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70 free Toy trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01Which department store hosted the first public demonstration of the Slinky in November 1945?
Gimbels in Philadelphia
Richard James set up an inclined plane in the toy department on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and the whole batch sold out.
Q 02How many coils did the original Slinky have?
98
The first ones were two and a half inches tall, made of blue-black Swedish steel and sold for a dollar each.
Q 03Who created the Barbie doll?
Ruth Handler
She named the doll after her daughter Barbara; Ken, introduced two years later, was named after her son Kenneth.
Q 04Barbie was based on which German doll that its creator bought on a trip to Europe?
Bild Lilli
The German original began as a risqué newspaper cartoon character sold to adults in tobacco shops and bars.
Q 05In the 1960s Random House novels, what is Barbie's full name?
Barbara Millicent Roberts
The books gave her parents George and Margaret and a hometown of Willows, Wisconsin.
Q 06The name Lego comes from a Danish phrase meaning what?
Play well
Ole Kirk Christiansen adopted the name in 1934, fifteen years before the company moulded its first plastic bricks.
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 08In what year did Lego produce its first minifigures?
1978
The little yellow figures arrived nearly thirty years after the brick itself and are now a staple of almost every set.
Q 09Play-Doh was first manufactured in the 1930s as what household product?
Wallpaper cleaner
The soot-scrubbing putty lost its market when homes switched from coal to gas heat, so a Cincinnati soap firm rebranded it for schools.
Q 10Which children's TV shows carried Play-Doh commercials that drove sales in 1957?
Captain Kangaroo, Ding Dong School and Romper Room
The compound's salt content was also reduced so models could dry without losing their colour.
Q 11What was the original name of the puzzle Ernő Rubik invented in 1974?
The Magic Cube
It was licensed to Ideal Toy Corp in 1980, sold roughly 500 million units and entered the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2014.
Q 12Roughly how many possible arrangements does a standard 3x3 Rubik's Cube have?
43 quintillion
The exact figure is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000, and every one of them can be solved in 20 moves or fewer.
Q 13The Etch A Sketch was invented by André Cassagnes, an electrician from which country?
France
He named it L'Écran Magique, the Magic Screen; the Ohio Art Company launched it in America in July 1960 for $2.99.
Q 21More than how many Furbies were sold in the first three years of production?
40 million
Its speaking abilities were eventually translated into 17 languages, and a colour-LCD-eyed Furby Connect followed in 2016.
Q 22The name Tamagotchi is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for egg and what?
Watch
The two creators shared the tongue-in-cheek 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for economics for diverting millions of work hours into virtual pet care.
Q 23Silly Putty was created during World War II research into a substitute for what material?
Rubber
Nobody could find a practical use until marketer Peter Hodgson packed one-ounce blobs into plastic eggs and sold them for a dollar.
Q 14What substance on the back of an Etch A Sketch screen does the stylus scrape away to draw a line?
Aluminium powder
The left knob moves the stylus horizontally and the right one vertically, and shaking the toy recoats the glass.
Q 15Which toy was the first ever advertised on television?
Mr. Potato Head
The 1952 kit was just plastic face parts with pushpins; families supplied their own real potato until a plastic body arrived in 1964.
Q 16Why did Hasbro start including a plastic spud body in its face-parts kit in 1964?
Complaints about rotting vegetables and new safety rules
Mrs. Potato Head had joined the line back in 1953, along with a car and boat trailer.
Q 17Cabbage Patch Kids grew out of the hand-stitched Little People dolls sold by which Georgia art student?
Xavier Roberts
The dolls were never 'sold' but 'adopted', complete with birth certificate, from a converted clinic called Babyland General Hospital.
Q 18Which company first mass-produced Cabbage Patch Kids in 1982?
Coleco
The line set toy-industry sales records three years running, and Christmas 1983 brought scenes of shoppers fighting over them.
Q 19Tickle Me Elmo retailed for $28.99 in 1996 but was resold by scalpers for up to how much?
$1,500
The giggling mechanism began life as a chimp toy, and the project was briefly a Tickle Me Taz until the Sesame Street plush licence came through.
Q 20The Furby, released in 1998, starts life speaking only which made-up language?
Furbish
It gradually swaps in English words, which is why the NSA reportedly banned Furbies from its buildings in 1999.
Q 24Silly Putty went into lunar orbit with the crew of which mission in 1968?
Apollo 8
The astronauts used it to hold tools in place in zero gravity; today the trademark belongs to Crayola.
Q 25Who came up with Hot Wheels after watching his son play with Matchbox cars?
Elliot Handler
He wanted exaggerated hot-rod styling with fat rear tyres and flame paint; the first car off the line was a dark blue Custom Camaro.
Q 26The first batch of Hot Wheels cars released in 1968 is known by collectors as what?
The Original Sweet 16
The metallic Spectraflame paint and red-striped tyres of the early cars make them some of the most sought-after diecast in the world.
Q 27The 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 28In the United Kingdom, the original G.I. Joe line was licensed to Palitoy and sold under what name?
Action Force
The British figures used the same moulds as the American ones, and later took on the Cobra storyline too.
Q 29The teddy bear is named after which U.S. president?
Theodore Roosevelt
The name came from a 1902 Mississippi hunting trip on which he refused to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree for him.
Q 30Which German firm produced a stuffed bear in 1902, almost the same moment as the American teddy bear?
Steiff
The bear was shown at the 1903 Leipzig Toy Fair, where a New York buyer ordered 3,000 of them.