When you think of vintage toys, you probably imagine stiff action figures with very few points of articulation and some questionable detailing. You wouldn’t really be wrong, as that’s exactly how you can describe Kenner’s highly coveted Star Wars line of toys from the late ’70s and ’80s. One of the best examples of this is the iconic 1985 Power of the Force Han Solo, whose strange facial features resulted in fans calling it ‘Thyroid Solo’. That didn’t change the fact that these toys are collectors items today, with some being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, assuming that all vintage toys were rudimentary is a big mistake. Some of these toys, made all the way back in the 1960s, weren’t just well detailed, but included features that many modern toys don’t.
Keeping action figures aside, ’60s toys loved depicting what the future would look like, giving kids a glimpse of a wondrous world with flying cars and technology beyond our wildest dreams. Heritage Auctions will soon be putting a set of such toys up for auction, and they’re a dream for fans of retro-futuristic settings. First up is Hasbro’s Think-a-Tron, which reads punch-cards to throw up questions and illuminate the correct answer. Laptops were still over 20 years away, but this toy gave kids a preview of what they were in for. Thankfully, it couldn’t handle spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations back then. You can’t have futuristic toys without a gun, which brings us to our next two toys.
These ’60s Toys Look Like They Belong To The Future
With the space race in full swing at the time, and astronauts being likened to movie stars, store shelves were filled with space-related toys, like laser guns and rocket ships. One such toy, the Marx Sound-O-Power Astro-Gun, is also part of this futuristic set. Built to depict a space ray gun, it featured battery powered laser sounds when the trigger is pulled. The bulky red design with the mini dish on the barrel is emblematic of the retro-futuristic sci-fi genre that was prevalent at the time. However, that wasn’t the only genre that was popular at the time, as the Cold War was also on, and spies were a very real threat. Of course, to regular people spies were fascinating, and toy companies made sure to leverage that with toys that resembled spy tools.
Topper’s Secret Sam Attaché Case let kids enact their spy fantasies, giving them a kit that’s straight out of an early James Bond movie. It featured a briefcase which included a spring loaded toy pistol, projectiles, a stock, and several barrel attachments. However, the coolest features of the toy were the removable camera and a mechanism that allowed you to fire the pistol while it was still in the briefcase. Tell me that doesn’t sound like it’s straight out of a Cold War era spy movie. Unfortunately, this set of toys isn’t graded, and the description reveals that they all have a decent amount of wear and tear. There’s also the question of the electronics and spring mechanisms working after all these years. Regardless of that, these vintage toys not only make for great collector’s items, but also give us a peek at what people in the ’60s thought the future would be like. With bids going live in a couple of days, their value might just blast off into space.
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