BW runs a big special report on the troubled toy industry. This is very interesting to me, because my friends and I often chat the reason:
toys suck these days. Toys were so much cooler in the 80s.
That's not just because we were kids then - it's because there was much more creativity, risk-taking, and real innovation then. In fact, many of they toys these companies are trying to hawk are direct descendants of ideas from the 80s. But they're not as good - because the industry forgotten how to innovate and take risks.
In fact, something the analysts haven't seen for quite a while is that the original toys of the 80s are now cool again - Transformers, My Little Pony, etc - because kids have seen how much cooler they are than what they're used to.
One other interesting thing is that toy entrepreneurs (who actually existed in the 80s) leveraged technology to build toys that excited kids and grown-ups alike. No one is doing that these days- although there are tons of new technologies ripe for the recombination.