Polio Comes Home - Pleasure and Paralysis in Candy Land - Samira Kawash

Oct 15, 2026

“Polio Comes Home: Pleasure and Paralysis in Candy Land” examines how the children’s board game Candy Land, developed during the mid-twentieth-century polio era, converts fears and medical trauma into an image of childhood play. Tracing Candy Land’s production history and marketing narratives, it argues that the game’s imagery and mechanics function therapeutically by separating children from bodily vulnerability and channeling desires into “proper paths.”

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages35

Reading Time1 h 28 min

AccessFree to download

Candy Land’s origin and marketing narrative

Polio ward invention and public success

Therapeutic play and the shaping of childhood

Polio Comes Home Pleasure and Paralysis in Candy Land • Samira Kawash The Candy Land board game has been in production since 1949 and remains oneof the best-known and biggest-selling children’s board games ofall time. Beginning with the fiftieth-anniversary edition in 1998, Hasbro Inc. has promoted the story of how a retired schoolteacher named Eleanor Abbott came to invent Candy Land while recuperating in a polio ward in San Diego. Although Candy Land appears all sweet pleasure and harmless fun, the coincidence of the invention and manufacture of Candy Land with the polio scares ofthe midtwentieth century suggests an important connection between the discourse of the “endangered child” and the image and ideal of childhood and play given material form in the Candy Land game. This article considers the form of game play and the imagery of Candy Land to show how the fears, images, and experiences surrounding the midcentury polio outbreaks came to shape a new idea of children’s play. Play in Candy Land is a therapeutic intervention that separates children from their bodies both to protect them from their bodies’ vulnerabilities and to form their bodies and desires into the proper paths. Candy Land has enjoyed popularity as a children’s boardgame since 1949 when it was first manufactured by Milton Bradley. With the fiftieth-anniversary edition in 1998, Hasbro Inc. began exploiting the historical significance of Candy Land in its marketing materials. Inserts Hasbro included with special fiftieth-and sixtieth-anniversary editions drew attention to the story of how Eleanor Abbott, a retired schoolteacher, invented Candy Land.1 The story lends a certain poignancy to the game: Abbott had contracted paralytic poliomyelitis (polio) and developed the game in 1948 while recuperating in a San Diego polio ward. The game was such a success with the children in the ward that Abbott submitted her idea to the Milton Bradley company, where it slowly grew to become one of the company’s most successful products. For the first thirty years of the game, the Candy Land package included the slogan,“A sweet little game for sweet little folks.” The candy is sweet and © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois the children are sweet, but they are both also insubstantial and insignificant, as suggested by including “little.” Yet Candy Land itself, as a brand and a cultural reference, is anything but little. In the years since its release, the board game has sold more than forty million copies.2 Through six decades, it has remained in production, first by Milton Bradley, and then as a unit of Hasbro Inc. Current surveys reveal that 94 percent of mothers are aware of Candy Land, and over 60 percent of households with a five-year-old own a copy of the game.3 In 2005 Candy Land was inducted into the National Toy Hall ofFame at the Strong in recognition of its continuing importance as an American icon.4 As the phenomenal success of the game indicates, it looms large among the experiences of children and families in the late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century American culture. Board games ofall kinds flourished in midcentury America. Family time and family entertainment marked the postwar baby boom and its attendant emphasis on suburban domesticity. Television had not eclipsed other more active forms of home entertainment, and many beloved and still-popular board games were introduced around the time of Candy Land, including such classic games as Scrabble (1948) and Clue (1949). Many earlier popular board games were also in wide circulation, including many titles familiar today such as Sorry! First marketed as “A sweet little game for sweet little folks,” Candy Land has remained popular since its introduction in 1949. The little game became big business for Milton Bradley and Hasbro Inc., its current manufacturer. This image depicts the box lid of the game dating from the 1960s. From the collections ofthe National Muse

FAQs

How does the text connect Candy Land to polio fears in the mid-twentieth century?

It links the timing of Candy Land’s invention and manufacture to contemporary polio scares, arguing for an important connection between anxieties about endangered children and the game’s constructed ideals of childhood and play.

What role does the article assign to play in Candy Land?

Play in Candy Land is described as a therapeutic intervention that separates children from their bodies’ vulnerabilities and forms children’s bodies and desires into appropriate paths.

Why does the article discuss Candy Land’s popularity and marketing across decades?

It uses sales, public awareness, and anniversary marketing to show how Candy Land became an enduring American icon, shaping how children and families experienced childhood culture from the late twentieth century onward.

Oct 15, 2026

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