Products Original character sets focused on household themes such as Miss Weather, a girl whose wardrobe changed with the weather, and Miss Cookie's Kitchen, a woman with a variety of kitchen tools and utensils. Later sets relied on the use of licensed cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Gumby. Colorforms products have expanded beyond the simple "paper doll" concept to more than 75 Colorforms toy products currently in distribution, with more added every year. Licensed characters The first Colorforms product to utilize a licensed character property featured Popeye, the King Features Syndicate cartoon character, released as a boxed set in 1957. Since then, licensed products have remained critically important to the Colorforms marketing strategy, with hundreds of brands connected to Colorforms. Later Colorforms licensed various properties, producing sets supporting varied cartoons, TV series, movie releases, and popular musical artists, like The Beatles, Peanuts, Gumby*, Tarzan, The Three Stooges, Doctor Do little, Star Trek, Batman and Superman (along with a whole pantheon of comic-book superheroes), and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Michael Jackson, The Smurfs, and even Steve Urkel. In a licensing twist, Colorforms developed their own character property, Sugar & Spice to compete with Strawberry Shortcake (1979) when master license holder, Kenner Products would not allow wide usage of character rights throughout the toy industry. Colorforms turned around and sold their character concept to other companies that got shut out of the 'Shortcake' craze. Another property that Colorforms was never able to translate into their own form was the lucrative Star Wars franchise, again because Kenner held the toy products master license very tightly. Other products 1968 saw an interesting diversion from the typical two-dimensional toy lines that Colorforms specialized in, when they released the Outer Space Men (a.k.a. Colorform Aliens) bendy action figures. This group of aliens, hailing from other planets in our Solar System, were designed to tie into the popularity of Mattel's Major Matt Mason astronaut line (1966); Colorforms nicely complemented the larger manufacturer's line due to Mattel's dearth of alien adversaries. Colorforms also offered a respectable "knockoff" of the Silly Putty concept—the pliable rubbery clay-like substance that picked up newspaper-ink images when pressed upon it, with Moon Putty and Monster Print Putty – the former packaged in a hard plastic moon container and the latter packed in a little plastic human skull for heightened "monster" effect. The Colorforms company was the major licensee of the Plasticine