Last fall, Fox Searchlight gave away limited-edition Birdman action figures as part of its marketing for the movie. Now, the Best Picture Oscar winner is reopening in cinemas—and getting a dose of new marketing, including a commercial for those toys.

Around the start of Toy Fair, I realized just what made the experience so different to the tech shows, video game events, and comic cons I usually visit. It was the volume. At a tech event, most companies have just a handful of products. Some have just one or two. Even a gigantic company like Samsung might be showing off no more than fifty different devices in all: a dozen TVs, a handful of phones, a line of computers, and a handful...

In July of 1999, I traveled with my family to Tenby, Wales. The town is said to be picturesque, but I have no memory of its scenery—except for a small toy store we passed on our drive in. As soon as we settled into our hotel, my sister and I begged our father to trek to the shop and search for the Britannia Beanie Baby, sold exclusively in the United Kingdom. The Britannia bear wasn’t just a toy, we explained; it was an investment, projected to be worth thousands...

Warner Bros. Consumer Products confirms tie up for first ever LEGO building sets.

Breaking news from the UK and international toy industry

Every September, largely unbeknownst to the rest of the company, a group of around 50 Lego employees descends upon Spain’s Mediterranean coast, armed with sunblock, huge bins of Lego bricks, and a decade’s worth of research into the ways children play. The group, which is called the Future Lab, is the Danish toy giant’s secretive and highly ambitious R&D team, charged with inventing entirely new, technologically enhanced "play experiences" for kids all over the world.

Play-Doh, by most standards, is an exceedingly innocuous toy. Kids can use the pliable dough to build all manner of things—rather than level cities and shoot people—and they can even eat moderate amounts of it without ending up in the emergency room. But over the holiday season, some parents made a rather unpleasant discovery: a tool in a Play-Doh kit that strongly resembles a penis. Pictures of the offending part circulated on Twitter with clever wordplays like "Dil-Doh."

Kmart’s layaway system has some families scrambling for gifts days before Christmas. NewsChannel 5's Scripps sister station Investigators at WRTV in Indianapolis uncovered a problem with Kmart’s layaway. Ashley Hazel, a single Bloomington, Ind., mother, said she put Christmas toys for her children on layaway starting Nov. 9 and made all the necessary payments.

In late 1969, Reyn Guyer, inventor of the game Twister, did it again. He invented a foamy toy that became a classic -- Nerf, "The World's First Indoor Ball." Since that first ball forty-five years ago, the Nerf brand has expanded to include many other products, including footballs and an arsenal of toy weapons. This week, On Remand looks back at Nerf and five legal tales of foamy fun gone wrong.

When it comes to buying gifts for children, everything is color-coded: Rigid boundaries segregate brawny blue action figures from pretty pink princesses, and most assume that this is how it’s always been. But in fact, the princess role that’s ubiquitous in girls’ toys today was exceedingly rare prior to the 1990s—and the marketing of toys is more gendered now than even 50 years ago, when gender discrimination and sexism were the norm.

The makers of Barbie seem to apologize A LOT for underestimating young women. This time the Internet’s buzzing over a pretty cringe-worthy Barbie book, “I Can Be A Computer Engineer,” published out of Random House.

Don't doubt the commitment of MIT graduate and Dynepic co-founder Krissa Watry. She used to work for the U.S. Airforce as a chief engineer designing and..

A mother in Dayton, Ohio was shocked this week when she purchased a toy wand for her child at a dollar store only to find it ran not on unicorn hair but a picture of a child slicing her arm open. In fairness to the dollar store (literally called '$.100 store') the product was named 'EVIL STICK', though the pink lettering, fairies, swirls and snowflakes on the packaging ensured it would catch the eye of toddlers.

When it comes to business, toys are anything but child's play. Here are the top turning points in the history of the modern toy industry.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un has been photobombed by two soft toys while visiting an orphanage. Kim seen oblivious as he leaned against a bed, that two soft toys had been placed in a compromising position on a wardrobe in the corner of the room. The front toy had a satisfied smirk and a cheeky wink while its grey-and-white compatriot approached it from behind.

The 35-year-old actor lashed out at the toy chain on Twitter for deciding to pull Walter White and Jesse Pinkman figures off shelves in response to a Florida mom’s petition.

A petition on Change.org called on the retailer to stop selling character action figures based on the hit TV show.

Toy at 2:08 in the video

Toys coming to life is not a new concept; we all know the story of Pinocchio’s struggle to become a real boy, or ahem, Chucky, the most terrifying doll in the world. But no franchise capitalised on the idea more so than Toy Story, which, nearly 20 years after its initial release, is worth over $10 billion.

The numbers: Move over, Barbie. Lego reported a 11% jump in sales in the first half of the year, compared with the previous year. The sales, worth 11.5 billion Danish krone ($2 billion), beat Mattel’s result for the same period, making the privately-held Danish company the world’s largest toymaker by revenue. Lego’s operating profit jumped by 12% in the first six months of the year.