TOMY: 100 Years of Fun!

2024 is Tomy’s 100^th anniversary year. Founded in 1924 by Eiichiro Tomiyama, the company cut its teeth manufacturing toy airplanes. This iconic toy company is also credited with being one of the first to employ a factory line assembly system and a standalone toy research department.

Tomy produced some of my favorite iconic lines in the 1970s and ‘80s, truly living its promise to create new forms of play that “make the world smile through the concept of asobi (play).”

In honor of Tomy’s milestone year, let’s take a look at four of the company’s innovations in play:

PENCIL SKETCHES

Children became fashion designers thanks to Tomy’s 1978 release of Fashion Plates. Using crayons, colored pencils, and interchangeable plastic plates, children created their own collection of couture by mixing and matching tops, bottoms, and hairstyles plates. They traced the stencils with a special crayon and used colored pencils to add different patterns such as plaids and checks.

Based on Fashion Plates’ popularity, Tomy expanded the “design by plate” concept to encompass superheroes and scary monsters with the release of Mighty Men & Monster Maker; customized vans with Little Van Goes; greeting cards with the Great Greeting Card Maker Set; and even Western scenes via Pony Plates.

POCKETFUL OF FUN

Portability was the name of the game with the release of Pocket toys. Tomy’s lineup of pint-sized offerings included:

• Pocket Cars (1974) —a line of die-cast metal vehicles with moving parts. Kids could choose from American and European model cars, trucks, vans, and a line of construction machinery. 
• Pocket Pets (1977)—assorted miniature animals that children could wind up and let go. Tomy released a menagerie of animals that walked, shuffled, and hopped across flat surfaces.
• Pocket Games (1977)—simple to play and self-contained, these leveraged a wind-up or spring-loaded mechanism and were perfect companions for family road trips.

In 1976, Tomy introduced children to Tuneyville, a magical place complete with a little train that “delivered music to all stations.” The Tuneyville Choo Choo had a battery-powered motor that both propelled the train forward and played plastic record discs placed in the back of the engine. Each tooth-edged plastic disc was encoded with a different song on each side.

With commercials for the Tuneyville Choo Choo in heavy rotation on Saturday mornings, Tomy next released the Tuneyville Player Piano, essentially a miniature organ in flute form. The stationary toy deployed the same three-inch plastic discs as its moveable counterpart and allowed for melody-making through eight working piano keys.

Ten years later, Tomy released the Tuneyville Pipewagon, which is now hard to find on collector markets. The miniature vehicle included clear pipes that housed colored balls that moved up and down as notes were played.

JUST ADD WATER

With the Wonderful Waterfuls toy line in 1976, Tomy placed simple carnival-style games and logic puzzles into water. Using distilled or plain tap water, kids used one or more buttons to create streams of air bubbles that moved the contents in a clear plastic container through the water. With a little luck, patience, and a bit of shaking, the bubbles could be manipulated to complete the challenge at hand.

The popularity of Waterfuls led Tomy to expand the line to include two-player options (often based on a sports theme) and games branded with licensed characters, including Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, Pac-Man, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

WORLDWIDE SUCCESS

While I’ve focused here on Tomy-made toys from my personal favorite eras of play, the company continues to evolve and innovate with the times. Its leadership is focused on “creating new forms of play value without being bound to existing assumptions and values.”

Here’s to the next 100 years!

Todd Coopee is Editor-in-Chief of Toy Tales, an online publication that covers toys and games past and present.