LJN

~ the eulogy ~

Jack Friedman started LJN in 1967 with money from Norman J. Lewis Associates, which is where the three letters came from. For its first fifteen years it was a toy company that bought licenses, and it was good at it. Revenue hit seventy million dollars in 1982 on the back of E.T. merchandise and a Brooke Shields fashion doll that brought in over twelve million by itself.

MCA bought sixty-three percent of the company in March 1985 for 39.8 million dollars, and then watched it fail to turn a net profit for four straight years. What LJN did in that window was move into video games. From 1987 it published on the Nintendo Entertainment System using exactly the method that had worked for plastic figures: acquire a property people already knew, attach a product to it, ship. Jaws, The Karate Kid, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future and a long run of WWF wrestling carts all came out with the rainbow on the box.

Acclaim Entertainment bought LJN from MCA in April 1990 for thirty million dollars. The toy division was closed immediately, forty-five of the seventy staff were let go, and the headquarters moved from Lyndhurst, New Jersey to Acclaim's own building in Oyster Bay. The label kept publishing for four more years and was shut in 1994. Acclaim finished absorbing the name in 1995.

~ the dossier ~

~ the carts nobody chose ~

In Turkey the Nintendo Entertainment System arrived without Nintendo. What people bought were Famicom clones under a dozen local and Taiwanese brand names, and what went into them were multicarts advertising impossible numbers of games, most of which were the same six games with the title screen swapped. A publisher logo in that market was not information. It was a picture that flashed before something loaded, if it survived the bootlegging at all, and nobody was choosing a cartridge by who made it because nobody was choosing a cartridge at all.

That is the part of the LJN story that does not translate. In the United States the rainbow was a purchase decision that a child had already made by pointing at a box in a store, and the anger that built up around the company is the anger of somebody who spent their own birthday money. The games earned it. LJN bought the rights and then contracted the actual development out to whoever was available and cheap, which is how you end up with a Back to the Future game where Marty walks down an endless street throwing bowling balls.

~ the rainbow ~

The logo was four colored bars arching over three letters, and it was printed on the cartridge shell itself rather than only on the packaging. That detail is why it survived. Boxes get thrown out and shells do not, so for a couple of decades the rainbow sat in attics attached to specific memories of disappointment.

It came back in 2006, when James Rolfe started making the Angry Video Game Nerd videos and used LJN as a running character, complete with a description of the rainbow that this site will leave in its original form. A dead licensing label with no surviving defenders turned out to be perfect material. Most people who can identify the logo today were born after the company that owned it was already closed.

~ the name kept getting rented ~

Acclaim pulled the label out of retirement once, in 2000, to publish Spirit of Speed 1937 on the Dreamcast. The game was received about as well as everything else that ever carried the rainbow, and there is a long-running theory that Acclaim used the LJN name deliberately as a signal of what was inside. Acclaim itself went bankrupt in 2004.

Jack Friedman had already left. He founded THQ in 1989 and built it into a real publisher, then walked away in 1995 to start JAKKS Pacific, which is still making toys today. In 2021 Jazwares revived the LJN brand for All Elite Wrestling action figures. Fifty-four years after Friedman registered them, the three letters are back on plastic wrestlers, which is where they started before anybody thought to put them on a cartridge.

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