The Empire was born from a boy, a girl, and a dog.

This was post-Second World War, the start of the baby boom generation, and there was a market for all three, though the truth is that it was the dog who made things happen, it was Pooch who was the real hit, and Gordo and Betsy were really only along for the ride, at least at the start. But Willis Wilson, twenty-six years old and recently returned from the Western front, had just enough genius in him to market the dog with the brother-sister pair, and since you couldn’t get the one without the others, he succeeded in marketing all three at once. And market them he did, slipping between newly made Madison Avenue satin sheets with an eagerness that, to abuse the metaphor, would have made a whore blush.

The second part of Wilson’s genius was an understanding of the incipient collector’s nature of a child’s mind. Kids collect things; they always have. From interesting pebbles to pressed flowers to bits of string to baseball cards to comics to model horses to books about dinosaurs or trains or heavy earth-moving construction machines, collecting is, perhaps, one of the means by which children come to terms with their world, one of the means by which they learn.

And, certainly, one of the means by which they play.

With Gordo, Betsy, and Pooch, Wilson made damn certain that there was always something else to collect. The trio were recast over and over again, thrown into new environments with new accessories, new costumes, and new narratives to support them.