We've Got Cooties! The History of the Name and the Games | WTFF?

It's a parasite AND a plaything, a playground game and a paper origami fortune teller. And as if all that weren't enough, it's the first ever plastic game! This is the Cootie Edition of Where's the Fun from?

Credits:
Very special thanks to Bruce Whitehill, Rick Tucker, Phil Orbanes, Nadine Sehnert, Debby Krim and everyone at The Association for Game & Puzzles International for the help tracking down some of these rare Cootie games.

Sarasota Toy Museum: https://www.sarasotatoymuseum.com
For a great book on the emergence of kids social games, check out Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture by Simon Bronner. Here's an excerpt: https://books.google.com/books?id=FMq...


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00:00 The story of Cootie
00:31 Herb Schaper's work background
00:47 Newspaper article image of Herb's original Cootie Bug Prototypes
01:16 Newspaper announcements of early Cootie drawing game played at "Cootie Parties"
01:27 Origin of the word Cootie
01:31 British and American Soldiers deal with body lice of "cooties" in World War I
02:00 The first commercial Cootie game
02:32 How Soldiers used play and humor to tell the cootie war story through games, poems, songs and cartoons
02:51 The Military Order of the Cootie
03:17 The home made drawing game called Cootie
03:35 Cootie game by Charles D. Bowlby in Chicago
03:46 Tu-Tee game by J.H. Warder in Chicago
03:54 The New Game of Cootie by Rork's in Saginaw
03:58 Cootie by Transogram in New York
04:21 Bug by Beachcraft Games in New York
04:35 Herb Schaper registers the trademark for "Cootie"
05:00 Cootie bug parts
05:15 Founding of W.H. Schaper Manufacturing Company and first plastic game
05:50 Sarasota Toy Museum Sponsorship
06:26 Dayton's is the first major account to buy Cootie
06:45 First Cootie games made in Robbinsdale, Minnesota
07:01 Release of Deluxe 6 Cootie and Giant Cootie
07:08 Herb Schaper files his patent on a "Separable Toy Figure for a Construction Game"
07:13 Cootie appears on Captain Kangaroo and sells 1.2 million copies in 1952
07:24 The Polio epidemic leads kids to invent the Cootie Tag and Cootie Catchers in 1952
08:11 Herb Schaper starts to appear in newspapers in 1953
08:20 Schaper prints a million Cootie Comic Books as a promotion in 1956
08:33 Cootie gets a packaging change in 1966 and Cootie House is introduced
08:44 Herb Schaper sells his company and retires: 25 millionth Cootie game sold
08:57 Cootie bug gets redesigned and appears as a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade
09:15 Herb Schaper dies at 66
09:22 Other bug-themed games by Schaper Toys
09:32 Hasbro's new Cootie Game

Additional photo credits:
Photos of Herb Schaper, W.H. Schaper Manufacturing Company building courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society,
Photo of Robbinsdale courtesy of Robbinsdale Historical Society
All Newspaper articles and ads courtesy of Newspapers.com
All Military Order of the Cootie courtesy of the MOC and Prelinger Archives
Child opening a Cootie Game courtesy of Prelinger Archives
Child holding Cootie Bug courtesy of Mike McInnis on Flickr

Product photos courtesy of The Playmakers

Other photography courtesy of istock.com, envato elements.

Industrial films of World War I, Plastic Injection Molding Machine, Polio awareness film, cleanliness film courtesy of Prelinger Archives.

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