Scrabble Celebrates 60th Anniversary
The popular board game Scrabble, which is owned by Hasbro in the US and Canada and by toy maker Mattel elsewhere, is celebrating its 60th anniversary with a special website, a special limited edition and a stop-motion video.
Scrabble celebrates 60th anniversary with stop-motion
In 1938 an out-of-work architect named Alfred Mosher Butts created, in the midst of the Great Depression, the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko. Discouraged by poor sales, Butts relinquished the game in 1947 to James Brunot, who made minor changes and renamed it Scrabble, registering its trademark in 1948.
In celebration of the classic word game’s 60th anniversary award-winning director and animator Adam Pesapane, aka PES, created a stop-motion animation video to promote the Scrabble Diamond Edition.
PES’s previous short film “Western Spaghetti” was recently named the number two viral video of 2008 by Time Magazine, in its “Top Ten of Everything 2008.” PES also created numerous other stop-motion internet commercials, for companies like Sprint, Orange Telecom, Sneaux, Coinstar and Bacardi.
Western Spaghetti – named #2 viral video of 2008 by Time Magazine
Scrabulous
Earlier this year, an unofficial online version of the game on Facebook called Scrabulous was taken down by Hasbro and Mattel for trademark and copyright infringement.
With over 500,000 daily players Scrabulous was one of the most popular applications on social networking site Facebook. Almost 50,000 Facebook users joined the group “Save Scrabulous” to protest against the Scrabulous ban.
Hasbro and Mattel recently have released their own official Facebook versions of the Scrabble game, created by EA and RealNetworks Inc.
Popular worldwide
Today the Scrabble game is sold in 121 countries, has been translated into 29 different languages, can be bought in various forms from Junior to Deluxe and is also known as Literati, Alfapet, Funworder, Skip-A-Cross, Scramble, Spelofun, Palabras Cruzadas and Word for Word. Sets are found in one out of every three American homes.
In 1984, Scrabble was turned into a daytime game show on NBC and ran from July 1984 to March 1990, with a second run from January to June 1993.
Source: Wikipedia, Hasbro, Brand Republic, USA Today
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