General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Toys That Made Us

The Toys That Made Us is an American documentary television series that examines the history of major toy franchises through interviews with the designers, executives, and marketers who created them. It premiered on Netflix on December 22, 2017, and ran for three seasons of four episodes each, totaling 12 episodes of roughly 45 minutes, before new seasons were announced in 2024.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	December 22, 2017, on Netflix; TV-14 rating¹
Creator	Brian Volk-Weiss, founder of The Nacelle Company; directed by Volk-Weiss and Tom Stern³^•⁴
Format	One toy franchise per episode, about 45 minutes each; narrator Donald Ian Black⁴
Original run	Three seasons, 12 episodes, released 2017 to 2019²
Season 1 subjects	Star Wars, Barbie, He-Man, and G.I. Joe⁵
Production scale	309 interviews across six countries and 19 U.S. states for the first eight episodes⁶
Reception	Season 1 scored 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (6 reviews) and 79% on the Popcornmeter; IMDb rating 7.9⁷^•⁴
Revival	Seasons 4 and 5 announced in July 2024, in production with eight subjects named⁸

Spoilers

Premise and format

Each episode focuses on a single toy line and tells the story of its design, manufacture, marketing, and commercial rise, and in some cases its fall. The series describes its subject as the minds behind history's most iconic toy franchises discussing the rise, and sometimes fall, of their billion-dollar creations.⁴ Interviewees include toy company executives, product designers, marketers, and collectors; the first season alone features figures such as Tom Kalinske, the former CEO of Mattel, along with comic book designers and actors from the associated films.⁹

The series uses colorful imagery, reenactments, and humor alongside its interviews. Common Sense Media notes that it addresses historically questionable design decisions, such as Barbie's unrealistic body proportions, and notoriously bad business deals.¹ Critics highlighted its lack of sentimentality toward its subjects; Stuart Heritage of The Guardian wrote that what makes the series sing is its lack of sentimentality for the toys at hand.⁷

Episodes and seasons

The first four episodes premiered on December 22, 2017, covering Star Wars, Barbie, He-Man, and G.I. Joe; four more followed in 2018 covering Hello Kitty, Star Trek, Lego, and Transformers.¹² The Star Wars episode opens with a small toy company in Cincinnati taking on its biggest licensing project ever, which the series credits with giving birth to the most profitable toy franchise in history.⁷ A contemporary review noted the unlikely beginning behind that line: Star Wars toys had generated $14 billion, yet production began only six months before the original film's 1977 release, when most film-related toy production begins two years before release.¹³

Season 3 arrived on November 15, 2019, with episodes on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, My Little Pony, and professional wrestling toys.²^•¹⁴ The Power Rangers episode traces the franchise to composer Haim Saban's adaptation of Japan's Super Sentai series, and the My Little Pony episode covers the line's redefinition of the modern doll and its adult fan community.¹⁴

Origin

The series grew out of creator Brian Volk-Weiss's twin interests in toy collecting and history. A lifelong collector, he found that outside of Star Wars, Barbie, and Lego, reliable information about the origins of famous toys was scarce, and he combined the two interests into a show concept.⁶ He pitched the series for about seven years before Netflix picked it up; he has said he came close to selling it twice earlier and considers himself lucky those deals did not close.¹⁰^•¹¹ An early version of the concept would have featured celebrities discussing toy properties they were associated with, but that version was passed on and abandoned.¹²

Volk-Weiss applied three criteria for choosing franchises: the toy had to be iconic, it had to have been in continuous production since its debut, and each episode needed an existing fanbase. He-Man was the one exception to the continuous-production rule.⁶^•¹⁰ For the first eight episodes the team conducted 309 interviews, traveling to Japan, Denmark, Mexico, and 19 U.S. states, and interviewed people including Michael Bay for the Transformers episode and Roger Sweet, the Mattel designer largely credited, though with some controversy, with creating He-Man.⁶

Reception

Season 1 holds a 100% Tomatometer score from six critics and a 79% Popcornmeter score from more than 50 audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.⁷ Reviewers praised the depth of reporting behind a nostalgic surface. Brad Newsome of the Sydney Morning Herald called the series a surprisingly intriguing, good-humored, and even gimlet-eyed dive into the very human stories behind some of the Western world's biggest toy phenomena, and Josh Terry of the Deseret News observed that most of the products covered are still on sale in some form.¹⁵^•⁷ On IMDb the series holds a 7.9 rating from about 6,000 users.⁴

Revival and related projects

In July 2024, Nacelle announced that the series would return for at least two additional seasons, then in production and directed by Volk-Weiss, with no distributor named at the time. The eight subjects revealed at the company's San Diego Comic-Con panel were superhero toys, NERF, Pokémon, American Greetings (covering Strawberry Shortcake, My Pet Monster, Madballs, and Care Bears), Hot Wheels, Ghostbusters, Polly Pocket, and fast food toys.⁸^•³ In 2025, Oni Press and Nacelle launched a Kickstarter for The Art of The Toys That Made Us, a two-volume hardcover collection drawing on unused material from the series, which surpassed its funding goal.¹⁶

The series spawned a franchise of its own. Netflix commissioned The Movies That Made Us, made by the same team and covering films such as Home Alone, Die Hard, Ghostbusters, and Dirty Dancing, and Volk-Weiss went on to create The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek, A Toy Store Near You, and Disney+'s Behind the Attraction.¹⁷^•¹¹ Making the show also reshaped Nacelle's business: through the contacts made while filming, the company acquired rights to dormant toy lines including RoboForce, Biker Mice from Mars, Sectaurs, and Power Lords, and became a toy company itself.¹⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026