Remember all those Mattel toy recalls last year? Apparently it didn’t cripple the company as much as some experts predicted. The Motley Fool posted an interesting article yesterday on the tenuous recovery of the company. Mattel’s fourth-quarter earnings are up 15% over last year, and the stock price – still drastically below early 2007 levels – is starting to go up (have a look for yourself at yahoo finance…or is that ‘Microsoft presents: Yahoo Finance’?).

Motley Fool attributes some of the company’s success to consumers having “the attention span of the kids for whom they’re buying toys.” While that might be partly true, the company also did pro-actively work to fix the situation and ensure that the same problems don’t come up in the future. Whatever the reasons for its success, Mattel can be happy it didn’t go the way of Topps Meat Co., which suffered a recall around the same time and immediately went out of business.

Motley Fool also notes that Hasbro, obviously a big rival to Mattel, is expected to release very “upbeat” reports on its own fourth-quarter results, which will likely overshadow Mattel’s meager but important progress. Hasbro, which recently bought the Cranium board game, is predicted to announce “a 30% increase in profits on a 9% increase in sales to $1.2 billion.”