There are no babes left in Toyland.

The toy industry these days has little room for the weak or unsophisticated. From manufacturing to selling, the big guys rule the playground, and the smaller players can stay only if they are clever and agile enough to keep out of the way.

In the last decade, the toy business in the United States has been a slow-motion Transformer as dozens of companies have merged or gone belly-up, giving the industry a whole new physique.

Leading toy makers have gobbled up smaller ones. On the sales end, discount store chains and Toys R Us--master of the toy-selling universe--have shoved many other retailers aside. Big toy makers are delivering more of their products directly to the big toy sellers, cutting out large wholesalers and distributors along the way.

There is no imminent danger of a monopoly, however, either at the manufacturing or the retailing level. No single player is putting hotels on the board yet. (None controls more than 22% of its market segment.) Still, as the industry clumps into teams according to size, toy shoppers are finding their options more limited.

Once, consumers could find a variety of toys year-round in nearly every kind of store--from corner dime stores to mall-inhabiting chains to downtown department stores. Now, however, the close relationships between manufacturers and retailers determine which toys are sold where and when.

To buy the most popular toys--the ones kids begin begging for right after watching the Saturday morning cartoons--shoppers generally have to go to one of the Big Five--Toys R Us, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target and Kay-Bee. Last year, those retailers sold nearly half of all toys bought in the United States--a market that industry experts put at between $11 and $17 billion a year, excluding video games.

Only large stores selling high volumes of merchandise can afford to match the discounters' low prices, shutting retailing's tykes out of the market for the best-selling products.

Large wholesalers used to fill in the gap for smaller stores by buying in volume from the toy makers and distributing the products to many independents. Now, wholesalers are small and deal in either low-priced, imported toys or higher-priced toys made by companies too small to do their own distributing.