Sweet Success

L.A. Times Archives

Nov. 19, 1999 12 AM PT

You’re stuck on Gumdrop Pass, hoping the other guy’s Gingerbread pawn is lost in Lollipop Woods, so that you can scoot along the multicolored trail past Molasses Swamp and get to Candy Castle first.

Is this any way for a 50-year-old to behave?

Well, yes, if the aging enfant is a board game called Candy Land. Candy Land turns 50 this year and, like so many Baby Boomers, refuses to get old. The game’s only real change has been in its price: Candy Land cost a dollar when it was introduced in 1949.

Since then, 40 million of the games have been sold, and its price has risen to about $7. And Milton Bradley, the game’s Springfield, Mass., manufacturer, has added a couple of new twists: There is a “Pooh” version of the game and a CD-ROM version. There’s also a $20 anniversary edition packaged in a deliciously colored tin box with molded plastic gingerbread game pieces instead of the usual cardboard ones.

Some say that Candy Land is for girls, but ex-boys still have fond if foggy memories of it.

“I v-a-a-guely recall playing Candy Land,” said Billy Lear, assistant manager at Game Keeper in Glendale. “Chutes and Ladders, that’s a game I remember. My brother and I used to fight every time we played it.” (Chutes, another Milton Bradley product, is now 56.)

Some moms who play Candy Land with their kids admit they’re a tad less enthused than they were the first time around.

“That’s OK,” said an unperturbed Mark Morris, a Milton Bradley spokesman. “The end user isn’t an adult--it’s a child age 4 to 6. Candy Land is about color matching. That’s a very gratifying thing for kids to do.”

At home in Los Angeles on Saturday mornings, Raeleen Nevarez dashes from her Candy Land game to her tea party set, but she knows where she’d rather be.

“Candy Land is my favorite,” the 5-year-old said. Candy Cane is the character in the game she likes best.

Candy Land was invented by a San Diego woman named Eleanor Abbott. Stricken with polio, Abbott devised the game for children with the disease. Milton Bradley immediately bought it and for 30 years marketed it as “a sweet little game for sweet little folks.” Abbott died in 1988, in her late 70s, and, according to Milton Bradley, instructed her beneficiaries to donate her game royalties to “charities and children in need.”

Marie Hidalgo, now in her 30s, remembers a time when most of the kids in her neighborhood owned their own boards.

“It was a security type thing,” said Hidalgo, manager of the FAO Schwarz toy store in Glendale. “Nothing complicated, not a lot of rules to learn, and kids of every age could play it together.”

Morris has heard that before.

“There’s a reason why we never changed Candy Land,” he said. “It works.”