Toy Trivia
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114 free Toy trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
68 free toy trivia questions with answers. Every toy in the attic has a story, and most of them are stranger than you'd guess. Play-Doh started as wallpaper cleaner. The Frisbee is named after a pie company. Silly Putty went to the Moon. This quiz covers the toys of the last century and a bit: dolls, building sets, diecast cars, water guns, electronic pets and the fads that emptied shop shelves every Christmas. It works for a family game night, a nostalgic pub-quiz round or a classroom warm-up. The early questions are the ones anyone who owned a toy box can answer (who created Barbie, what Lego means in Danish), and by the end you'll be asked how many coils are in a Slinky and which company turned down the Star Wars action-figure licence. Every answer has been checked against the published histories of the toys and their makers and comes with a linked source, so you can settle arguments on the spot. Grab your friends and find out who actually paid attention to the box.
30 of 114 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which department store hosted the first public demonstration of the Slinky in 1945?
Gimbels in Philadelphia
Gimbels in Philadelphia let Richard James show the spring walking down a ramp, and customers snapped up all 400 Slinkys within 90 minutes.
Q 02Who ran the Slinky company after Richard James left for Bolivia?
Wife
Wife Betty James stayed with their six children, rebuilt the nearly bankrupt business and ran it until selling it in 1998.
Q 03Who created the Barbie doll?
Ruth Handler
Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara give paper dolls adult roles, and created a grown-up doll when store shelves were full of baby dolls.
Q 04Barbie was based on which German doll that its creator bought on a trip to Europe?
Bild Lilli
Bild Lilli was sold in German smoke shops as a gag gift for adult men, and Mattel later bought its rights and ended its production.
Q 05In the 1960s Random House novels, what is Barbie's full name?
Barbara Millicent Roberts
Barbara Millicent Roberts split from Ken in a 2004 Mattel announcement after 43 years together, and the couple reunited on Valentine's Day 2011.
Q 06The name Lego comes from a Danish phrase meaning what?
Play well
Play well is what leg godt means, and the company was a carpenter's wooden-toy workshop before it moulded its first plastic bricks in 1949.
Q 07Lego's interlocking bricks were inspired by self-locking bricks patented by which English toymaker?
Hilary Page
His Kiddicraft bricks dated from 1939; the Danish company began making its own version a decade later.
Q 08Which children's TV host's endorsement helped turn Play-Doh into a hit in the late 1950s?
Captain Kangaroo
Captain Kangaroo star Bob Keeshan agreed to use Play-Doh on his show once a week in return for a percentage of its sales.
Q 09What was the original name of the puzzle Ernő Rubik invented in 1974?
The Magic Cube
The Magic Cube stumped even its inventor: after scrambling his first one, Rubik needed roughly a month to work out how to solve it.
Q 10Roughly how many possible arrangements does a standard 3x3 Rubik's Cube have?
43 quintillion
43 quintillion positions sound hopeless, yet in 2010 a team using computer time donated by Google proved that every one of them can be solved in 20 moves or fewer.
Q 11The Etch A Sketch was invented by André Cassagnes, an electrician from which country?
France
France's Magic Screen drew little interest at the 1959 Nuremberg Toy Fair, and the Ohio Art Company passed on it before a second look changed its mind.
Q 12What substance on the back of an Etch A Sketch screen does the stylus scrape away to draw a line?
Aluminium powder
Aluminium powder clings to the screen by static, so turning the toy over and shaking it lets tiny plastic beads spread a fresh coat and erase the picture.
Q 13Which toy was the first ever advertised on television?
Mr. Potato Head
Mr. Potato Head's 1952 commercials pitched the toy straight to children instead of their parents, and within months the kits had earned Hasbro more than $4 million.
Q 21Silly Putty was created during World War II research into a substitute for what material?
Rubber
Rubber it could never replace, and the goo sat without a use until marketer Peter Hodgson sold one-ounce blobs in plastic eggs for a dollar.
Q 22Silly Putty went into lunar orbit with the crew of which mission in 1968?
Apollo 8
Apollo 8's astronauts used the putty's stickiness to hold their tools in place in zero gravity.
Q 23Which feature let the first Hot Wheels cars of 1968 roll faster than rival Matchbox cars?
Low-friction wheels
Low-friction wheels made the cars zoom, and Matchbox's maker, caught out, hit back with its own faster Superfast line.
Q 14Why did Hasbro start including a plastic spud body in its face-parts kit in 1964?
Rotting vegetables and safety rules
Rotting vegetables and safety rules drove the change, and the pieces were made less sharp at the same time because parents found the spikes dangerous.
Q 15Cabbage Patch Kids grew out of the fabric Little People dolls sold by which Georgia art student?
Xavier Roberts
Xavier Roberts 'adopted out' his Little People with birth certificates, a concept influenced by Kentucky craft artist Martha Nelson Thomas's Doll Babies.
Q 16Which company first mass-produced Cabbage Patch Kids?
Coleco
Coleco's plastic-headed dolls reached stores for Christmas 1983, and shoppers rioted to get one.
Q 17Which talk show host helped spark the 1996 Tickle Me Elmo frenzy?
Rosie O'Donnell
Rosie O'Donnell's plug helped start a craze in which Christmas shoppers turned violent over the doll.
Q 18The Furby, released in 1998, starts life speaking only which made-up language?
Furbish
Furbish gives way to English as a Furby 'grows', but the switch was pre-programmed: the toy's chip held a fixed stock of Furbish and English words.
Q 19Which US agency banned Furbies from its premises in 1999, fearing the toys could record and repeat secrets?
The NSA
The NSA treated Furbies as recording devices, but the toy's maker, Tiger Electronics, said a Furby had absolutely no ability to record anything.
Q 20The name Tamagotchi is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for egg and what?
Watch
Watch completes the name, and the toy's creators won a spoof 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for diverting millions of person-hours of work into raising virtual pets.
Q 24The first batch of Hot Wheels cars released in 1968 is known by collectors as what?
The Original Sweet 16
The Original Sweet 16 wore glittery Spectraflame paint over shiny metal, a finish Mattel later swapped for plainer solid colours on most of its cars.
Q 25The 1964 launch of G.I. Joe led to the coining of which now-universal toy term?
Action figure
The original 12-inch line represented four branches of the U.S. armed forces; the 3.75-inch Cobra-fighting relaunch came in 1982.
Q 26Which name did Hasbro give its G.I. Joe line in 1970, as war toys lost favour during the Vietnam War?
Adventure Team
Adventure Team Joe swapped the battlefield for civilian adventures, hunting for lost mummies instead of fighting wars.
Q 27On the 1902 hunt that gave the teddy bear its name, Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear that was what?
Tied to a tree
Tied to a tree after a brutal chase, the bear seemed too unsporting a target for Roosevelt, yet it was killed anyway.
Q 28Which German firm produced a stuffed bear in 1902, almost the same moment as the American teddy bear?
Steiff
Steiff started out selling a felt elephant as a pincushion, but children took it up as a toy, and the firm turned to stuffed animals long before its bear.
Q 29Beanie Babies are stuffed with what instead of conventional soft filling?
Plastic pellets
Plastic pellets filled the $5 toys, and maker Ty refused to supply big chain stores, selling Beanie Babies only through small gift and specialty shops.
Q 30Ty announced that certain Beanie Babies would be what, sending collectors into a frenzy?
Retired
Retired characters stopped being made, so collectors, never sure which Beanie Baby would vanish next, rushed to buy every one.