Toys – The Roohr Way

Small Stuff

Looking back at this list, it’s interesting what stuck with me. They’re all vehicles! I guess I just find vehicles appealing. Some vehicles toys are well documented, so I won’t bore you with a repetition of the hotwheels wiki. What i want to consider today are what you might call modern “Penny Toys” are the kind of thing you’d find in a gumball machine, or on the table at the end of a party, discarded. They’re of a sort of hard to find now: not tied (legally anyway) to a franchise or character. But there’s something alluring about the mystery of trying to track down who made them, so let’s do it.

Bruder Mini: Space

Bruder is a toy company that still exists, making die cast vehicles. They no longer support their line of “mini” plastic vehicles, though they mention it in their history. There was a space line in silver, white, and blue, and more realistic vehicles in bright colors.

In Unit 01 colors no less. I’ve seen a small number of other palettes online.

I don’t know if the zany colored ones came out before or after the more common blue/white/silver ones.

Bruder Mini: Trains

Though long lost, I definitely had an an engine and a couple of passenger cars. Managed to find a lot of them on Ebay. They’re still adorable. They’re a neat combination of bright colors, crisp detail, and functionality. Not perfect fit and finish by any means, but at this price point, who’s complaining?

Accoutrements/Archie McPhee

Not everyone was content to use public domain designs like flying saucers.

The easy part of figuring these out is figuring out where the design comes from-they’re mostly vehicles from thunderbirds (ignore the Star Wars one for now.)

You can see that the mold has been altered-it used to say Hong Kong but that’s been scratched out and China has been added.

The holes made them perfect to mount on Micromachine star trek stands

I initially had a tough time finding any attestation of these neat little plastic ships online. I know that at one point Accouterments sold them in a big tub (probably a gross each) but I can’t find that product photo any longer. I know I discovered this during the google era, because the models on the left are ones I purchased online.

I sent an email to Archie-McPhee, who got back to me with a link to this archived page:

They were called ‘alien and spaceship invasion.’ No luck on the star wars ship. I do wonder if it came from the same factory, but I have very little to go on for it. It uses a different type of plastic, but I swear the overall sensibility is similar enough. It came in a grocery store blister pack with a cooler looking spaceship with the same ‘moulded top screwed into acrylic bottom’ design, and a short knock off lightsaber type thing.

Z-Cardz

These plasticard punchouts came in randomized packs. The ink has held up surprisingly well. Influences are sometimes clear-a couple look like they’re from Cowboy Bebop, and I think I see a Droid Fighter. Classic shmups seem to have influenced these heavily as well.

We had a lot of fun building these back in the day. I managed to get my hands on some un-punched ones, remind me to scan them so you can make your own copies out of plasticard. If that’s important to you for some reason.

This product line eventually evolved into much larger more detailed models, and apparently a tabletop game.

Shackman & Co Five Piece Train Set

It was surprisingly easy to find these considering I had only a single one and no accompanying documentation. I think I just searched for “small plastic train 90s” and the like.

These seemed to have a random assortment of colors. They’re four parts: two sides, top, and chassis. Very neat little pieces. All identical. They shipped in a Christmas ornament which itself looked like a train. Something about the soft shape and tiny size made them super appealing to my kid self. Always wondered if there was a whole line of these, but it’s just the one mold.

Pretty close to N scale though.

I heard you like trains so I put a train in your train

Giant robot submarines, we’ve got those too

One interesting aspect of most knowledge being instantly accessible is the holes in that knowledge-things from the before time that never got ingested into the web and as such still mostly exist in your memory. I find myself trying to fill in those gaps sometimes. I found myself asking “what the heck was this old toy series I remember?” Not everything will get the Toys That Made Us treatment.

pink robotic lobster toy

I picked up a set (not pictured) at what I seem to remember being an aquarium gift shop, but it could really have been any pit stop on the mass pike, back in the 90s or early 00s. The scifi theme and being unencumbered by a fleshed out fictional universe was appealing.

More recently, I decided to figure out what the heck they where. I didn’t have the original handy, but after googling some vague descriptions, an imageboard (of all places!) pointed me in the right direction with a very accurate rendition that sparked my memory.

I’ve now got a decent handle on what the internet seems to know about Silverlit Toys’ Multimac. There isn’t much of it. They can be had on ebay (see the lobster above.) There are good pictures of the drivers here, as well as some information.
some good pictures of the crustacean-shaped submarines as well. There are a couple of forum posts here and here that put it in context (how it related to other lines, where parts where reused, etc.)

But really, these just create more questions than answers. Especially looking at the shark, lobster, and crab shaped submarines I’m reminded of Lego’s Aquazone line – which one came first? Or was there a general atmosphere of “giant animal shaped robots piloted by humans” in the 90s?

I had a small breakthrough when looking at the packaging of the lobster and crab though – I believe that they are a later addition to the line because they have a URL on their packaging! It might be possible to date them by when that became common practice, but now I’m eager to actually dig up the site!

This one is small and hard to read.

And this one has a label over the URL, but a upon close reading they appear to have just owned “www.oceandiscovery.com”

And in 2001, the internet archive captured a copy!

And that’s it, everything the English-Speaking internet knows about this (dare I say mysterious?) line. I suppose that’s what made it appealing at the time: the suggestion of a wider world, a connection to a past (specifically the giant-robot-and-vehicle toy-verse that included more popular lines like Transformers and Zoids) that I didn’t really have knowledge but the matter-of-fact-ness of the packaging suggested it. It was as if to say “yeah, you know, giant robot submarines. We’ve got those too.”

LEGO Shop At Home Scans: 95-99

A while back, I was trying to find a specific Lego catalog that I’d looked at as a kid. However, when I tried to find the specific one I was looking for, I realized that very few of these catalogs from the 90s had been immortalized by the internet. However, many of them where on sale for reasonable prices (and Sabrina wanted a Scanner for old family Photos anyway) so I got to work.

The raw files are here on my archive.org account, if you find my (largely imagemagick-powered) PDFing of the files inadequate. If the PDFs appear small just zoom in, they’re about as high-res as they can be without creating artifacts on the screens I tried. I plan on also scanning the ones that I personally saved when I was a kid, and will post those here too.

And the specific catalog I was looking for? Turns out it was Holiday 1997. Twenty one years ago. The page I was looking for in particular turns out to be this one.