22 min readConsider G.I. Joe. Consider slot cars, model trains, and dollhouses. Even consider Barbie. The most popular toys of the 1960s played on fantasy. You weren’t really a soldier, or a train conductor, or a paragon of femininity. Kids watching micro-racers buzz around a plastic track never saw a genuine checkered flag. The families inhabiting those replica houses were too perfect to be real.
The Big Wheel was different. It was the first superstar toy of the 1970s. It was fast and often furious. Swathed in bold primary colors, it ran low to the ground, making a sound as recognizable as a jet engine. Bruises and road rash weren’t a downside: They were a bonus.
And let’s get real. This is not just the most revolutionary three-wheeler of all time. It is the single most fun vehicle of any kind ever built for anyone under age 10. It’s a gateway—to motocross, skateboarding, off-roading, today’s electric scooters, and hoverboards. The Big Wheel invented drifting long before Hollywood turned the concept into a burnt-rubber franchise. Owning one instantly made you king of the cul-de-sac. And you weren’t alone. The Big Wheel is the second-most popular toy in history, after Barbie, with sales that range (depending on who’s counting) from 250 million to over one billion in the nearly six decades since it was introduced.
The Big Wheel was freedom, the kind that let late Baby Boomers and early Gen X kids rumble the streets of their neighborhoods with little oversight, at a time when parenting had nothing to do with helicopters or hovering. Introduced in 1969, and hitting retail stores just in time for Christmas, the trike embodied the happy anarchy of pre-digital childhood. It was one of a few toys to unashamedly promise—and deliver—pure action, an escape from front yards, fenced-in day cares, and supervision in general.
The story of this freewheeling trike is the story of a pair of toy-industry giants. One was a mogul and marketer, and the other an obsessive tinkerer and design paragon. Both took fun very seriously. The story is also a tale of dizzying shifts in American manufacturing, in the very definition of play. The Big Wheel stood at the pinnacle of the third wave of 20th-century toymaking. The industry started with wood, moved on to metal, and then, with neutered dolls and tricolored trikes, embraced plastic. (The fourth wave, still ongoing, is electronic.)
But for an object so simple and recognizable, the Big Wheel’s first 50 years were complicated. The product has been the subject, and sometimes the center, of family drama, corporate machinations, and arguments over ownership and provenance, with millions of dollars at stake. It was a toy invented and marketed by geniuses but occasionally coveted and controlled by rebels and rogues. The Big Wheel would rise and then nearly be killed by the drain-the-happiness shadow of corporate consensus. But the trike endured, and it is still defined as much by what it does—and how it makes people feel—as by where it came from.
If any toymaker was destined to become master of the universe, it was Louis Marx. Long before Mattel and Hasbro staked claims as the overlords of kiddie merriment, Marx had figured out exactly how to create what kids wanted and how to make their parents buy it for them. Marx became so famous that at the height of his career, in 1955, he made the cover of Time magazine, partially eclipsing an image of Santa Claus himself, supplanting the Jolly Elf as the new face of commercial Christmas. Through a shrewd campaign of providing samples for the children and grandchildren of the rich and powerful—he’d earned Dwight D. Eisenhower’s friendship by repairing a model train set that the five-star army general and future president had purchased for his grandchildren—Marx joined the ranks of America’s elite. “Through the swinging glass doors of Manhattan’s ‘21’ Club,” wrote the Time profile, “popped a roly-poly, melon-bald little man with the berry-bright eyes and beneficent smile of St. Nick.”
For somebody powerful enough to relegate Kris Kringle to a supporting role, Marx had humble beginnings. Born in Brooklyn in 1896 to German Jewish refugees, Marx didn’t learn English until he entered grade school. In the Time profile, the toymaker described a childhood of roaming in the streets and occasionally shoplifting goods from the department stores along the borough’s main thoroughfares. After graduating high school at 15, Marx happened upon a job at a toy company whose chief product was “Zippo the Climbing Monkey,” a mechanical ape who wobbled up a tin string. Marx worked his own way up to managing the New Jersey factory that assembled the shimmying simian, but when he suggested that his employer close its retail shops to concentrate on manufacturing, he was fired.
After serving in the U.S. military in World War I, Marx started his own company, specializing in buying existing toy lines—and improving them. Like most toymakers, Marx didn’t mind emulating competing playthings outright, though he’d usually make them either better-performing or cheaper to produce. “When they copy you, it’s piracy,” he told Time. “When you copy them, it’s competition.”
Though the Big Wheel—a tricycle with a radical infusion of innovation—represents the pinnacle of that concept, the notion of reinvention applied to even the earliest and simplest Marx products. Louis Marx is often given credit for “creating” the yo-yo, even though spinning toys on windable tethers have been around, in various forms, for millennia. What Marx did was turn a simple, ancient plaything into a fad. In 1929, the toymaker introduced a yo-yo with a longer, looped string threaded around the plaything’s center axle, increasing hang time and making complex-looking tricks possible. In an article dated November 9, 1929, The New Yorker noted that Marx was selling the doodads at a rate of about 150,000 per day, at an average price of 20 cents each (that translates to more than $200 million annually in today’s dollars). The nation, the story noted, was catching on to the yo-yo to such an extent that it had been banned in public schools. Marx’s version of the toy came out just about the same time as another “original” yo-yo was introduced by a California inventor named Pedro Flores. The West Coast version was noticed by entrepreneur Donald Duncan, who purchased the rights to the Flores product a year later. (The ongoing Flores/Duncan vs. Marx argument over provenance is the least thrilling part of the spinning toy.)
Another signature Marx characteristic was realism. The company offered kid-friendly automobiles that were scale duplicates of popular full-sized vehicles of the day. Marx cleverly packaged the cars with full toolsets that taught kids basic mechanical skills as they built the diminutive conveyances—which also saved the expense of assembling the realistic Stutz Bearcats and bright red Willys Jeeps at the factory. (Big Wheel buyers got a similar experience, encouraged to make a cool activity out of affixing the sheets of decals that came with the product.) Marx drew on his military experience to offer extensive lines of toy soldiers, first in metal, then plastic (some cast figurines are still manufactured today, using the original Marx designs).
By the mid-1950s, Marx held about a 10 percent share of U.S. toy sales. The mogul’s continued cultivation of key contacts within the defense community—famed generals Omar Bradley and George C. Marshall became godparents to one of his sons—may have helped the toy mogul win key government contracts as factories switched to munitions production. Assembly lines that produced cowboy playsets and wind-up Disney characters shifted to real-life bazookas and grenade pins. Marx was rumored to have contributed to the Manhattan Project, building components for the first atomic bombs. (This may have just been skillful self-promotion, since there’s no solid record of such an effort, though it is mentioned in Marx Western Playsets: The Authorized Guide, a 1998 history and catalog of the company’s cowboy line.) The war made Marx even wealthier, and as it ended, the toymaker bought a mansion in Scarsdale, New York, just north of Manhattan, complete with White House–like Corinthian columns.
Marx had four children with his first wife, Renee, who died of cancer in 1944. “He adored my mother,” says Marx’s youngest daughter, Patricia Marx Ellsberg, who went on to become a host at New York’s WNYC public radio station, and was married to Daniel Ellsberg, the Washington think tank analyst who’d released the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971. Patricia Marx describes a brilliant and sumptuous existence growing up: “My father drove a Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce,” she says. “We lived an amazingly luxurious life.” Three years after Renee’s death, Marx married Idella Blackadder, who performed on the burlesque stage under the name Barbara Moffett, whose half-sister was the more famous—and often less-clothed—Lili St. Cyr, who was billed as the “anatomic bomb.” Marx would go on to have five sons with his new wife.
In between visits to Japan and Europe—he was recruited by Eisenhower and Marshall to help rebuild the infrastructures of the defeated nations—Marx was known for jogging through his neighborhood with a half-dozen dogs in tow or finding solitude by sitting at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, dictating product ideas into an early portable recorder. “We were so spoiled,” Patricia recalls. “And abundant in toys.” (Marx made sure that items from competitors appeared under the family Christmas tree, in order to test them with his own family.) There were also various animals, besides the dogs: “He’d bring back exotic pets from his trips,” Patricia says, recalling her father lecturing “the first shift” (his older children) while a monkey sat on his head: “He’d smoke a Cuban cigar, and the monkey would wrap its tail around him.”
One remarkable element of the Marx company’s success is how long it lasted. Toymakers often trip over disruptive changes in manufacturing processes or consumer preference. But Marx ruled the space beneath America’s yule trees through the wood, metal, and plastic eras. The Big Wheel would become the most fantastic plastic of them all.
If Marx was the general, then Ray Lohr was Marx’s secret weapon. Lohr had joined the toy company in the 1930s and worked his way up to becoming the manufacturer’s chief designer. Over four decades, Lohr came up with dozens of concepts for Marx, everything from miniature pianos and rocking horses to kitsch-favorite Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, a 1960s-vintage pair of miniature automatons who battled to knock each other’s composite craniums off.
Lohr was especially fascinated with wheeled toys. In 1936, he patented a mini car made of stamped sheet metal, complete with a safety feature that would throw the vehicle into reverse whenever it hit an object. Through the 1960s, Lohr turned his attention to plastics, and by decade’s end, the company was releasing an annual fleet of mobile playthings that would ultimately become known as the “ride-on” category, including Big Wheel predecessor “Marvel the Mustang,” introduced in 1967: Kids could coax Marvel into a trot by bouncing lightly on the steed’s molded saddle, activating a spring that moved the horse’s legs.
But Lohr was always looking for something more exciting. He wanted to use a relatively new process called blow molding, where a metal form lined with molten plastic was puffed full of air, yielding near-infinite possibilities for shape and color. Blow molding also imparted strength—its hollow structures, similar to tubular shapes used for aircraft fuselages, are plenty tough without a lot of added weight, an important attribute for a toy designed to be lugged to the tops of hills by 8-year-olds.
Lohr had begun by experimenting with molded wheels but hadn’t hit on the perfect application for the technology. Then, in 1968, Lohr’s mother passed away, and the engineer was driving with his entire family from Erie, Pennsylvania, where Marx had one of its three U.S. toy factories, to Cincinnati, for the funeral. “We were [on] Interstate 71,” recalls Phil Lohr, Ray’s son, who was 17 years old at the time. “Dad was telling us how, as a kid, he’d take his tricycles apart and reassemble them upside down. He’d sit on the frame, and because the center of gravity was much lower, he could go down hills really fast without tipping over.” And that was the Big Wheel’s eureka moment—an upside-down three-wheeler that would perfectly balance thrills and security.
When Lohr returned from Cincinnati, he began working on his inverted tricycle. The first step, Phil Lohr recalls, was to create wooden models. Marx was known for its meticulous prototyping, and the company employed a team of skilled carvers. Big Wheel alpha was made entirely of lumber. Next came injection-molded versions, but these beta-level iterations were solid plastic, yielding a cumbersome ride. The true Big Wheel really began to take shape when Lohr built a blow-molded sample. The hollow frame made all the difference, creating a trinity of light weight, easy maneuverability, and kid-resistant durability. But the true benefit of the process was that by constructing the wheels from molds, sidestepping traditional pneumatic tires, it allowed for the Big Wheel’s most thrill-making attribute: the by-design lack of traction, which encourages skidding, drifting, and the product’s matchless thunking sound print.
Within a year of its 1969 holiday debut, the Big Wheel had become Marx’s best seller and America’s most coveted toy. In a memo to a business associate, Louis Marx marveled at the product’s success: “With the Big Wheel,” he wrote, “we are in trouble all over now and we have been swamped. I would say roughly we will be fifty to seventy-five thousand pieces oversold and maybe more. I get nothing but telephone calls all day on this item and it is a ‘must’ for a lot of people.”
Despite limited supplies, Marx launched a television campaign that zeroed in on the Big Wheel’s trademark roar. Though TV advertising was fairly common for toys in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the fact that the Big Wheel had such a recognizable sound made the product especially well-suited for the medium. The 30-second spots shouted: “The Big Wheel Sound of Power…Roaring! Spinning! Winning!”
The promos were also able to take advantage of newly popular color television sets. American networks had just completed their transition away from black and white. The Big Wheel’s red-yellow-blue visual scheme, believed to be chosen by Louis Marx himself, was ideal for the new medium. “The colors were classics for the era, and still appeal to children today,” Peggy Van Allen, a former president of the Color Marketing Group, a research organization that studies the effects and uses of color, wrote in an email. “The combination…is a basic triad: three colors, equidistant on the color wheel so they complement each other.” The black tires, Van Allen says, “ground the palette and provide the illusion of being real. For all of the reasons that made the toy popular—fast and super cool skid-outs—the colors worked with the design.”
Kids who grew up coveting the first wave of Big Wheels remember the product’s instant appeal. “Combine color, speed, and the ability to spin out, and you’ve got something way cooler than any tricycle,” says Matt Armbruster, a Lafayette, Colorado, engineer who organizes an annual Big Wheel rally and pub crawl in Boulder, and who builds and sells an adult-sized version called the High Roller. Armbruster remembers finding a Big Wheel under his family Christmas tree in the early 1970s. “It was my first taste of real freedom. It got you around the block and out of sight of your parents. You could scuff your elbows and skin your knees until your mom called you in for dinner.”
Despite the Big Wheel’s ability to bloody its users, one of its earlier attributes, played up by Marx, was safety—especially when compared with conventional tricycles. In 1973, Big Wheel advertisements capitalized on a study sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Product Safety, predecessor to today’s Consumer Products Safety Commission. The report showed that low-slung trikes, like the Big Wheel, were more stable than traditional, higher-profile rigs.
Marx purchased full-page advertisements in national magazines touting the survey’s conclusions. “Safety study shows Marx Big Wheel most stable tricycle design tested in U.S.A.,” read an ad that ran in the November 1973 edition of Family Circle.
And with this, Marx refined the Big Wheel’s appeal: It was as safe as danger could be—and vice-versa. The combination was even more irresistible, leading to howls of protest from aggrieved tricycle makers. The paper’s chief author later qualified his findings, asserting that the study “nowhere said that the tricycle is unsafe. What we said was only that it is less stable than some other designs that have the youngster seated closer to the ground.”
It was too late. The market for traditional tricycles collapsed to the point that one of the country’s largest makers of the product, the Garton Toy Company of Wisconsin—whose three-wheelers were first introduced around 1890, with its crimson designs growing so renowned that the color became known in the bicycle industry as “Garton Red”—saw sales drop by two-thirds. “A tremendous push from the Big Wheel,” the firm’s president told the Detroit Free Press in 1974, sent business “into a tailspin.” Garton tried to pivot, switching to garden tools, but the company eventually went out of business, and its century-old Sheboygan factory was converted to luxury condominiums.
By now, Marx had expanded the Big Wheel lineup. In addition to the flagship 16-inch model, the company introduced the six-inch Mini Wheel, the nine-inch Little Wheel, and the 12-inch Sport Wheel. The original metal fork, which bent easily, was eliminated in favor of a blow-molded component. But the biggest innovation was a design change that upgraded key details of the product. The second-generation trike was initially marketed as the “Deluxe Big Wheel” and sold for about $15, compared with the original’s $10 price tag. What buyers got for that premium was a saddlebag, an adjustable plastic seat—and most important, a hand brake alongside the right rear wheel. Though Marx’s own advertising at the time touted the “brake” as helping a rider “slow down without dragging his feet,” every kid knew that the real purpose of the addition was the opposite of stopping: Just like an automobile’s emergency hand brake, if you jammed the Big Wheel’s unilateral friction lever into the locked position, you’d go into even more massive spins and drifts. (More recent Big Wheel marketing has dispensed with the pretense: “The hand brake is not a safety feature,” some current materials note, “but completely opposite. It is designed to do tricks.”)
Though Louis Marx didn’t directly design the Big Wheel, when he stepped off the stage, his most famous product almost stopped rolling. The toy mogul was in his 70s, and none of his kids showed an interest in entering the business. “Dad didn’t encourage us to enter the industry,” Patricia Marx recalls. “He knew it was something that a person might fail at if they didn’t have their heart in it.”
With no lineal successor, Marx struck a deal that he thought would continue his work. At the time, the recreation and leisure industry was being overwhelmed with a kind of merger mania—corporate melding that, in retrospect, made absolutely no sense. CBS broadcasting purchased Ideal, maker of Evel Knievel action figures. American Machine & Foundry (AMF), a manufacturer of cigarette machines and nuclear power plant parts (!!!) merged with a bicycle company and a bowling pin maker. Not wanting to be left out, a pair of cereal companies joined the fray, with General Mills (Cheerios) buying Kenner (Play-Doh, Easy-Bake Oven); and Quaker Oats, in 1972, purchasing Marx for around $52 million.
The acquisition was troubled from the beginning, according to Jay Horowitz, a Florida-based toy manufacturer who currently markets new versions of vintage Marx toys, using some of the company’s original molds and intellectual property rights. Throughout much of the 1970s, Horowitz watched Quaker attempt to manage Marx: “They had no idea how to run a toy company,” he says. Phil Lohr remembers his father, who briefly stayed on, complaining that the company manual grew from being an inch-thick binder to a volume 12 inches thick. Quaker also eliminated the company’s hugely popular lines of military-themed toys, citing the growing anti-war movement of the time. Staying true to the pacifist Quaker namesake ultimately cut a third of Marx’s profits.
Louis Marx had been kept on as a consultant, but according to Horowitz, “they never asked him to do anything; not even a question,” and the mogul departed just six months after the acquisition. By the middle of the decade, the toy company that had turned a profit every year of its existence—including through the Great Depression—was operating at a loss.
One of the biggest blunders of the Quaker era, Horowitz says, was that the company was “too distracted to protect [the Marx] patents and trademarks,” what today we’d call intellectual property.
The result was a flood of Big Wheel look-alikes, including the EZ Riders Mighty Wheel and the Coleco Power Cycle. Another variant would end up making one of the product’s most notorious cameos. The Hedstrom Super Cycle paired blow-molded rear wheels with a metal frame and inflatable front tire. It began as a product featuring Fonzie, the motorcycle riding, tough-but-tender guy from the 1970s sitcom Happy Days. But the Super Cycle’s true moment came on the big screen: It was the trike ridden in alternating silence and cacophony, rolling from patterned carpet to hardwood floor and back again, by Danny Torrance, the psychic 5-year-old in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror opus, The Shining. (Fast-forward to minute 34:40 for the first appearance and the clattery sound effects.)
Meanwhile, Quaker was trying to maintain sales with a program of steep discounts and tie-ins. Among them was a 1974 promotion that connected the trike with the company’s leading kids’ cereal brand, Cap’n Crunch. Featuring a picture of the breakfast mascot—a bicorn-clad cartoon mariner—riding a Big Wheel, the advertisements, which appeared in eight national magazines as well as weekend-morning network television spots, garnered a claimed 231 million exposures—roughly the entire population of the United States at the time. If a family purchased a Big Wheel and consumed four boxes of cereal, it would receive, by mail, a check for $3.
But the tide of copycats was unstoppable. The imitators couldn’t be blamed—they were simply following Louis Marx’s strategy of imitating, embracing, and extending. Horowitz, at the time, was selling a look-alike called the “Big Cycle,” recalling that “there was a lot of confusion, and a lot of it was intentional.” Retailers didn’t seem to care who made whatever lowrider they sold, especially if it came with a licensed character motif.
The confusion finally sank what was left of Marx. By the end of the decade, the company was foundering. Quaker sold the company to a British manufacturer of playthings, which itself ended up in bankruptcy in 1980. Horowitz was able to buy nearly everything Marx left behind, but the Big Wheel—still the company’s most valuable asset—was offered separately. The buyer was Carolina Enterprises (later called Empire Industries), which already manufactured dozens of Big Wheel variants, mostly sold under the brand name Hot Cycles. Carolina had the facilities to build millions of drift trikes without using the original Marx molds. Starting in the mid-1980s, a “genuine” Big Wheel was actually a tricolor Hot Cycle with different stickers.
“We already had a factory that was making blow-molded, lowrider trikes,” says Barry Halperin, former president of Carolina/Empire. “It made sense to just switch the names.” Halperin says that he doesn’t remember whether the company ever put the original Big Wheel molds—the ones developed by Ray Lohr—back into use, but he does recall that once the Hot Cycle was rebranded as a Big Wheel, sales skyrocketed. “We sold a lot of them,” he said. When I asked how many, he replied: “A GAZILLION!” The Big Wheel had become its own imitation.
There was one final gasp of the old Marx under its new owners. In 1980, the company patented a Big Wheel variant called “The Green Machine,” a chopped trike that used a pair of levers for rear-wheel steering. The Green Machine was an exciting product (it is still sold today under the Huffy brand), but it couldn’t save Marx. The company’s head offices at 200 Fifth Avenue—the historic Toy Center building—in New York City, which it had occupied for over 50 years, finally closed. Louis Marx died in 1982. His New York Times obituary identified him as the “Toy King of America.”
If you search eBay today and look for vintage Big Wheels, you’ll find a lot to choose from. Genuine Marx versions can cost as much as $2,400 in unopened packaging, according to Francis Turner, owner of the now-closed Marx Toy Museum in Moundsville, West Virginia, near the company’s old factory. Vintage Big Wheels made by Empire/Carolina are considerably cheaper, selling for as little as $300 for new-in-box models.
But the Big Wheel’s home at Empire—and the toy’s stratospheric sales numbers—didn’t last. Halperin was diversifying, and the company would soon become better known for owning the Klondike and Popsicle lines of frozen confections. By the 1990s, tectonic shifts in the toy industry—electronics were the industry’s new growth market, and production of plastic toys had moved overseas, reducing margins—caused Big Wheel sales to decline. In 2000, after three consecutive years of losses, Empire declared bankruptcy. The Big Wheel, along with a few other brands, were sold for a bargain-basement price of $6 million. The new owner of the now three-decade-old tricycle franchise was a longtime toy entrepreneur and former carnival barker based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, named Jody Keener.
In 2001, when Keener bought the Big Wheel, he moved production to a series of facilities, some in the U.S., some overseas, all under the name Alpha International, a joint venture with his then-wife, Connie. The toy entrepreneur—who claims to own one of the world’s largest collections of vintage toys—also controlled J. Lloyd International, one of the largest makers of plastic model sets. Keener says he had new molds commissioned but also used both of the original Marx molds, which Empire had in storage (Halperin isn’t certain of this), and Empire’s Hot Cycles molds.
The Keener era was, for better and worse, punctuated by intense drama. Owning what Keener described as the “number one most famous toy of all time” can become perilous when things get personal. In 2007, as part of a highly contested divorce proceeding that included both company assets and individual property—including a 13,666-square-foot mansion, complete with indoor swimming pool, movie theater, and Sistine Chapel–esque overhead fresco—a judge wrote: “When two people cannot get along, sometimes it is better for both of them to just pick up their toys and leave. Unfortunately, in this case, that was not so easy.” The Big Wheel was essentially the child in a custody battle. (The court awarded Connie the Alpha Industries assets, which included the Big Wheel, but ordered her to pay her ex-husband some $7 million to “equalize” the division of property. A later court proceeding returned the rights to the trike to Keener.)
Keener, like nearly everyone else in the toy industry, is enthusiastic and fun to talk to. (He’s also uniquely qualified to understand what kids want: At the time we spoke for this story, his offspring ranged in age from their 50s to under 10 years old.) During the peak of Alpha’s ownership, Keener says, manufacture of Big Wheels reached up to 10,000 trikes per day, using over 200 molds. Keener had big plans, including an adult-sized Big Wheel. “If you ask anyone—boy or girl—that was born in the U.S. in the past five decades what their favorite toy was, nine out of 10 of them will say the Big Wheel,” Keener says, adding that he believed sales of five million Big Wheels per year were possible.
But not, it turns out, under Keener’s watch. In February 2020, Keener, then approaching his 70s, told industry trade journal The Toy Book that Alpha was “in the process of selling or licensing” its brands. “It is time to pass the torch,” he said.
The genuine Big Wheel, at least in name, seemed to be in limbo. The product experienced a sort of e-commerce diaspora, available on everything from Amazon to what appeared to be fan sites selling warehoused old stock, sometimes for several hundred dollars. That confusion—and attendant fluctuations in price, availability, and quality—may have contributed to the Big Wheel eventually being dismissed by key product review sites: Wirecutter, The New York Times’ consumer recommendation service, chose a pneumatic-tire, metal-frame Schwinn semi-clone in its guide to toddler-level tricycles. Radio Flyer’s Big Flyer Sport, in that company’s quintessential red color scheme, comes closer to the real thing, with molded wheels and an adjustable seat.
The Big Wheel remained an icon. A house-sized version of the trike sits in front of the 1970s wing of Disney World’s Pop Century Resort in Orlando, Florida. But with multiple outlets selling what appeared to be genuine Big Wheels, as well as copycat products, brand integrity (based on Amazon product ratings) declined. What the Big Wheel needed was somebody who understood both its legacy and its appeal.
That potential savior emerged in June 2024 at the Strong National Museum of Play, which began as one of the world’s largest collections of dollhouses in the 1960s but has since morphed into a 375,000-square-foot tourist attraction in Rochester, New York. Notably, it houses the National Toy Hall of Fame, which inducted the Big Wheel in 2009. Chief curator Chris Bensch says the Big Wheel is as close as a toy can get to perfect: “The sound it makes, the feeling, the durability—it pretty much is the essence of play. Has there ever been a toy like that?”
In 2024, a Massachusetts-based company called Schylling announced that it had purchased the rights to the Big Wheel and would be hosting a golden anniversary celebration at the museum, coinciding with a national relaunch. (It had actually been 55 years since Louis Marx and Raymond Lohr introduced the lowrider trike, but the pandemic—as well as negotiations to purchase the brand—had delayed any celebration.)
The acquisition is a hopeful sign. Schylling specializes in revitalizing vintage toy brands—it is known for reestablishing the Lava Lamp, along with Care Bears and Sea-Monkeys—and the first thing it did with the Big Wheel was to pare down the product line and distribution channels. “There was a lot of messiness in the marketplace,” says Paul Weingard, the company’s CEO. “It was time to refocus.”
One of the key elements of the company’s renewed push is to acknowledge the Big Wheel’s inherent appeal—that perfectly balanced combination of peril and pleasure. “This is empowerment for young children. A 5-year-old gets on a Big Wheel, and they can move fast,” says Weingard. “They can spin out. It feels scary, but it’s safe. That’s the essential nature of the product.”
There are now three official Big Wheel versions—two in traditional colors (the “Big Spin” model has a hand brake and saddlebag) and another in a purple and pink theme. They still come with the apply-it-yourself-stickers that were such an essential part of the original Marx experience. Schylling Big Wheels are available on Amazon for between $100 and $110—less than what they retailed for during the Keener era—and are sold nationwide at the Tractor Supply hardware chain. (You can still find alternate Big Wheels for as much as $300 on various websites. Weingard says that those are companies selling mostly unused, older stock. Calls and emails to the biggest of these vendors were not returned.)
Are the new Big Wheels authentic? It depends on how one defines the product: They’re not made from the original Marx molds, Weingard says. “The original molds are long gone,” he says, “and would not be suitable for today’s manufacturing machinery.” But maybe it doesn’t matter. The fun is genuine.
The genius of Marx and Lohr wasn’t just creating toys people wanted to buy. They created legends. The Big Wheel, perhaps more than any other plaything—and that includes Barbie—doesn’t just deliver thrills. It builds core memories. If you’re a parent or a grandparent, you understand that sometimes you need to step back and watch, no matter what happens. The Big Wheel doesn’t just represent the idea of the free range: It is the free range. It is front-lawn waterslides, BB guns, buckle-on roller skates, and treehouses, almost literally rolled into one.
I remember when we bought our own son (he’s now 10, so this wasn’t that long ago) his first Big Wheel. He’s one of those kids who has a knack for endangering himself. We had a house full of bikes and scooters, but he got bored with them. The Big Wheel was something else. “Wow,” he said. “I love my motorcycle.”
The word choice was telling. This wasn’t about building a skill, or positive role models, or staying fit. In a world where too many toys tend to scream “Eat your vegetables!” this was red meat. This was play. This was action.
