaded the hand-off
to the manufacturing engineering and production team. I was responsible
for making or approving any engineering changes that had to occur inproduction and for keeping the product on schedule. We were working
on Tree Tots Family Tree House, Six Million Dollar Man, Snoopy Electric Toothbrush, Dusty and Baby Alive dolls, Play-Doh, Spirograph, andGirders and Panels building sets (one of my favorites). Then came Bionic
Woman and Stretch Armstrong. One of my most memorable experiences
was the engineering problems we encountered trying to make Stretch Armstrong. We had to design the equipment for the process while developing the product. We had to cook the syrup and control its viscosity while
putting it into a latex body and vacuum sealing it, something none of us
had ever done before—and what a mess! Then Star Wars came along andchanged everything.
		 Over the next ten years at Kenner, I worked on Sit ’n Spin, Miss America
dolls; Star Wars, DC Comics, Marvel, NBA, NFL, WWF, action figures;
M.A.S.K., Aerial Aces, in-home shooting arcade, Redline Drag Racing,and NFL hand-held electronic games; products in the Rose Petal Place,
Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears, Hugga Bunch, Raiders of the Lost Ark,
Centurions, Fast 111s, Ghostbusters, Alien, Super Powers, Sea Wees lines
and so many more. My role changed with the evolution of manufacturingin America. When I started, everything was manufactured in the UnitedStates, and I traveled to the East Coast to work with injection and roto
cast molding companies. I went to Pennsylvania for tooling companies.
As manufacturing moved over seas—first to Japan, then to Hong Kong,then to New Territories, then to interior China as well as to Taiwan, Korea,
Thailand, Mexico, and Haiti—my job title changed from liaison engineer
to product engineer to international liaison engineer or advance manufacturing engineer. My responsibilities remained the same—working withproduct from concept or idea alongside the designers and development
engineers and taking the hand-off from them (so they could move on to
new products), then sourcing and manufacturing the product and deliv-

A Lifetime of Making Toys, Games, and Playering the quantities promised, all while solving any problems that developed along the way. Kenner Products was the start of my career in the
toy industry. Kenner and the Steiner Brothers were instrumental in mysuccess. I spent a lot of time traveling as part of the product engineering
department, which ensured manufacturing and distribution at the highest
quality product possible—from concept creation to product retirement.
I was fortunate enough to visit various manufacturing vendors in Hong
Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Mexico,and Haiti.
AJP: Tell us more about how Kenner’s Star Wars toys came about and the role
you played.
Miles: Star Wars, I remember being called down to PD&E for a meeting. George
Lucas, his attorney (I think), Bernie Loomis, Karl Wojahn, and several
other engineers where there, and we reviewed the script and discussed
our ideas for toys based on the movie. We had no idea how big Star Warswould become. My initial involvement focused on the TIE Fighter and
X-Wing Fighters from an engineering and manufacturing standpoint andhow we could add play value, make them toyetic. We did not want just avehicle with no action or sound features, so we focused on adding action,
on push-button wing expansion forming the X, and on a sound and lightfeature to the Tie Fighter. I also had the responsibility of going to Hong
Kong and introducing the Star Wars line to our Hong Kong and New Territories manufacturers. I had to find the right manufacturer that could meet
our quality and quantity standards and convince them to invest significant
capital and resources for large production capacities without any historyof success for this new property that no one had ever heard of. It was quite
the challenge.
		 During the initial development of the Star Wars action figure toys, ourdepartment wasn’t sure it would be successful. Unfortunately, we didn’t haveenough time to design and build injection molds before the premiere dateof the movie in 1977. Instead, we produced a diorama set that promised
the purchaser they would receive Star Wars figures when they came out in
1978. We sold over five hundred thousand pieces!
		 To reduce the cost of manufacturing these toys, I traveled to Hong
Kong to lay the groundwork for the new Star Wars figures production,engineering, and support capabilities. My focus was to assess our vendor
in Hong Kong’s capabilities for mold building and tooling. This included

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examining tooling shops, steel quality, and injection molding and decorating machines.
AJP: How did you end up at Tonka? How was Tonka’s approach to toy making
different from Kenner?
Miles: By 1985 many of my colleagues had left Kenner to work elsewhere. One ofthem was Armando Garcia who resigned at Kenner to be the executive vicepresident at Tonka. He reached out and asked me to come to visit Tonka’s
operation in Minneapolis and discuss a job opportunity. I had no plansof leaving Kenner, but I eventually was offered the position of director ofliaison engineering with key executive status, which I happily accepted. I
was thrilled to help lead the company to the next level of becoming a fullline toy and entertainment company.
		 Tonka’s approach to toy making was much more conservative andwas primarily focused on metal versus plastic and soft goods. The entire
industry was marveling at what we were accomplishing at Kenner with
our licensing and highly engineered, high-feature action figures. We were
the best. Tonka wanted us to replicate that success for them. Pat Feely was
our leader, and he was a risk taker. Steve Shank, our CEO, a lawyer, wasnot. We started doing licensing deals with Bandai, Sanrio, World Wrestling
Federation, and Sega among others, and we rapidly grew Tonka’s business.
AJP: While at Tonka you helped introduce Sega video games to American audiences. Tell us how that happened.
Miles: Tonka had a long history of working with Japan. Bandai represented
and sold Tonka trucks in Japan and made the famous commercial of anelephant standing on a Tonka truck. The new Tonka team from Kenner,
led by Pat Feely, decided to license and sell Japanese toys, and we would
create our own cartoons and launch them to support the toy sales. We
needed to do this with Bandai, Takara, Sanrio, and Sega. We had tremendous success with Pound Puppies and used some of those funds to acquire
the Sega license. We had to learn fast, we had some experience with handheld electronic games from our time at Kenner. I went to Japan and spent
several weeks there with Bandai and with SEGA teams working with theengineers. I returned to the U.S.A., and, after two weeks sharing info andputting systems for communicating in place, I left for San Francisco tospend a week to ten days with the Sega U.S. team. I was sitting in the conference room on Forbes Avenue when the 1989 San Francisco–Oakland
earthquake (also known as the Loma Prieta earthquake) hit. The quake

A Lifetime of Making Toys, Games, and Play

struck with a moment magnitude of 6.9 on October 17, just before thestart of the third game of the World Series, which was being held at San
Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Sixty-three people died, and nearly thirtyeight hundred were injured.
		 Since Tonka had relationships with many different manufacturers andcompanies in Japan, we received an opportunity to team up with Sega
Games Company, a multinational video game developer and publisher
headquartered in Tokyo. We worked closely with the American division to
introduce the Sega Master System, a cartridge-based video game system,
which launched us into the video game business and grew rapidly to over ahundred million in sales on its own in its first year. We focused on creating
nonviolent video games, such as racing, arcade, and adventure games.
AJP: In your experiences at Kenner, Tonka, and eventually Hasbro in the 1970s
and 1980s, how did toy and game makers engage people of color?
Miles: The toy industry was—and still is—a very closed industry. Historically, it
is a family business, Steiner brothers (Kenner), Hassenfeld brothers (Hasbro), Parker brothers. Through the 1970s, I was the only one except for
Armando Garcia Jr., my boss who was from Argentina. He mentored me
and looked out for me. His secretary was African American, and she would
also tell me who to look out for or avoid from a racism standpoint. For
the most part, I felt like family and still do. Early in my career, there were
guys in tooling or machinery companies in rural areas across America
that would be surprised when I showed up representing Kenner, General
Mills, or Tonka. I was always told how my work was superior to that of mypeers. However, I felt that was the minimum I had to do to stay, and I loved
the industry and wanted to stay. I remember Joe Mendelsohn telling me
in my first month on the job that, if I could stick it out, I would be a very
important person in this industry.
		 Some toy makers produced Black dolls, but they were designed as white
dolls that were then molded in brown color. These dolls didn’t accurately
portray the look and culture of African Americans. The U.S. doll market ingeneral did not reflect our country’s diverse population. Therefore, I noticed
there was a gap in the market for multicultural toys, which is why I created
the Cultural Exchange Entertainment Corporation. The corporation had
three segments: Cultural Toys, Cultural Exchange Publishing, and Cultural
Exchange Content for TV and film.
AJP: Tell us more about Cultural Toys.

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Miles: At the time, I had founded and was running my fine art business, Cultural Exchange Gallery, which featured multicultural art. While I enjoyedworking in fine art, I discovered that I couldn’t leave my passion for the
toy industry behind. Therefore in 1993, I created Cultural Exchange Entertainment Corporation, with one of its three segments being Cultural Toys.
		 My research in the toy market showed that there was a tremendous gap
for multicultural toys. Children of all different backgrounds needed toysthat reflected their look and lifestyle. We also felt there was a need for toysthat promoted nonviolence and multicultural friendships. Cultural Toys
met these needs and filled the gap.
AJP: How did the toy industry and retailers respond to your company and its
products?
Miles: We were thrilled to see Cultural Toys brand products become the mostprominent, broadest multicultural toy line available in the U.S.A. In the firsttwo years, we established a nationwide distribution channel of top retailers.
Cultural Exchange Entertainment and Cultural Toys also received extensive
national media attention from Black Entertainment Television, CNN, CBS,USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and others. Cultural Toys was even ranked
in a list of the top hundred toys by Stevanne Auerbach’s Dr. Toy.
		 All that to say, Cultural Toys was very successful. It proved that the toy
market wasn’t meeting the needs of a large portion of buyers. As more andmore children received Cultural Toys, the toy industry realized what it had
been missing.
AJP: Tell us more about Hollywood Hounds. How did that toy line come about?
Miles: Hollywood Hounds are the pets of America’s diverse children. They havetaken on the cultural attributes of their owners. I showed them to Clarence
Avant, chairman of Motown, early on in their development. He laughed andjoked about them becoming a singing group so I developed the storyline
as their being able to sing and were a singing group. I knew that pets werealways popular in the toy industry, and at Kenner, Tonka, and Hasbro, wealways had a pet line, so that was what I decided would be my first toy line.
We did a deal with DIC Entertainment, a division of ABC-Cap Cities at
the time, to produce a Hollywood Hounds cartoon after the retailers said
that, if they were on television, they would buy it. We did a Christmas
special and that led to over a million dollars in orders thanks to Cultural
Toys extensive marketing and education about the toy.
AJP: How did customers respond to some of your other toys?

A Lifetime of Making Toys, Games, and Play

Miles: Cultural Toys Preschool and Infant line was also received well. Our biggest success was the Dinkytown Daycare Kids, which consisted of multicultural dolls, finger puppets, and play sets. We also had a children’s bookand life-size character appearances, different from the Hollywood Hounds,
which was a kid sell. The others were mom or parent sells. The moms welcomed our products with open arms, and I still get positive comments andrequest for the products today. We also added the Kenya doll line after it
was released by Mattel, which I still work on and which is still very popular.
		 Dinkytown Daycare Kids (DDK) was a multicultural line of dolls,
books, clothing, and a finger puppet play set. DDK included stories aboutsharing with others, believing in yourself, and spreading kindness. From1994 to 1995, the line was included in the list of hottest selling toys fromthe Toy Manufacturers of America (today called the Toy Industry Association), and it sold out in 1995.
		 Another one of our products was the Double Scoop line. The Double
Scoop books were illustrated by an eight-year-old boy and featured a drawing of him and his African American friend. In the book, the friends wererepresented as vanilla and chocolate ice cream cones and made the analogyof two kids being different flavors but still the same ice cream. Throughthese characters, stories, and toys, we promoted multicultural friendships
and racial acceptance.
AJP: Are there other products or lines of products that you worked on, otherthan Star Wars, that you are especially proud of?
Miles: There are several projects or situations that developed throughout mycareer that I am, in hindsight, particularly proud of. I remember it wasapproaching Christmastime, and I was in a Baby Alive meeting. Baby
Alive was a special engineering challenge because we were pioneering
self-skinning foam, which required managing a lot of chemical reactions.
Environmental regulations today would not let us experiment the way we
did then. I asked the head of marketing why we did not make any brown
Baby Alive dolls. I was told because Black girls did not like what they looked
like, that they preferred white dolls according to the latest research. I was
extremely disappointed in his answer but, as the only African Americanin the room or in engineering, I kept my cool but continued to push theissue every chance I got. One day I was out at our Oakley manufacturing
facility and one of the plant managers said, “Jacob, we ran you some brown
Baby Alive dolls so you can have some for your family.” I told him to just

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package them out and ship them with the white dolls. When the retailers
received them and put them on display, they flew off the shelf, and they
started calling sales and marketing for more. I remember the vice president
of marketing, who I had been pestering for months, came to my office,called me a son of a bitch, and blamed me for having manufacturing put
brown dolls in the shipments. He then smiled, and we figured out how to
get some brown dolls in the system and manufactured.
		 I, of course, was very proud to be part of the Kenner Star Wars family,
to be working with the Steiner family—Bernie Loomis, Armando Garcia,
and Joe Mendelsohn—and of being the guy that brought Star Wars to
China. I still get reminded of that by the kids of the guys I worked with inHong Kong and China. My tenure at Tonka was exciting, and the products
I was most excited about were working with Bandai on GoBots and otherJapanese products and their telling me that I was the first African American engineer they had worked with. I was honored and proud of my workon the team that launched Sega Master System in America, which led toworking with Tom Kalinske. Pound Puppies I was proud of because it symbolized rescuing dogs from the pound and raised awareness nationwide.
		 Cultural Toys gave me so much to be proud of with its focus on edutainment, nonviolence, and diversity. I received a lot of blowback for startinga company focused on social issues. It was not as popular as it is today.
Cultural Toys Infant and Preschool line of African American and multicultural preschool learning aids made me especially proud. That line led
to Bill Whaley, CEO of Children’s Television Workshop, serving on myboard of directors. The Dinkytown Daycare Kids was a Better Homes andGardens and Today show top toy, and it was first an endcap and feature in
Target stores. I can’t forget the Hollywood Hounds because they were myvery first product and my first animated TV program and led me to my
mentor and board member, Clarence Avant, chairman of Motown.
		 One of the products I’m particularly proud of is Stretch Armstrong
because it was the first toy of its kind. At the time, no one had produced a
toy that could be stretched from fifteen inches up to five feet. We developed
the manufacturing equipment and production lines ourselves. Stretch Armstrong became such a hit that it was later followed by the Stretch Monster
and Stretch Octopuses Ollie and Olivia.
AJP: What are you working on now?
Miles: I recently founded MAP Esports Network, a “Play and Learn” company

A Lifetime of Making Toys, Games, and Playand the first-of-its-kind multimedia platform and network to provide
esports and robotics-based gaming centers. It includes a network of media
platforms, including podcasts, streaming and magazines, and community
touchpoints providing access to the fast-growing esports industry. MAP
Esports Network also supports disadvantaged children and communities
by helping them participate in esports with resources and access to nonviolent video games, robotics, and coding via STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics)-based initiatives. Of course, once a toy
guy always a toy guy. We are developing an esports toy and entertainment
property that we plan to announce soon.

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