The commercial spun off some incredible promotions. You could go into Jack In The Box and buy a 45 of my song, “Take Like A Little Easier”. You could buy my puzzle, you could buy my poster. Then a phone call comes in and it’s Matel Toys. They want to produce my doll. I was very thankful to my wonderful agent and manager and all the people I had at that time. The doll was a project called ‘Operation Bootstrap’. Somebody asked, why don’t they have any Black dolls? The guy kind of put his foot in his mouth and said there was no market for Black dolls. Oh boy, did that set the world on fire. Everybody went crazy. So he goes ok, I didn’t mean it like that. So everybody started to ride down on this multi-million dollar toy company. And he said are there any Black toy manufacturers? We want to see what you got. Well, there was a wonderful group in LA called Shandana Toys. And so they had submitted their doll and they landed the contract for ‘Operation Bootstrap’ and they made my doll, they made the JJ Jimmy Walker doll, they did the Flip Wilson doll, and these dolls had a voice box. You would pull a string and it would talk. That was just one of the many great things that happened.
