LJN Toys Ltd. was an American toy company and video game publisher founded in 1970. The company published movie tie-in and TV show-based games mainly for Nintendo consoles since 1987 and was owned by MCA. The company was sold to Acclaim Entertainment in 1990 and published games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy that Acclaim acquired the rights to, as well as getting rid of their toy counterpart. LJN produced the Roll & Rocker accessory and their console, the LJN Video Art.
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 There is no gold at the end of this rainbow.
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"How many of these games are worthless?! All the LJN ones, I can tell you that, but there are good games here, there are! Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Contra, Castlevania, Mega Man, but then A BIG FUCKING SHITSTORM HIT IT! A SHITSTORM OF HORRIBLE GAMES! And at the middle of it all, a rainbow! A rainbow of shit! LJN!"
LJN was dissolved in 1995 by Acclaim, but not before Jack Friedman, the founder of LJN, founded THQ as his new independent company following the acquisition by MCA in 1990. The brand was often briefly used in some of the subsequent products made by Acclaim, such as Spirit of Speed 1937 (released in 2000). After Acclaim's demise in 2004, the brand was later used by Hasbro for their reproduction of LJN toys.
History
Early history (1970-1985)
Jack Friedman founded LJN in 1970 using funds from his employer Norman J. Lewis Associates (from which the company name "LJN" is derived, being a reversal of Lewis' initials) after seeing the sale figures of Mattel and Milton Bradley Company increase. Friedman later founded THQ and Jakks Pacific after leaving LJN. LJN shifted money used for television advertising to instead purchase licenses to make toys based on television shows. The first toyline by LJN based on a television show was for Emergency! The highest amount the company paid for a license by 1982 was $250,000.
LJN purchased the license to make toys based on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for $25,000 due to other companies declining the option, including Kenner Products and Ideal Toy Company, and sold over $16–25 million worth of merchandise without the need of an advertising campaign. A doll based on Brooke Shields was released with a $2 million advertising budget and made over $12 million in 1982. LJN's revenue rose from $5 million in 1971 to $70 million in 1982 due to the E.T. and Brooke Shields toys.
In 1984 LJN became the toy licensee of the World Wrestling Federation. The Wrestling Superstars line, which featured action figures based on WWF's roster of wrestlers, was produced from 1984 to 1989.
LJN competed with Mattel in the toy market. The company produced the ThunderCats toyline in competition with Mattel's Masters of the Universe.
MCA ownership (1985-1990)
On March 26, 1985, MCA Inc. announced that it would purchase 63% of LJN's stocks for $39.8 million and proposed to buy the remainder of the stock for $14.26 for each share which would increase the total value of the deal to almost $65 million. However, the company failed to make a net income from 1986 to 1989, and MCA had to take a $53 million after-tax charge due to the expenses of the company before selling it to Acclaim Entertainment for $30 million in April 1990. LJN had a revenue of $110,510,000 and a net loss of $37.3 million in 1987.
LJN entered the video game industry by publishing games based on movies and television shows developed by companies including Atlus, Beam Software, and Rare for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987. The company released the LJN Video Art in 1987. The majority of the company's $70 million in sales in 1990 came from video game sales on the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy.
The company released a paint gun line named Gotcha! with a license from the film Gotcha!, but this line was criticized by consumer protection groups due to the danger it posed to eyes. The toyline was financially unsuccessful, and MCA had to take a $35 million after-tax charge due to its failure and the expenses of the Coleco. The company was also criticized by police officers and Americans for Democratic Action for its Entertech line of toy water guns due to how realistic they looked; LJN changed the design of the toys after three people in the United States from ages 13 to 19 were killed as a result of police officers thinking they had actual guns, and multiple cities and states banned the sale of realistic toy guns.
Acclaim Entertainment ownership (1990-2000)
Lawrence Kanaga filed a lawsuit on behalf of Clark Thiemann on January 31, 1990, against LJN, Nintendo, and Major League Baseball claiming that the game Major League Baseball was falsely advertised to Thiemann stating that it would allow him to simulate being a baseball team manager and Kanaga stating that the game was advertised as having all of the players, but instead only had their uniform numbers.
Acclaim closed LJN's toy division and shifted the company's focus to video game publishing. In 1991, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled LJN's Sling 'Em-Fling 'Em wrestling ring toys based on the World Wrestling Federation, which sold 1.4 million products from 1985 to 1989, due to multiple children between six and ten being injured by the toys.
Acclaim closed LJN in 1994 but reused the company's name for the release of Spirit of Speed 1937 in 2000.
The LJN brand was revived again in 2021 by Jazwares for its All Elite Wrestling Unmatched line of action figures. The LJN-style figures resemble the Wrestling Superstars of the 1980s.
Why There Was No Gold at the End of Their Rainbow
NOTE: The first six reasons are from the 94th AVGN episode Back to the Future ReRevisited, colored after the "Shit Rainbow/Spectrum of Awfulness". Below the reasons is a game showcasing them.
- Putrid gameplay.
- Major League Baseball: Poor physics, including terrible fielding, and sometimes the controls suffer from input delay.
- Bad musical abominations.
- Beetlejuice: The music in the game is not based on the movie, instead uses original music, which sounds way too silly and peppy for a game based on a horror movie. Despite this, the game still has great music thanks to it being composed by David Wise.
- Graphical farts and garlic.
- The Uncanny X-Men: The name is an accurate representation: poor graphics and palette swaps for every character.
- Piss-poor lack of loyalty to source material.
- Back to the Future: Barely faithful at all to the film, mostly in the horrible minigames.
- "Orange (aren't) you a fucking idiot?"
- Friday the 13th: A confusing to navigate game in which it may seem like you're going the right way, but you may actually be going the wrong way.
- High-stress anger-inducing masochism.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Horrible, slippery driving controls, slow searching, and a time limit to writing down a password after a game over.
- Sometimes LJN didn't even credit the developers at all.
- They are also known for forcing the developers who were developing for them to rush their games to meet their pitiful deadlines to get the game out while the movie's popularity was sky-high, causing their games to be released in unacceptable conditions.
- They also produced the Roll & Rocker, which, as shown in AVGN's NES Accessories episode, barely even works unless you found a rare one that worked.
Put that all together, you got all the colors of the shit rainbow. Hooray LJN.
Redeeming Qualities
- Some of the games they published, including Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage, the 16-bit WWF games, the Town & Country Surf Designs games, the console port of Terminator 2: The Arcade Game and Alien 3, Wolverine: Adamantium Rage and True Lies are actually pretty decent, if not good.
- They've also made the awesome ThunderCats toy line, the first line of WWF action figures, and the popular but controversial Entertech toy line of water guns.
- A few of their games have great music (e.g. Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wolverine and Beetlejuice).