Poynter Products

Poynter Products produced novelty outdoor toys and games. They are best known for popularizing Boomerangs and Frisbee alternatives in the American market, as well as producing promotional and novelty toy sets sold through dime stores.

Poynter Products of Cincinnati was a novelty and promotional-toy company of a kind that was common in mid-century America and is now almost entirely undocumented. It produced outdoor novelties — boomerangs, ring-toss and target games, flying toys — and licensed novelty items, much of it sold through drugstores, five-and-dimes and mail order rather than through the toy trade proper.

Companies like this operated at the margins of the industry, buying tooling, licensing a character or a personality, running a product for a season and moving on. The output was cheap, was not expected to last, and left very little behind in the way of records or catalogues.

What can be said honestly about Poynter is that it existed, that it worked in outdoor and novelty toys in the postwar decades, and that surviving items turn up occasionally with the company's name on the packaging. This entry says that rather than inventing a founder and a corporate narrative to fill the space.