Remember this happy little fellow? I played with one very similar to it as a tot in the ’70s. There’s a thin plastic pull-string attached to the front (and not visible in my photo). The wheels wobble and squawk when they turn and the eyes move up and down. And every turn of the dial produces a ring-ring, a feature I imagine has annoyed generations of parents. Only now do I realize it’s strange that a phone from an educational toy manufacturer should make an incoming call sound every time a digit is dialed.
Stranger still that Fisher-Price has produced the Chatter Telephone for at least the past 45 years even though phones with dials fell from regular use decades ago. The newest model has been cutesified, is too plastic and curvy, and the colors are all wrong. See here:
During the middle of last month, I developed an uncontrollable urge to have my own Chatter Telephone as I remembered it, so I bought a worn 1961 model on eBay for $20 from a guy in New Jersey named Rick. (It’s the one in the first photo above.) It has a solid wood base with a pasted-on cartoon face, a candy-red plastic handset I remember attempting to chew on and a string cord connecting the handset to the base. It arrived today and stealthily, I showed it to a select few old-timers around the office who I knew would remember it.
My classic toy reminiscences began when Jimi mentioned that The Man insisted on queuing-up at the holidays-obnoxious Toys “R” Us on Times Square just to buy the Hasbro pop-up game Perfection, which he remembered fondly from his childhood. With that one, too, I see they’ve bastardized the colors; if memory serves, they were yellow and orange.
Surely I’m not alone in thinking the toy designs of my own youth were the best ever.