Mego Museum: Tell me about the commercials ?
NK: Believe it or not, there was a period of five or six years where I wrote and directed every commercial until (Mego) brought in an ad agency.
NK: Which is why they called Kiss "dolls" which to this day has stuck for some reason. (Editors note: Neal describes the Toy Industry unwritten rule that forbade calling 12" Action Figures "Dolls").
NK: One of the interesting things about the tape of the commercials I got was that they were not air worthy commercials. They are from a sales film that we did in house.
Mego Museum: Why were the type one metal rivet bodies replaced with plastic?
NK: We were concerned with lead content and it was much cheaper with plastic, it should have worked a lot better. I've read how we had damage with them (type 2 bodies), we were using a top material called Marlux.
NK: I've said it before we really were responsible guys, we all had little kids, nobody was doing anything that we couldn't stand up for. It was a problem with the material that we didn't have much choice..
NK: The other thing was the factory; they were set up as a profit center. If there was one overriding reason Mego went under that was it. That was a terrible error starting our own factory because they took care of their own profits and their own selves first, collect their bonuses and sometimes it was at our expense, in other words the United States expense.
Mego Museum: So it was the fact that the factory wasn't owned by Mego?
NK: No, being owned by Mego, we eventually opened our own factory, it was the Rolls Royce of factories in '77 or '78.
Mego Museum: So it didn't work out?
NK: Well, I think it was one of those things you didn't find out until it was too late. First, we borrowed a lot of money and then interest rates went through the roof. So when we when we had to roll the loans over, it went from 8% to 12% to 18% (!)
NK: But the fact is, here in this country, quality was a major issue we constantly fighting with them. A lot of the same arguments go on today with the overseas makers.
Mego Museum: What about the Head Greying?
NK: I don't remember it, I had to check and find out if we were aware of the problem, I gather it came too late. One of the interesting things we had set up a customer service thing, one of the first companies to do so and it was not a problem that came back to us.
NK: Parents (didn't care) they paid a $1.99 for it and who cares? So the problem didn't rear it's ugly head until it was too late to do anything. It's called migration and again the problem was the materials we had access to.
Mego Museum: What's happening in the process of migration, is the pigment not binding with the plastic?
NK: It's basically the vinyl attacks the paint pigment and results in that graying material.
Mego Museum: It seems to be dolls mainly produced from 1979 and up.
NK: My guess is someone was getting paid off in the factory to buy inferior materials. I was out of there in '80 and Marty was already encountering legal problems.
Interesting enough, by that time, the Superheroes had lost their bloom so to speak. They were not doing well, it was kind of interim period. In '79 which was big year for us, the profit picture wasn't so great, we unloaded a whole load of Superheroes into the marketplace.
Which really hurt it for a couple of years, it was the only basic product line we had. (Mego) had tried to take over Tonka in an unfriendly takeover and Marty got bluffed out, one of the few times, if he didn't have the problems, that would have never happened, he would have taken over Tonka and things would have been a lot different