Kenner’s Morgue wasn’t the only thing still located at 2950 Robertson Ave. in Cincinnati, Ohio during the final days of Kenner. In the same warehouse that stored all of the pre-production material I wrote about earlier, was a section that Kenner referred to as the Museum. This is where Kenner kept final production examples of many of their toy lines. These saved items went all the way back to the beginning days of Kenner, and in many cases included multiple examples of each. One ex-employee recalls that one to four cases of each toy were to be kept, but that may have varied based on if the toys came in variety cases like action figures.
The term museum makes it sound like they were being preserved for historical reasons, but the toys were being kept more for practical reasons than for historical or sentimental value. The toys in the Museum were constantly being used as part of the toy making process. Kenner employees working on new toys could check items out of the Museum to use on their projects. There are a lot of reasons they would need to do this, including seeing how certain action features worked on a toy so they could duplicate it, or if they needed to kit-bash the toys to turn them into other items for presentations and proposals.
When Hasbro shut down the Cincinnati location, the contents of the Museum were loaded up on skids and shipped to Hasbro’s Rhode Island facilities.
Here are some examples of Withdrawal Request forms that were used to take items out of the Museum in early 2000:
4-17-00 Request for Bionic Woman Doll
4-17-00 Request for Ghostbusters Action Figures
4-18-00 Request for Robocop Action Figures
4-18-00 Request for Terminator Action Figures
Here is the first part of the Kenner Museum list:
Museum inventory list pages 1-20 (2.53M PDF)
This is the first of five updates about the Museum inventory list. The entire document is 98 pages long.
Here is a link to the second update.
Has the Kennertoy.com website been taken down?
Is yours the only site that gives history and employee inputs on the old Kenner?
My father worked in the model and design area of Kenner for many years and
was the creator of the Sit’n Spin, Knitting machine, Loom and some others that
I can’t remember. He worked at the Vine St. location and one previous to that.
I have several of his prototype toys still and keep them as family rememberances.
Recently my daughters have become more interested in their heritage and we
always had believed he had been the inventor of the Sit’n Spin but found that
the Toy Hall of fame and some other sources had sited another person as being the
inventor. We are making an effort to get that corrected by referencing the Kenner
US Patent that was filed showing my father, Jacob W. Burkart and John F. Mayer
as the inventors. We have also noted that often Wikipedia is referenced for the Sit’n Spin
and we have made efforts to correct that site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sit_%27n_Spin
It seems that most of your web site relates to more of the collectible figures from Kenner.
Is there any site that concentrates on the other toys made by Kenner.
Thanks for keeping the Kenner name and it’s toys and people alive.
Thanks,
Jacob W. Burkart Jr.