But, despite all this marketing, the life of the Billy Possum turned out to be demoralizingly brief. The toy was a flop, peaking and petering out within months of its introduction that January and almost entirely forgotten by the end of the year. That is, Billy Possum never even made it to Christmastime, a special sort of failure for a toy. In retrospect, the failure of the Billy Possum can probably be explained two ways. The first is straightforward: opossums are ugly. But the Billy Possum’s backstory was all wrong, too, particularly compared with the teddy bear’s.
