Hoping to Find the Hot Holiday Toy

The search is on for holiday sleepers.

Not just the kind you try to tuck into bed on Christmas Eve with visions of dancing sugarplums and all that, either.

We’re talking toys, the kind that prove unexpectedly popular. They are playthings that don’t necessarily come from major manufacturers or have multimillion-dollar TV campaigns and movie tie-ins.

Pokemon, for instance, is no sleeper. It’s been in full-hype mode all year. Ditto for “Star Wars”-related toys, which some retailers report aren’t selling all that great anyway.

If you want to see a real sleeper, get a load of MusicBlocks. By mid-November, toy stores were already reporting brisk sales of the $70 toy that allows 2-year-olds to play brief passages from Mozart.

By touching different sides of five cubes, a toddler can vary the instruments playing the tune--like a conductor assigning parts to his orchestra.

“The sound quality is so good, I don’t even mind when the kids play with it in the store,” says Sharon Tufaro, co-owner of Shananigans in Baltimore.

At the toys etc . . . stores in Potomac, Md., and Bethesda, Md., owner Brian Mack says parents are going so wild over MusicBlocks he suspects he won’t be able to keep them in stock. Same thing for LeapPad, an electronic book that allows a young reader to press a wand to a word he can’t read, and the book sounds it out.

Zany Brainy, the educational toy retailer, seconds Mack’s prediction for the $60 LeapPad.

“You open one up in a store, and anyone within earshot has been sold,” says Lisa Orman, spokeswoman for the 103-store chain.

Orman also nominates two other computerized toys as guaranteed hits: Ellie’s Enchanted Garden and Redbeard’s Pirate Quest. Both are plastic play sets that activate a game on your home computer.

Move the Ellie character piece around her garden, and the same thing happens on your monitor. Fire Redbeard’s cannon from your plastic pirate ship, and you can hit targets on the computer. Both sell for $60.

“We’re going to sell out of whatever we get with those,” Orman says. “Everyone who sees them goes totally bananas.”

Spotting a sleeper is a vital skill in the toy industry. Most retailers have to decide what to order as early as February during the annual Toy Fair in New York. Fail to spot a trend, and a store may be left in the cold when December rolls around and manufacturers’ inventories are depleted.

Figuring out the best new toy is a useful skill for parents, too.

“Parents get sucked into buying a so-called ‘hot’ toy, and that’s a media-crazed phenomenon,” says Christopher Byrne, a New York-based writer who covers the toy industry. “What you want is a toy that’s hot for your kids.”

Byrne is high on a number of electronic items. Among them is a wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin doll that you can plug into a computer and dial up new rants and tirades for him to spout into a microphone. He sells for $50.

Another he loves is the Radica Rider, a virtual snowboard that sells for $54. Stand on it, and your body movements are translated onto an electronic display on the board.

“It’s not enough for a toy to light up and beep anymore,” says Byrne, who writes for Toy Wishes magazine. “They have to have a human element.”

And few toys are as human as Amazing Ally, the $60 doll with a PC-like 32 megabytes of memory. Her internal clock reminds children of coming holidays. The doll’s built-in sensors allow Ally to know when she’s being fed or getting dressed.

“She’s as human as a doll gets,” Byrne says.

Unfortunately for parents, a lot of the hot electronic toys are expensive. From MusicBlocks to LeapPad, the toys retailers are most excited about often seem to fall in the $50 to $70 range.

There are more affordable items on the sleeper lists, however. FAO Schwarz predicts big things for the Barbie Beaded Handbags at $25 each. While Barbie might not seem to be a sleeper, the Mattel doll has performed so badly since last Christmas that a big Barbie year would be something of a surprise.

The owners of Shananigans are having trouble keeping the Coin Banc Safe, a $25 children’s bank with its own burglar alarm, in stock because demand has been so high.

If these toys still sound a bit expensive, don’t despair. Stevanne “Dr. Toy” Auerbach, a toy industry consultant and author, says even the best toys are no match for the ultimate gift--the time parents devote to playing with their children.

“There are some really interesting products that are really innovative this year,” says Auerbach, author of “Toys for a Lifetime, Enhancing Childhood Through Play.” “But ultimately, it’s more important that you just have fun together.”