6 Forgotten Collectibles From the 1950s
Some famous toys from the 1950s, such as the Frisbee and Mr. Potato Head, became so embedded in popular culture that they remain in regular use or at least are recognized by kids even today. But not every popular collectible from that period survived for successive generations to incorporate into their playtimes. Here are six treasured toys from the 1950s that inspire warm feelings from those who remember the fun.
Robert the Robot
Thanks in part to the success of science fiction books such as Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) and films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), hordes of American children grew up playing with imported tin toy robots in the early 1950s. However, the market was jolted in 1954 with the Ideal Toy Company’s Robert the Robot, the first plastic toy robot made in the United States.
Standing 14 inches tall, Robert moved on wheels by way of a cable-connected, hand-cranked remote control, while winding another crank on his back prompted him to blurt out, “I am Robert Robot, mechanical man. Drive me and steer me, wherever you can.” Robert proved popular enough to inspire two songs from the Cricket Records music label and even appeared in the 1956 film There’s Always Tomorrow, although he fell out of favor with the introduction of more advanced toy robots such as Mr. Machine the following decade.
You may also like
More from our network
Whee-Lo
Much like the ageless top, Whee-Lo was a toy that hooked kids not with flashy components but by displaying physics in motion. Introduced by Maggie Magnetic, Inc. in the early 1950s, Whee-Lo consisted of a double-pronged piece of curved wire and a red plastic wheel with a magnetized axle. When placed on the wire track and tilted, the wheel spun back and forth across both sides, reaching impressive speeds with well-timed turns of the wrist.
Whee-Lo remained an engaging boredom-killer for kids even as the 1950s gave way to subsequent decades and oversight of the product passed into the hands of Tarco and then Skilcraft. Today, identical-looking knockoffs can easily be found online.
Baking Powder Submarine
The 1950s were a prime time for digging packaged prizes out of cereal boxes. One such keepsake was the “working” submarine patented by brothers Henry and Benjamin Hirsch in 1955 and snapped up by the Kellogg Company. These tiny plastic submersibles featured an empty chamber that could be filled with baking powder (or another effervescent product, such as Alka-Seltzer) before being closed up; once placed in water, the submarines would sink to the bottom, until the water reacted with the baking powder to create carbon dioxide bubbles that pushed the piece back to the surface.
Despite the cheap nature of the enterprise, these toys were popular enough to spawn other baking powder-powered products including scuba divers and PT boats that propelled across the water instead of rising from its depths.
Wings “Friend or Foe” Trading Cards
1952 was a banner year for baseball card collecting; just ask anyone who was shrewd enough to hold onto a ’52 Topps card of New York Yankees star Mickey Mantle, which can fetch a sale price of more than $12 million. But that year, Topps also introduced its 200-card Wings set, featuring military aircraft from countries that participated in World War II and the then-ongoing Korean War.
Sold in 1-cent or 5-cent packs of chewing gum, the cards displayed a plane or helicopter in a horizontal layout on the front, while the back listed statistics and other information about the featured flying machine, as well as the silhouette of another aircraft in the set that asked viewers to determine if it was “friend or foe.” While the Wings cards never attained the popularity of the baseball sets, they have their fans among collectors today due to the strong artistic quality of the planes and the scenic backgrounds.
Chatty Cathy
The year 1959 brought the arrival of a blond-haired doll named for the daughter of Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler, and needless to say, Barbie went on to become a worldwide hit. But Mattel introduced another seminal product that year with Chatty Cathy, the first commercially successful talking doll.
While talking dolls had been around since Thomas Edison debuted his prototype in 1890, many produced screechy noises that were hardly soothing to young children. Chatty Cathy, on the other hand, was capable of delivering 11 different phrases recorded by celebrated voice actress June Foray, activated by a pull string that connected to a small internal phonograph. Although the doll initially went out of production in 1965, Mattel found enough nostalgic cause to rerelease Chatty Cathy in the 1970s and again in the late 1990s.
Give-A-Show Projector
Also appearing just before the end of the decade, Kenner’s Give-A-Show Projector was the kids’ version of the slide projectors that were popping up in living rooms across the country. Essentially a flashlight with a lens and a slot that permitted the passage of a colorful film strip across the light, the projector beamed images up to 4 feet tall on a wall or any otherwise suitable surface.
Standard sets came with 16 slide strips featuring popular characters from TV shows such as Rocky and Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle, and Captain Kangaroo, a format that enabled users to tell a story with the projections and proved a perfect match for licensing tie-ins. Later additions to the basic system resulted in the Talking Show Projector, which included a record with spoken stories to accompany the images, and the Super Show Projector, which came with blank slides and puppets so future directors could act out their own narratives.
