46: The Real Norville Barnes
The Hudsucker Proxy is a kind of collage of pastiches in its composition. Between its plot points of a big business whose leadership is in turmoil cribbed from Executive Suite, a guileless rube from the sticks in the big city obsessed over by the press cribbed from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and a fast talking quick witted reporter who never says die cribbed from His Girl Friday, there’s little about the plot of the film that isn’t a take on existing art. The most original aspect of the film would appear to be Norville’s great invention. The Coens and Sam Raimi while writing the film had done no research about the real creation of the hula hoop or its history, they simply wanted something that would seem ridiculous to the characters for Norville to invent but that would also believably turn out to be a great success. The Hula Hoop fits the bill perfectly. It is simultaneously something that can be summed up as a circle and the words “you know, for kids!” and it is something that was a ubiquitous and successful toy in 1994 (and indeed, in 2020 as I type these words). In the film’s denouement, as it is described how Norville and Hudsucker Industries continued to prosper after the end of the film, it is shown that he is no mere one trick pony, having developed a second toy that also can be described as a circular drawing that is “you know, for kids”: the frisbee. Both toys as narrative devices work beautifully, but of course it’s a work of complete fiction. There’s no reason to think from watching the film that the Hula Hoop was developed by the same company that developed the Frisbee a year later, and that the Hula Hoop was a massive hit, selling millions of units just after its release in December of 1958. The reality of course, is that the Hula Hoop was actually developed by the same company that had developed the Frisbee a year earlier, and that the Hula Hoop was a massive hit, selling millions of units just after its release in January of 1958.
The Frisbee and the Hula Hoop were both creations of the Wham-O toy company in the 1950s. Wham-O however, was no Hudsucker Industries. It was no multinational conglomerate with a 44 floor art deco office in midtown Manhattan. Wham-O was originally a much smaller and scrappier organization, started in 1948 by Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin. Rich and Spud had been high school and college buddies who graduated with business degrees from USC but who hated where their careers had taken them by the late 1940s. They started making toy slingshots in Knerr’s garage and named their nascent toy company out of the sound that the slingshots made on impact. Neither man seems to have been the kind of wide eyed businessman with big dreams of big profits that Norville Barnes is in The Hudsucker Proxy. They were just affable goofuses. They had a desire to grow their toy company, but one gets the sense from their biographies that Rich and Spud started a toy company so that they could convincingly have a reason to play with toys as grown men more than because they thought that owning a toy company was a good way to make a lot of money.
Rich and Spud made a modest living selling toys for the first ten years of Wham-O’s existence, including one toy that was only a modest success upon its initial release: the Frisbee in 1957. The world of toys and games are full of items that are barely modified versions of existing objects. Just as the game of Pictionary is just a fun way to use a pad of paper and the game of Balderdash is just a fun way to use a dictionary, the Frisbee was originally just a fun way to use a cake pan. An Angelino named Fred Morrison had long enjoyed tossing a cake can as a flying disk with his wife Lu as a beach pass time when a stranger one day offered him a quarter to buy the disk off him. After he realized that if a stranger would buy a five cent cake pan for a 500% markup if you could demonstrate that it could be used as a toy, he began doing exactly that. He had a small run of slightly more aerodynamic cake pans manufactured which he branded “Pluto Platters” after the then-recently-discovered dwarf planet and would sell them on LA beaches.
Eventually they became popular enough for Rich and Spud of Wham-O to take notice, and so they purchased the design. They manufactured their own discs out of cheaper and more durable plastic and branded it the Frisbee after the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, CT, whose own disposable pie tins were known among New Englanders as fun flying disks. The Frisbee, however, even though it is ubiquitous today was not a huge hit upon its original release in 1957. It would take Wham-O having a national success under its belt already before America at large would take notice of the Frisbee*.
Much like flying disks, human beings have been using hoops recreationally since antiquity. Just as we know that the first Olympiad had a disc throwing event, so too is there evidence on painted urns and in the work of Hippocrates that people were playing with hoops in ancient Greece. There are woodcuts, engravings, and paintings of children (and adults) playing with hoops throughout the world and throughout recorded history. It makes sense, it’s a circle, one of the simplest and most straightforward shapes in existence. You make one out of a reed or a cane or any other substance rigid enough to hold its shape but flexible enough to bend and you’ve got yourself an instant toy. For hundreds of years however, no one thought to put the hoop around their body. All the hoops played with in antiquity are hoops that are meant for rolling, not for swinging. The goal of any hoop game for most of human history was one of two things: how far can you roll this hoop with a stick, or if a hoop is rolled in your line of sight, can you throw an object through it. Outside of the “hoop dance” of the Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes region of North America, no one seems to have had the idea to put hoops around their bodies for fun until the late 1800s.
In the 1890s a Swiss composer and music educator named Émile Jaques-Dalcroze invented a method of teaching music through rhythmic gymnastics. He called his method “Eurythmics”, and one its aspects was swinging a small metal hoop around one’s neck or arm. The French sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme’s sculpture “Hoop Dancer” depicts such an aspect of Eurythmic dance.
The Eurythmic method spread throughout Europe into the UK** and then to Australia, where at some point the hoops became larger, specifically large enough to swing around the hips rather than around the extremities. It was these hoops, imported to the US from Australia that Rich and Spud encountered in 1957 which they decided could be used as the basis for a toy design. Their great innovation to the idea was building it out of extruded plastic to make it lightweight, and putting a small bit of grit inside so that it made a sound as the user swung it. They rightfully thought that “eurythmic gymnastic hoop” wasn’t a very good name, so they decided to jump on the bandwagon of celebrating anything Hawaiian as the island chain was making its years-long ramp up to US statehood. The hip gyration that was needed to keep the hoop upright reminded Rich and Spud of the hip movements of the traditional Hawaiian Hula, and thus the Hula Hoop was born.
As in The Hudsucker Proxy, the hoop was sold at a significant markup to its modest manufacture price. It cost around $0.40 to extrude one plastic dingus, but was sold for $1.98 (around $3.50 and $18 in today’s buying power respectively). Also like in Hudsucker, the hoop did not make a splash the second it was released in January of that year. Rich and Spud rightfully thought that warmer weather might be the key to the hoop’s success and so they waited until the spring to start aggressively marketing it. It worked. Over the summer of 1958 the hoop sold 25 million units. One out of every 7 American owned a Hula Hoop by the end of that summer. Unfortunately for Rich and Spud, the hoop itself became a bit of a Hudsucker-ian financial boondoggle that year. Anticipating that sales would continue, the company poured millions into manufacturing more hoops, only to have the rug pulled out from under them as the school year restarted and the weather turned cold. By November of that year sales dried up, and Rich Knerr estimated that Wham-O had only cleared $10,000 in profits from Hula Hoop sales with warehouses full of hoops going unsold.
A savvy investor observing Wham-O in the year of 1958 could have cleaned up nicely, either by shorting the company as its meteoric rise came to a screeching halt, or by buying up stock in November as the company’s future prospects looked about as bright as a round trip on the Titanic. The company looked to be in trouble, but Rich and Spud had some tricks up their sleeve. They quickly made some minor changes to the Frisbee, a toy they felt had not got its due the previous year, and in doing so they mounted a campaign for the Frisbee as the “new” toy from Wham-O. Having won the hearts (and hips) of America the previous summer with one plastic circle for kids, they managed to bounce back with another plastic circle for kids. Indeed, the Hula Hoop itself turned out to have more staying power than its initial fad release might have suggested, as winter turned to spring the next year and children resumed their purchases of Wham-O’s wacky circumference. Over the course of two years they sold 100 million of them, causing Wham-O to thrive into the next decade, when they invented yet another circle for kids: The Super Ball.
Rich and Spud were not the giants of industry and commerce depicted in The Hudsucker Proxy by Norville Barnes and Sidney Musburger. They were a pair of goofballs who had a knack for figuring out what round objects children might want to play with. In the film, the contrast between the deadly seriousness of Sidney Musburger’s scheme and the earnest goofiness of Norville Barnes and his dingus creates much of the humor. For that humor to work, Norville needs to both credibly be a bit of a buffoon but also credibly come up with something successful. The Hula Hoop, and thus the career of Wham-O’s founders is exactly that bridge to buffoonish success. Even if the Coens and Raimi hadn’t known their names when they wrote Hudsucker, hats off to Rich Knerr and Spud Melin for providing that inspiration to Norville Barnes and his hoop.
* After the Frisbee gained national popularity through the early 1960s, a group of college students at Amherst College started creating a formalized game around tossing a frisbee in a field. In 1968 one of them taught their nascent game to a high school student at a summer camp, who further codified the game, naming it “Ultimate Frisbee” and writing its first rulebook. That high school student’s name was Joel Silver, and he would later make his career as a film producer, where in 1992 he took a risk and sunk $25 million of his production company’s money into a feature film by a pair of critical darling indie filmmakers named Joel and Ethan Coen. Their film was called The Hudsucker Proxy.
** Eurythmic method continued to be used in schools into the latter half of the 20th century, and was taught to a budding musician named Annie Lennox in the 1960s. When she formed a pop duo with Dave Stewart in 1980, she decided to name the project after the instruction method which is why you started humming “Sweet Dreams” to yourself as you read this paragraph.