The photo’s in the link John Kelly posted below show the stickers more clearly. The PCA sticker is for the Playmobile Club of America (not Porsche Club of America 😀) and the one on the passenger side reads Visit Washington DC.
I would have loved to have had this under the Christmas tree when I was 4. But my Parents realized that it wouldn’t last long, resulting in a cascade of tears! Interesting story about the inventer : https://www.hemmings.com/stories/article/playmobile-dashboard
Yikes. I coveted toys like this, but was always told that they were too expensive and “we can’t afford something like that”. True enough if they were the equivalent of $121 in today’s money.
I agree 100% Nate. Kids would get bored with this pretty quickly. It would be the life of the party Christmas Day. And placed in the corner by Boxing Day. lol
I love the details! The left-hand key and the overall vibe say Mercury to me, but it has a GM-style PNDLR shift quadrant. I’ll bet that thing burned through D cell batteries like nobody’s business!
The PNDLR shift quadrant was the first detail I noticed – go figure! 😉
The center of the steering wheel vaguely resembles the wheel covers on dad’s ‘57 Fairlane 500.
I had a similar one or two of these when I was a tot, but probably not the Playmobile brand. I’m thinking it might’ve been made by the Marx toy company.
I must have been around 7 when I got one of these for Christmas (1960), after seeing it at Safeway perched up high on the wall over the produce area. I loved it, and had it for a few years before it was passed down to my brother.
As a kid in the ’70s, I was often impressed at the quality of some ’60s toys. Not always, but the general cost cutting in many ’70s toys seemed apparent. Much like ’70s autos.
I did notice plastics improved, in some ways. My older brother’s ’60s toys plastics, would crack fairly easily, if left in the cold garage in winter. They seemed more brittle.
Somewhere around here there is 8mm footage of me enjoying this at age 3 or so. I wish I knew what happened to it in the intervening years. It was a very well done toy for the time, and actually much better than the cartoonish dashboard toys sold in the 70’s and 80’s.
Although it doesn’t copy any specific car, I feel like it is closer to a 1963 Ford than anything else. The left-side ignition key was definitely a Ford feature in the early 60’s. However, I can’t think of any car where the wipers were activated by moving a switch to the left — that is an oddity.
I wonder what it cost? I can imagine begging for this at the age of seven or eight, and then ignoring it after two days.
It reminds me of a rather complicated spaceship-control-radio-thingy that I was desperate for in the late 1950s. My parents got it for me for Christmas and it stopped working the next day. They took it back and instead got me a small bedside table radio, which ended up providing far more ‘fantasy play time’.
Ever longer wire antennas hanging out the bedroom window were capable of receiving ever more distant AM radio signals at night. I still remember the excitement of picking up stations in West Virginia and Indiana (in New Brunswick, Canada), and adding them to a list I kept in a scribbler. 🙂
Hey, I thought I was the only person mad enough to do long-distance radio station listening! I lived in a third floor flat, and ran wire out the window and down three storeys. I used to regularly listen to Sydney radio (875km), and I once just picked up a southern Queensland station from Melbourne (1,625km), but I think you have me beat. Fun, wasn’t it?
After watching the video, there is an option for a more than six-minute color presentation. Unfortunately, I could not copy a URL for you all. Great toy! VAROOM.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL! Hee is one of my favorite Christmas ads.
I got one of these for Christmas that year. Between the commercial and the one actually sitting on the shelf at the Victory Market, my mom knew my pleading was for real. I actually bought another as an adult on eBay.
One of my favorite car toys was this cardboard 1953 Nash dealership my Dad got while he was working for a Nash dealership at the time. He put it together for me but given the material used and how much play time the toy received from me and my cousins, it did not hold up very well. Cannot image kids today prying their eyes away from a screen to even look at this thing let alone play “car dealer.” From another age, another world:
Yes! My Grandpa was a part-time Nash salesman, and I received two of these kits from him. Those kits I remember very positively, although they didn’t last long at all.
Remember better my Grandparents’ 1949 Nash in which we rode from Iowa to Colorado&return. The return was made at night with Grandpa driving all night, Grandma sitting behind him in the back seat, and five-year-old me sleeping on the passenger seat folded back into its functioning bed form. One could make great time motoring across Nebraska in the dark. This was not quite a decade before I-80 made that drive so much more hospitable. As I remember almost all of that drive was over U.S#6 which I knew by then ran across my home state from Davenport to Council Bluffs and on to Denver.
Had to laugh: Just wikipedia’d to discover the following quote RE U.S#6, the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, “Route 6 runs uncertainly from nowhere to nowhere, scarcely to be followed from one end to the other, except by some devoted eccentric.” And yet it formed a large segment of my home town’s transportation pattern.
I, too, enjoyed listening to distant AM stations with a variety of antennae, including one that I strung from one end of our farmhouse to the other high up, parallel to the ridgepole. After sunset, I’d search for the best or most distant, or most novel radio station I could find. Up here in the rural Northeast, most of our AM stations were sunup to sundown hours only, so after dark primarily the clear-channel stations were on with little local interference. I always sought out WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia and especially for their Friday Night Jamboree. I always tried to get WSM with particular effort to receive the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. On those few occasions that reception was especially good, I listened to both the early and the late show, and sometimes even the post-Opry “Ernest Tubb Record Shop Show.” I used to also get a Chicago station (WBBM?) that had a show whose name included the term “Barndance” as I recall, but as in the case of the others, reception was dependent on many variables, including interference from super high power off-shore pirate stations whose power wasn’t limited to the 50,000 watts our clear channel AM stations were allowed. Alas, that was all more than fifty years ago; now our AM stations in the Northeast have nothing I would bother to turn on my to listen to, but I believe there is a movement to mandate AM radio reception in new vehicles with radios, primarily to expedite emergency notification in very rural areas, so AM may not be headed for extinction after all!
Our local top 40 radio station in the 60’s could only broadcast from sun up until sun down. This time of the year it signed off at 4:45PM. However I could pull in WABC in New York City to listen to top 40, with Bruce Morrow (Cousin Brucie) in the evening., Sometimes I could pull it in until after sun up the next morning.
In the early 70’s during my weekend runs back and forth from home to Ft Bragg, I’d pull in two Chicago stations on the Friday all night run up the east coast and the Sunday all night run back down the east coast. One was WLS. The other I can’t remember now but from 11PM until midnight one of them had Reverend Ike who apparently was a worshiper of money. I remember in the late 70’s or early 80’s seeing him on a huge billboard. I guess he was still at it.
I wonder if any here had home made or purchased cheaply made crystal radio sets when they were young ? .
In the late 1950’s Japan began making and selling a bewildering variety of cheap crystal radios that didn’t use batteries and only used a crystal earphone .
These co$t $5 / $6 in the mid 1960’s, a not insubstantial amount for a child to have .
The better ones had a wire with alligator clip on the far end you’d clip to an antenna, in the sticks I’d use and old metal window screen placed as high up as the wire allowed, in town I discovered the metal finger stop on a rotary dial telephone worked best, failing that there was an old desk top electric fan with a metal twist knob to turn on, they worked well *if* the fan was turned off .
Nate, you brought back memories as I recall receiving one for Christmas that was shaped liked a little rocket. I Googled it and found one just like it:
Holy crap – that is amazing!
It has a California auto sticker on the windshield, so it was probably sold there.
ME WANT!
The photo’s in the link John Kelly posted below show the stickers more clearly. The PCA sticker is for the Playmobile Club of America (not Porsche Club of America 😀) and the one on the passenger side reads Visit Washington DC.
I would have loved to have had this under the Christmas tree when I was 4. But my Parents realized that it wouldn’t last long, resulting in a cascade of tears! Interesting story about the inventer : https://www.hemmings.com/stories/article/playmobile-dashboard
Thanks for this link (and the video). It’s neat to read about this toy’s creator, and his other inventions.
Below is an image of the Playmobile in its original packaging, along with the price. $11.88 in 1961 dollars equates to about $121 today.
Yikes. I coveted toys like this, but was always told that they were too expensive and “we can’t afford something like that”. True enough if they were the equivalent of $121 in today’s money.
Looks like it’d be fun for a day or two .
Only a few of the toys I had as a child kept my interest very long .
I wish Honda would bring back the “Step & Go” ~ it was a smash hit and all the kids wanted one .
-Nate
I agree 100% Nate. Kids would get bored with this pretty quickly. It would be the life of the party Christmas Day. And placed in the corner by Boxing Day. lol
Great toy. I think the speedo should be activated by something other than the steering wheel, but hey! Suddenly it’s 1960 (‘s)!
I love the details! The left-hand key and the overall vibe say Mercury to me, but it has a GM-style PNDLR shift quadrant. I’ll bet that thing burned through D cell batteries like nobody’s business!
The PNDLR shift quadrant was the first detail I noticed – go figure! 😉
The center of the steering wheel vaguely resembles the wheel covers on dad’s ‘57 Fairlane 500.
I had a similar one or two of these when I was a tot, but probably not the Playmobile brand. I’m thinking it might’ve been made by the Marx toy company.
This post heartily approved by Young PRNDL!
“I’ll bet that thing burned through D cell batteries like nobody’s business!”
No joke, toys of that era were hard on the D cells of that era.
And those old D cells were nothing like the Duracells of today.
That’s why we called them Neveready’s.
Exactly. My parents never bought anything battery powered as presents for my sister and I.
I must have been around 7 when I got one of these for Christmas (1960), after seeing it at Safeway perched up high on the wall over the produce area. I loved it, and had it for a few years before it was passed down to my brother.
As a kid in the ’70s, I was often impressed at the quality of some ’60s toys. Not always, but the general cost cutting in many ’70s toys seemed apparent. Much like ’70s autos.
I did notice plastics improved, in some ways. My older brother’s ’60s toys plastics, would crack fairly easily, if left in the cold garage in winter. They seemed more brittle.
Would agree with all.
Somewhere around here there is 8mm footage of me enjoying this at age 3 or so. I wish I knew what happened to it in the intervening years. It was a very well done toy for the time, and actually much better than the cartoonish dashboard toys sold in the 70’s and 80’s.
Although it doesn’t copy any specific car, I feel like it is closer to a 1963 Ford than anything else. The left-side ignition key was definitely a Ford feature in the early 60’s. However, I can’t think of any car where the wipers were activated by moving a switch to the left — that is an oddity.
Christmas 1968 I was the lucky recipient of a Matchbox Motorway, a pin in track road for Matchbox cars.
I was pretty young, I can recall my Dad spending a lot of time with me that Christmas with my / ours / his track.
My dad passed the first day of 2023. For Christmas I’d like to have some time with him and the race track again.
Miss you dad! Merry Christmas!
That’s touching. Sorry for the loss of your beloved dad.
The toys are fun, but it’s the people we miss, isn’t it?
Very much so Jon ;
My father was a tortured man who was never happy, now that I’m older I can understand better and often wish I could talk to him about things .
-Nate
I wonder what it cost? I can imagine begging for this at the age of seven or eight, and then ignoring it after two days.
It reminds me of a rather complicated spaceship-control-radio-thingy that I was desperate for in the late 1950s. My parents got it for me for Christmas and it stopped working the next day. They took it back and instead got me a small bedside table radio, which ended up providing far more ‘fantasy play time’.
Ever longer wire antennas hanging out the bedroom window were capable of receiving ever more distant AM radio signals at night. I still remember the excitement of picking up stations in West Virginia and Indiana (in New Brunswick, Canada), and adding them to a list I kept in a scribbler. 🙂
Hey, I thought I was the only person mad enough to do long-distance radio station listening! I lived in a third floor flat, and ran wire out the window and down three storeys. I used to regularly listen to Sydney radio (875km), and I once just picked up a southern Queensland station from Melbourne (1,625km), but I think you have me beat. Fun, wasn’t it?
Yes Peter ;
Long distance and short wave listening was great fun way back when .
Rigging up a long antenna seemed to be the trick to getting farther away stations .
Sadly these days AM radio has little to listen to .
I just bought a two band short wave radio and hope to do some late night listening again .
-Nate
From Ottawa, I recall briefly picking up an AM station from New Orleans late at night around 1984. Being dead of winter helped. 2,400km away.
Regularly listened to Chicago Blackhawk games on WBBM, later in the ’80s. 1,200kms from Ottawa to Chicago.
After watching the video, there is an option for a more than six-minute color presentation. Unfortunately, I could not copy a URL for you all. Great toy! VAROOM.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL! Hee is one of my favorite Christmas ads.
I got one of these for Christmas that year. Between the commercial and the one actually sitting on the shelf at the Victory Market, my mom knew my pleading was for real. I actually bought another as an adult on eBay.
Yes, these were expensive and I never got one.
One of my favorite car toys was this cardboard 1953 Nash dealership my Dad got while he was working for a Nash dealership at the time. He put it together for me but given the material used and how much play time the toy received from me and my cousins, it did not hold up very well. Cannot image kids today prying their eyes away from a screen to even look at this thing let alone play “car dealer.” From another age, another world:
https://www.undiscoveredclassics.com/vintage-brochures/lets-build-nash-dealership/
Yes! My Grandpa was a part-time Nash salesman, and I received two of these kits from him. Those kits I remember very positively, although they didn’t last long at all.
Remember better my Grandparents’ 1949 Nash in which we rode from Iowa to Colorado&return. The return was made at night with Grandpa driving all night, Grandma sitting behind him in the back seat, and five-year-old me sleeping on the passenger seat folded back into its functioning bed form. One could make great time motoring across Nebraska in the dark. This was not quite a decade before I-80 made that drive so much more hospitable. As I remember almost all of that drive was over U.S#6 which I knew by then ran across my home state from Davenport to Council Bluffs and on to Denver.
Had to laugh: Just wikipedia’d to discover the following quote RE U.S#6, the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, “Route 6 runs uncertainly from nowhere to nowhere, scarcely to be followed from one end to the other, except by some devoted eccentric.” And yet it formed a large segment of my home town’s transportation pattern.
I, too, enjoyed listening to distant AM stations with a variety of antennae, including one that I strung from one end of our farmhouse to the other high up, parallel to the ridgepole. After sunset, I’d search for the best or most distant, or most novel radio station I could find. Up here in the rural Northeast, most of our AM stations were sunup to sundown hours only, so after dark primarily the clear-channel stations were on with little local interference. I always sought out WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia and especially for their Friday Night Jamboree. I always tried to get WSM with particular effort to receive the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. On those few occasions that reception was especially good, I listened to both the early and the late show, and sometimes even the post-Opry “Ernest Tubb Record Shop Show.” I used to also get a Chicago station (WBBM?) that had a show whose name included the term “Barndance” as I recall, but as in the case of the others, reception was dependent on many variables, including interference from super high power off-shore pirate stations whose power wasn’t limited to the 50,000 watts our clear channel AM stations were allowed. Alas, that was all more than fifty years ago; now our AM stations in the Northeast have nothing I would bother to turn on my to listen to, but I believe there is a movement to mandate AM radio reception in new vehicles with radios, primarily to expedite emergency notification in very rural areas, so AM may not be headed for extinction after all!
Our local top 40 radio station in the 60’s could only broadcast from sun up until sun down. This time of the year it signed off at 4:45PM. However I could pull in WABC in New York City to listen to top 40, with Bruce Morrow (Cousin Brucie) in the evening., Sometimes I could pull it in until after sun up the next morning.
In the early 70’s during my weekend runs back and forth from home to Ft Bragg, I’d pull in two Chicago stations on the Friday all night run up the east coast and the Sunday all night run back down the east coast. One was WLS. The other I can’t remember now but from 11PM until midnight one of them had Reverend Ike who apparently was a worshiper of money. I remember in the late 70’s or early 80’s seeing him on a huge billboard. I guess he was still at it.
I wonder if any here had home made or purchased cheaply made crystal radio sets when they were young ? .
In the late 1950’s Japan began making and selling a bewildering variety of cheap crystal radios that didn’t use batteries and only used a crystal earphone .
These co$t $5 / $6 in the mid 1960’s, a not insubstantial amount for a child to have .
The better ones had a wire with alligator clip on the far end you’d clip to an antenna, in the sticks I’d use and old metal window screen placed as high up as the wire allowed, in town I discovered the metal finger stop on a rotary dial telephone worked best, failing that there was an old desk top electric fan with a metal twist knob to turn on, they worked well *if* the fan was turned off .
-Nate
Nate, you brought back memories as I recall receiving one for Christmas that was shaped liked a little rocket. I Googled it and found one just like it:
http://www.esnarf.com/7395k.htm