Hasbro has rejected the holy grail of lightsaber toys, and it's not saying why.
He Star Wars The toymaker spent two years secretly working on a lightsaber for kids that can extend automatically. and retracts its blade, the first of its kind. Hasbro acquired all rights to the idea from a previously unknown Israeli inventor and patented it worldwide.
But instead of finishing the product, Hasbro backed out without explanation and let the inventor regain the rights. Today, with the help of a different manufacturer, you can finally buy it. At Target and Walmart — like the Goliath power saber.
The $60 toy has no official branding Star Wars Authentic Jedi or Sith sounds or hilts. The blade is not as long as the lightsabers in the movie and does not have the build quality or sophistication of more expensive accessories.
But a simple yet ingenious mechanism means we finally have a toy lightsaber that can actually retract its own blade.. Flip the golden switch and a loud motor sends each of the blade's glowing segments in and out of the handle. If you flick someone with the saber, the blade will harmlessly collapse. You can even safely aim it at your own face—watch the video below.
Three years after Disney dazzled the world with a self-retracting lightsaber you could never touch, one that was used exclusively by a paid actor at its gated $6,000-per-stay hotel, Star Wars Hotel, now you can buy a toy that captures some of the same magic.
And its Israeli inventor claims the Power Saber is just the beginning.
Yair Shilo tells The edge It took him five years to find the right formula for an automatic blade that folded safely, starting with prototypes made of paper and aluminum foil. He says he sold newspapers, mowed lawns and cleaned pools while working on his Star Wars childhood dream, He finally gathered a cousin and an investment group behind a provisional patent in 2019.
At its core, the new Power Saber isn't all that complicated inside. Just like the children's saber I proudly wore to the premiere of Star Wars: Episode I In 1999, the blade consists of telescoping tubes that attach to each other when fully extended. With those kids' sabers, you move your arm to propel the entire set of tubes; with the Power Saber, each segment is pushed up and pulled down by a long screw.
But that's not the clever part. The sheer genius of Shilo's patent Is that each segment of the blade? it's not married to that screw, so you can safely fold them without driving a screw into your hand. As the saber extends, each segment lifts up Above The screw, which is lifted into the air by the segment behind it. Once the tip of the sabre is extended far enough, it lifts the next segment of the blade into the air, and then the next, and the next, until they are all fully extended, held together only by friction.
Additionally, each segment of the blade has flexible tabs where they attach to the smooth screw, allowing them to slide along their rail when pressure is applied. Even if you roughly push the entire blade back into its housing (which I've done many times in testing), it doesn't damage or harm the internal mechanism, Shilo claims.
That's something its inventor says other designs never achieved. “In 99 percent of cases, something needs to push the smaller segment from inside,” he says. “With this mechanism, nothing pushes it.” Hasbro tried for years, he says. Following Founder Robert Fuhrer, and created Spring-loaded self-extending bladesBut there were always potential safety issues with automatically retracting a toy lightsaber's blade. Shilo ran into some of them with an earlier model that relied on traditional gears.
The “biggest toy in history”?
But Shilo didn't just want to build a self-retracting blade; he wanted to build an official Star Wars lightsaber with Hasbro, the company he works with. Disney's exclusive blessing to mass-produce genuine Star Wars toys. “He would ask around the toy industry to see if anyone had ties to Hasbro and knew them well,” recalls Fuhrer, who put him in touch with the company and remains his agent to this day.
In 2020, Shilo sent Hasbro a wooden wine box containing a white plastic prototype with a red motorized blade. He says Hasbro was more than happy: They told him they had finally cracked the code. They told him it would be the “biggest toy ever.”
Two years later, everything fell apart.
“They tell us, hey goodbye, we're not going to do it, we have a problem inside, we have a lot of things going on, you have to go,” says Shilo.
No one is willing to tell it The edge What really happened. Shilo, Fuhrer, and even Goliath, the Power Saber's manufacturer, suggest that they want to maintain a positive relationship with Hasbro rather than talk out of turn.
Hasbro isn't saying either. “We greatly value our partnerships with inventors who bring us ideas for toys and games. For a variety of reasons, we were unable to move forward with this particular concept,” reads a statement from Hasbro's chief advertising officer, Whitney Spencer, to The edge.
Fuhrer strongly suggested I speak to Angus Walker, Hasbro's head of inventor relations, but the company declined to make him available for an interview.
I wonder: Could there be some fundamental problem with the design? (I noticed that sometimes the tip of the saber falls off after a few hits.) But Fuhrer says no, Hasbro didn't mention any specific concerns. “There was no compelling reason,” he says. “There was nothing like 'there's a safety issue' or a cost issue or anything like that.”
He also downplays the possibility of Hasbro filing a lawsuit over the patent. “I don't think there's any feeling of animosity,” says Fuhrer.
There is speculation that Hasbro was simply under a lot of pressure at the time. Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner had just died; it was the pandemic early on; some projects fell by the wayside. Cost might have been a factor, too: He says Target and Walmart were pressuring toy companies to keep the price under $50. And, he says, an early prototype failed one of Hasbro’s first safety tests.
But he points to the successful shipment of Goliath's $60 saber at Target and Walmart as proof that neither cost nor safety were sticking points, and says Hasbro will regret not doing so because the Power Saber will cannibalize its toy sales.
Photograph by Sean Hollister/The Verge
Us were Fuhrer confirms that Hasbro was contractually obligated to return the rights if it did not move forward, so they found a new partner in Goliath, a company that had no intention of selling the company. Previously known primarily for its board gamesAnd thus the “Power Saber” was born.
As a child, I would have been fascinated by this toy, but I would not have been completely convinced by its imitation aspect, and I suppose Shilo might feel the same. Earlier in our conversation, he had talked about the Star Wars lightsaber almost religiously, about how it's “the only weapon that brings light to the world,” how he always wanted to be a Jedi, and how building a lightsaber was a childhood dream. How significant is that official lightsaber? Star Wars Is it his turn now? I ask.
He says that, like the Force, he believes his lightsaber will eventually find its way to Star WarsHe says it's meant to be that way.
