British toy company Bluebird Toys saw some difficult years before licensing Chris Wiggs' Polly Pocket concept in 1989. The micro-playset line became a global phenomenon within the following years, being distributed by Mattel in the States. Upon Polly’s success, Bluebird decided to create a new line that targeted boys in 1992.
Mighty Max was born.
Max’s playsets were far more fantastical than his corporate sibling’s, with medium-sized "Doom Zones" and smaller "Horror Heads," each a self-contained playscape with cascading stairs and its own set of creatures. An animated series, SNES and Sega Genesis game, and comics books would follow Max's toy boom.
But both Max and Polly lines' popularity would begin declining in the mid-1990s, with Mighty Max canceled in 1996 and after Mattel purchased Bluebird in 1998, Polly went through a couple evolutions before dwindling and disappearing in 2012.
Polly wasn’t done, though. She’s had a strong presence on the shelves after re-emerging in 2018. And her cross-media adventures continue, too: Polly Pocket: Summer of Adventure is the most recent animated collection to appear on Netflix, and Lena Dunham is currently scripting a live-action film to star Emily in Paris’ Lily Collins. (This is surely an extension of popular culture’s current obsession with the 1990s, which is also being represented on the silver screen by Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie film.)
So why hasn’t Max gotten his chance to occupy shelves again?
The question isn’t a cry for gender representation—after all, the industry has made some progress from the days of the binary thinking that brought us a Polly for girls and a Max for boys, though not enough. But toy shelves could certainly use more of the self-contained, non-digital play that Polly Pocket provides, and the more sci-fi-tinged, creepy worlds of Max would just offer more dimensions to play in.
In 2023, when the category of “connected toys”—meaning the “drone-connected, smartphone-connected, and console-connected toys”—continues to rise, it’s important to continue to support well-made ones that live solely in the tactile.
And personally, I’d hope to see a growing footprint in micro-playsets once again rub off on other properties: In the early 1990s, the following franchises took cues from Max and Polly to craft their own micro-playsets, including Star Wars, Godzilla, and Batman Forever.
The latter was particularly memorable: