Bobby Russell doesn’t remember every single thing he grabbed during his manic dash through a KB Toys in San Jose, California, back in 1992, but he remembers the receipt. “{It was} 10 or 20 feet long,” he tells Mental Floss. “Like getting a receipt from CVS or something.”
Russell, just 10 years old at the time, was one of a handful of kids in the 1980s and 1990s who achieved the ultimate in adolescent wish fulfillment. He was a winner of the Nickelodeon Super Toy Run, a promotional sweepstakes that saw the kid-centric network deluged with hundreds of thousands of entries from viewers hoping to score the grand prize: a five-minute all-you-can-grab shopping spree through a toy store. Pushing a shopping cart, winners could cram in Nintendo games, bicycles, action figures, dolls, and swing sets. With the right strategy, some—like Russell—could walk away with $10,000 in inventory and a receipt longer than a tape measure.
But not everyone who won considered it a dream come true. After the cameras were shut off and the 18-wheeler delivering the toys drove away, Russell found himself confronting what he calls “the dark side” of the Toy Run.
“People,” he says, “were very upset.”
Toying With Ideas
Under the guidance of branding executives Fred Seibert and Alan Goodman, Nickelodeon spent the early 1980s making a transformation from an obscure cable channel to destination viewing for kids. Irreverent programming like You Can’t Do That on Television, Double Dare, and Mr. Wizard’s World helped Nick embrace a brand identity. It was a place for kids to feel seen and heard without being patronized.
Carving out that identity through advertising took some careful planning. “We had zero money,” Scott Webb, a producer for on-air promotion at Nickelodeon from 1983 to 2000, tells Mental Floss. “We had jam sessions in our writer’s room about what would be kids’ fantasies that we could fulfill.”
At the time, Webb explains, television and radio had the same problem: Programming was often similar, so stations had to stand out in other ways. (While Nick had original hits, they also relied on dusty reruns of shows like Lassie.) Running contests was one trick to boost audience engagement. It worked on radio and was working for MTV, which was then a sibling network to Nick under the MTV Networks banner. The channel ran promotions where viewers could win prizes like a chance to party with Van Halen and all the liver damage that implied.
Debauchery was not an option for Nick. Instead, Webb and his team came up with Nick or Treat, a Halloween-themed contest in which a kid could win their weight in M&Ms. “The other one that came out of that was the Super Toy Run,” Webb says. “To be able to get an amount of time to run through Toys ‘R Us and grab all the toys you could. That was a classic supermarket spree, but we just put it through the framework of how we wanted to connect with kids.”
The first Super Toy Run (then called the Nick Toy Run) was promoted in December 1984, with Nickelodeon inviting viewers to submit their name for a chance to win a spree through the Children’s Palace toy store in Denver, Colorado. The winner would be flown out with two guardians and had five minutes to scoop up anything in sight.
Why Denver? “Distribution was sort of the key issue in the day,” Webb explains. “I think that the toy store was selected where we wanted to achieve cable distribution in that area.” (Many promotional contests were aided and abetted by local cable operators, who stood to gain by viewers tuning into Nickelodeon.)
The Children’s Palace and its castle-like exterior was a familiar toy franchise in the 1980s. Still, the store wasn’t quite on the same level as Toys ‘R Us, the largest toy chain in the United States. By 1985, the second year of the Toy Run, the company had signed on as an official sponsor. Kids could mail in forms or fill them out and drop them into a point-of-display box in stores. Winners were flown to a TRU in Los Angeles, which would be shut down for several hours so the sweepstakes winner could take their victory lap.
Unlike other promotions, which might be slightly adversarial in the hopes winners don’t bleed the promotional entity dry, Nickelodeon went out of its way to stack the deck in favor of kids. “Obviously, we wanted the kids to win and to get what they want,” Webb says. “So there was a dry run.”
A Toy Run winner usually had a chance to walk the toy store the evening before, figuring out where everything was and what they wanted most. If something was on a tall shelf, a producer might have it moved lower to the ground. If the item was large, like a bike, the kid could simply grab one of the blue tickets used by TRU for large or expensive merchandise. “But there was a lot of cart filling, as well,” Webb adds, referring to the camera-friendly practice of shoveling toys into the basket.
As Nick’s audience grew, so did the interest in the Toy Run. By the early 1990s, the network was receiving between 500,000 and 750,000 entries for the annual contest. One of those entrants was Bobby Russell from West Lake, Ohio, a self-professed toy nut who recalls dropping an entry form off at his local KB Toys (sometimes stylized as K-B or Kay Bee), which had temporarily seized promotional honors for the sweepstakes away from Toys ‘R Us.
“My parents are like, sure, you can fill out one of the little postcard things, and just drop it in the cardboard bin at KB Toys,” Russell says. “And that’s all I did. That’s it. That’s the only thing I did to try and even enter into the competition. I filled out one card one time.”
Russell had just filled out his own golden ticket.
The Toy Run
The call came to Russell’s parents first, who arranged for Nickelodeon to call back when Russell was home. “It was kind of hard to believe that it even happened,” Russell says. “I guess it’s kind of like winning the lottery for a kid, is what it really was.”
A packet in the mail confirmed the appointment. But it also meant a long wait. Toy Run entries were usually collected in the fall, with the spree taking place a few months later. For Russell, it meant waiting until February 1992.
Nick sent Russell and his family to a KB Toys location in San Jose, California. Like most KB sites, it was smaller than a typical Toys ‘R Us, where past Toy Run winners had been placed. And instead of five minutes, Russell would get just three. “I remember that the only downside to it was that it wasn’t the big {store},” Russell says. “So my initial thoughts were, oh, I’m not going to be able to get as much or have as much time to try and get everything that I wanted.”
There was another wrinkle. Unlike Toys ‘R Us, which allowed kids to grab slips of paper for video games, KB kept their gaming inventory on the sales floor, which, in theory, would have meant not being able to grab as much before the cart got full. But the store—and Nickelodeon—allowed some leeway.
“{Nickelodeon} kind of made a mistake,” Russell says. “I don’t want to call it a mistake, or if it was not a wise piece of instruction that they told me, because they told me the items don’t have to necessarily get into the cart. They just have to touch the cart and it’s yours. It didn’t have to stay in the cart, either.”
“So then my dad was like, ‘You heard what they said, right? That means all you got to do is take your hands and put it to the very back of the peg that they would store games or anything on. Pull them all off with the cart near you and just have them be knocking the cart so they don’t have to even get in there.’ ”
It was good advice. On the day of the spree, Russell was given the go-ahead. He darted through aisles, adhering to the strategy. Entire pegs of games were swatted to the ground, collapsing in a cacophony of plastic and cardboard. Russell acted like a human tornado, following the rules and having stuff bounce off his cart.
“I basically cleared out the entire game section of the store in about two minutes,” he says. “The whole thing was gone. And then, I took out the action figure aisles, and this was when the first wave of X-Men figures were out. I was literally just reaching to the back of the peg line and just taking the entire row of action figures.”
He went for bikes and stuffed animals and, to maintain sibling civility, grabbed some other items for his sister. He also swept up armfuls of cheaper pocket toys in the hopes of placating classmates and friends back home. When it was over, Russell had totaled $9522.22 in merchandise. The haul—some 200 items—arrived sometime later, stuffed into a freight trailer. When the contents were unloaded, the items filled his garage.
But there were a few harsh intrusions of reality on the Toy Run. For one, like all prizes, the Internal Revenue Service considers it income. Russell’s parents had to pay taxes on his winnings.
The other was that not everyone was pleased with Russell’s good fortune. Back at school, his classmates were sour over the idea their peer had hit the toy lottery. “All the kids at school were very jealous of the opportunity, which is very justified, I guess,” he says. “But obviously they’re all like, get me this, get me that … but when that was all over, that wasn’t enough for people. And obviously young individuals can be very toxic and mean, and they were toxic and mean about it.”
According to Russell, it wasn’t just the kids. “I remember my fourth-grade teacher took it out on me, and because it was her first year teaching, she decided to make my fourth grade year {be} the year from hell, because I was taking a week and a half or something off to go out to California and do this Toy Run. So there was no empathy or excitement from the teacher about it, and she was trying to essentially punish me when I returned from it.”
For Russell, winning the Toy Run became part of his identity at school for years to come. “I was like, under the radar forever in school, and then once the Toy Run happened, it was like, now everyone knew exactly who I was. I was the Toy Run kid.”
Played Out
At age 7, Brittney Balcer was among the youngest Toy Run winners, getting a five-minute window at a Toys ‘R Us in her hometown of Pembroke Pines, Florida, in June 1996.
“They picked us up, some close friends of mine, in a limo and brought us to our local Toys ‘R Us,” Balcer tells Mental Floss. “It was super cool to be at the store that I was familiar with and, you know, {where I had} put the entry in that. So this limo brought us over, and I had a whole bunch of friends from church and the neighborhood, and everybody kind of cheering.”
Like Russell and the others, Balcer had an opportunity to scout the store. “They walked us through and kind of said, ‘OK, what are the things that you wanted to really see and go through?’ And they put arrows on the ground kind of as like a track so that we kind of had a route that we were going to go. It wasn’t just like, oh, we’re going up and down and around and stopping. They needed it to be kind of more fluid because there was a camera crew that was literally in front of me the entire time, like walking backward with the camera equipment.”
Hitting Toys ‘R Us in the wallet didn’t occur to her so much as sharing the opportunity with her three siblings. “And they wanted to, you know, benefit, which I was happy to do because, as a kid, I loved sharing. I wanted to give a lot of toys away to the neighbors. So, it’s kind of fun that I was able to do that.”
Her haul—which she recalls amounted to $7000 or $8000, plus a Toys ‘R Us gift card for $1000—was later delivered to her home. “I remember there being like a big truck that came and like, unloaded everything and we had everything out in the garage. It was just like tons of stuff and we kind of looked it over. Just like amazed that it was real. It all felt very, very surreal, especially as a kid. You’re just, like, this is not real life. It’s crazy.”
Nor was peer envy a problem. “I was home-schooled,” she says.
Like other winners, Balcer signed a release to become a literal poster child for the Toy Run. Nickelodeon used footage from the event to hype the next one, assuring kids that someone just like them had won.
“We always did big follow-ups showing a real kid really winning because we really wanted to have sort of that honest, kind of clubhouse relationship with the audience,” Webb says. “So we would make a promo all about real kids.”
Balcer was one of the last sprinters in the golden age of the Toy Run. It would be held just a few more times through 2000 before going on an extended hiatus. It returned in 2010 before disappearing again a few years later. The last iteration in 2018 invited three grand prize winners to visit Walmart, though the monetary value of the toys grabbed couldn’t exceed $3000. It was a long way from the feeding frenzy of Toy Runs past. (Russell’s win would be worth about $21,000 today, adjusting for inflation.)
“I think that after a while, it doesn’t feel fresh anymore,” Webb says of the post-2000 decline of contests, which also coincided with Nick’s growing online presence. “It doesn’t have to be an annual event, and around that time was when we were shifting into much a bigger investment in original programming … the business goals that we created that were the reason that those contests were created in the first place, were sort of played out in a lot of ways.”
Today, Toy Run winners are a bit like a secret society. Most of the events were held in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era, making winners seem almost like urban legends.
“I don’t tell people very often, they don’t know,” Russell says. “And then eventually, when I do tell them, they’re like, blown away. ‘How come you never told me about any of this?’ And I was just like, ‘I don’t know. I just didn’t.’ ”
Today, Russell is a theater professor and oversees a high school drama program. It’s hard to say how much influence the Toy Run had on his career choice, but he thinks the connection is there: “For me, it really doubled down on … not wanting to abandon that, that sense of wondering and fun and being able to create.”
He still has a lot of the toys he grabbed in 1992. (Others were sold when, years later, he needed money to buy his first truck.) He may one day sell them, provided he can find them a good home and not simply add to the inventory of a reseller.
“I guess it’s like Andy with his toys from Toy Story. Even though they’re inanimate and they don’t have any sort of feeling, I just don’t want them to go somewhere to be wasted. I would rather they go to someone who wants it for nostalgia purposes or reminds them of something from their childhood, and that’s why they want to have it.”
He still buys toys. “It obviously has had an impact on me because I still buy collectible toys today … I don’t know if Toys ‘R Us or the Toy Run psychologically did a number on me where I still like the toys or something, but I do. I still like it.”
Read More About Nickelodeon: