He was a Holocaust survivor who built a major American toy company, and later persuaded the company to start its line of Transformers action figures.
Susie Orenstein said the cause was Covid-19.
Mr. Orenstein was 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217
The Johnny Seven One Man Army toy gun, the Betty the Beautiful Bride and Dawn dolls, the Zoomer Boomer trucks, and the Ding-A-Ling robots were all made by The Topper Corporation. At one point, De Luxe Reading was said to be the fourth-largest toy company in the United States.
Mr. Orenstein wanted to market his doll with a television commercial that included three little girls. He said you can bend her legs, bend her arms, and bathe her. There is a chair, a dish, and a cup. You press her tummy, her arms go up.
Al Unser won the Indianapolis 500 in a race car sponsored by Mr. Orenstein. The victory helped ignite sales of Johnny Lighting miniature cars. He gave Mr. Unser a $30,000 bonus after he won.
Mr. Orenstein stepped down as president and chief executive because of debt. The company filed for Chapter 11 protection. He said he had lost all his money.
He reinvented himself as a toy inventor and broker. He saw a Japanese-made toy that could change into an airplane at the Toy Fair in Manhattan in the early 1980s.
Mrs. Orenstein said that her future husband said, "This is the best thing I've seen in at least 10 years." When he got excited, he had the sparkle.
The introduction of Transformers, a toy robot that could turn into vehicles or beasts, was the result of a deal Mr. Orenstein brokered with the Japanese company, Takara. They would become hugely popular, spawning an animated television series and a series of movies.
He told Newsweek in 2016 that ideas don't come in little pieces. It is in; it is out. He said it was either there or not. I was an inventor. You needed a big company to do what I thought should be done: make real transformations from complex things to other complex things.
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Mr. Orenstein brokered a deal between the Japanese company that made an early version of the Transformers and the company that made the final version.
Mr. Orenstein was the catalyst that made this happen, according to Alan Hassenfeld. He said, "To be able to take a car and change it into another toy, that was something magical."
Mr. Orenstein sold toy manufacturers on his own ideas, including Dolly Surprise, a doll with a ponytail that grew three inches when her right arm was raised.
Mr. Orenstein was born in Poland. His parents were a grain merchant and homemaker.
Henry, his father and brothers fled to Poland after the Nazi invasion, leaving his mother and sister behind. They spent more than two years there.
The mortal danger for Jews in the town had gone up. The Gestapo executed his parents and other Jews in 1942. Henry and his brothers were taken to the Budzyn concentration camp in Poland in July of 1943.
Majdanek and Plasznow are in Poland, and Ravensbrck and Sachsenhausen are in Germany. He and his brother Sam were liberated about 10 days into a death march from Sachsenhausen.
Mr. Orenstein wrote in his book, "I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds", that his heart started to pound with joy. It was true. We were free. We shouted and one hugged another.
His sister was killed at a concentration camp, but his brother survived. Felek was also dead.
Mr. Orenstein moved to New York after two years in Germany. He opened a grocery store in New Jersey, became a salesman for a food company, and started a novelty company with his uncle.
He told United Press International that he had proved that this was still the land of opportunity.
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Mr. Orenstein was in 2004. A competitive poker player came up with the idea of placing cameras under a glass table to show the down cards in stud poker games.
In the late 1980s, he found another opportunity. Mrs. Orenstein said that he liked to play backgammon. He should take up poker.
He played in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The game was seven-card stud, in which four cards are face up and three are face down, and only the holder of the hand can see them. He realized that the excitement he felt while playing was not being conveyed while watching a poker tournament.
A professional poker player who produces televised poker programming said in an interview that he was told this wasn't the game they played. If everyone could see the hole cards, they would see how great it is.
Mr. Orenstein spent six months developing a table with miniature cameras mounted beneath each player's station, which would show the hole cards and transmit the images on television. He patented his idea of a hole-card camera in 1995 and got his first customer a few years later when the Discovery Channel licensed it for its "World Poker Tour."
Mr. Eskandani said the table was called the Holy Grail.
Mr. Orenstein is survived by his wife, two children and a daughter. His marriage to Bigajer ended in divorce.
Jon Miller, an NBC Sports executive, was persuaded by Mr. Orenstein to use a hole-card camera table on the network's programs.
The president of programming for the NBC Sports Group said in an interview that Henry changed the game for a whole generation of poker fans who would not be able to see it as it is without his creativity and ingenuity.
Other networks avoided violating Mr. Orenstein's patent by moving the tiny cameras from below the table to inside the players' table-edge, or rails, which made the hole cards visible to the cameras when the players looked at them.
The Poker Hall of Fame in Las Vegas in 2008 had Mr. Orenstein in it.
