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