Little Tikes Turtle Sandbox
The big green plastic turtle in the backyard whose shell lifted off to reveal the sandbox, and went back on to keep the rain and the neighborhood cats out. Little Tikes introduced it in 1979, and by the 90s there was one behind seemingly every house with a toddler.
Little Tikes was founded in Aurora, Ohio, in 1967 by Tom Murdough and Jack Hill, and grew into the company that made the big, rounded, primary-colored plastic toys of every 80s and 90s childhood, from the party kitchen to the Cozy Coupe. The Turtle Sandbox arrived in 1979, the same year as the Coupe, and Little Tikes says it set out to reinvent the traditional wooden sandbox. The pitch wrote itself: instead of a frame that rotted, splintered and filled with leaves, here was a single molded green turtle with a shell that lifted off and doubled as the lid. Rubbermaid bought the company in 1984, Murdough left at the end of 1989 and founded the rival Step2 in 1991, and the turtle kept selling through all of it.
The design solved every problem a parent had with sand. The shell kept out rain, leaves and cats, the plastic hosed clean, and the whole thing could be dragged across the lawn by one adult. Filled with a couple of bags of play sand and a set of plastic shovels and molds, it was the center of the yard for a few summers, then a wading pool, then a planter, then a hand-me-down. In the 90s it was simply the sandbox, the way the Cozy Coupe was simply the car: a Little Tikes green so specific that people recognize it in a photo before they see the turtle.
It never went away. MGA Entertainment bought Little Tikes in 2006, and the turtle is still molded in the United States: the current version measures about 38 by 34 inches, holds more than a hundred pounds of sand, is rated for ages one to six, and has a shell that tethers to the base and snaps shut. The 40th anniversary passed in 2019, and the ones bought in the 90s are mostly still out there, faded to mint, sitting in the corner of somebody's yard.
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