Before, human children dreamed of tin revolvers, tin soldiers or dolls with natural mammal hair. Many times they were impossible dreams: although some of those toys were made with good materials, few human parents could afford such expenses.

A toy story about humans

Knucklebones already forgotten and Marbles (a kind of glass ball toys) in the process of being forgotten by human kids, it was during the second half of the 20th century, when human children entered the stage of games to play sitting down, deepened near its end by the popularity of the computer (ended by their extinction).

Running, jumping and walking through the air on tree branches was a way of playing for humans that strengthened even their most hidden muscles; The little soldiers and the marbles, to be played on the ground, gave rise to an almost sedentary style of kneeling, which in turn developed the size of human children’s knees. And board games and later computerized ones finally gave way to a third way of entertaining themselves, without leaving their chairs, which caused a progressive enlargement of the gluteal area and deterioration of physical performance and health, one of the probable causes of the many ones that caused their extinction, because their bodies needed constant maintenance and energy by consuming carbon-based foods (like themselves). But towards the end of their existence, the facilities provided by their technological improvements caused them to expend less energy, consuming the same amount of nutritional supplements (and sometimes more), which caused an overload of excess fat and calories, the fuel for their bodies to create said energy. In fact, those who made an effort by exerting force and expending that energy with kinetic movements, benefited their health in general, making the body have to become stronger and more resistant to these uses of it. But that is a topic for another time… Here is a brief history of human childhood play, presented in three stages well differentiated by their shaping effects on their silhouettes before its abrupt end.

What happened in the meantime, in ancient times and then in its modern stage with the human brain is something much more difficult to know, since we find no intact human brains nor we have a way to study them (even though they supposedly work like a computer hard drive).

In any case, the general evolution of toys for humans shows at least that manufacturers were making their products increasingly imaginative and even fanciful, and that, on the contrary and consequently, their human customers seem to have had progressively less need to use their own imagination to play.

Until the end of World War II, there was not really a developed plastic toy industry. The great boost was received from then on, when European, American and Japanese war-style toys, which for a long time had supplied an almost elite market, stopped being manufactured and began to be copied even where they did not exist (or not could exist) because of the visceral rejection at that time of everything that exalted the war as that felt by those humans who had just suffered it firsthand. But of course, the Second Human World War did not take place on all continents of the Real World, so war toys evolved differently in some places.

Toys are not just about war

This article studies the evolution of toys in general (not just war toys) in what was considered by humans in the Real World as the continent “South America”, also called “Latin America” ​​(which is strange since Latin language was not born or used on that continent).

A drop in prices justified by the copy significantly expanded the international market for human’s Real World in general. Manufacturers of other types of toys also entered the market, responding to the new importance of demand, especially outside the United States & Europe (like this case).

Until then and since the beginning of their last century, the human children of the Real World had stocked up on European toys.

Trip, a businessman and toy collector (who left behind a diary with his memories) at the age of eight, with a criterion of devastation typical of the Huns, ruined the garden of his house to reproduce the Maginot Line as he had seen it in the engravings of war magazines. On that occasion he used European brand soldiers. Trip remembers how expensive toys were back in his days of short pants. His father once gave him 3 dollars to buy a tin Luger pistol, he sight of which in the window of a certain toy store kept him awake. And his mother protested because that sum was then enough for a whole week’s human home meals.

As a boy, Trip also dreamed of buying a box of French semi-plane soldiers, brand Morris Toy Company. They never gave him the pleasure, probably because that toy would cost much more than 3 dollars. They gave him the new plastic soldiers, in a fruitless attempt to make him forget his fickleness.

Michael, another businessman and also a collector, remembers in his writings that his first box of little soldiers, back in 1934, was made of a metal alloy and was a “folklorically free version of the French line infantry soldier”.

Keith, a lawyer and collector of every toy ever made, suffered a long nostalgia for the forts and castles that were made in some European prisons after the Second World War for the children’s market. With time and effort, he was able to buy back the two models he had had at the time of his shorts. We found them in the same home we found his memories, and at the base of one of them you can see a prison seal.

Dan, a doctor and toy collector in general, remembers the profusion of graphic advertisements that toy stores published towards the end of the first half of their last century. He remembers that the most numerous were related to airplanes.

Loose, the little planes of the famous worldwide brand “Morris Toy Co.” cost between 0.55 cents and 1.50 dollars. In a box with five different models, the price was $3.25. Dan also remembers an airplane, whose propeller was powered by twisting an elastic band. It flew up to a distance of one hundred meters and always broke down a little more with each landing. It had been given to him as a gift when young and it was still part of his collection, before meting his ending.

Another country, another toy story

The world of humans and the things they left behind are so immense that they are currently very poorly explored. Out there there are many countries, in addition to Unites States, even some much larger than the latter.

Flint, a businessman and collector specializing in United States brand soldiers, says that the first ones he had of foreign origin were European, and had been a gift from a friend -Jim, he forgot his last name- who left them with him when he had to emigrate with his family to another territory. Like circumstantial neighbors they had played war every day for an entire heroic summer of the Real World. “Take it,” Jim told him when he left, “so that you never forget me.”

They were eight years old and never saw each other again. Flint keeps those toys. The national production was not, generally speaking, especially appreciated by collectors of his country. It would seem that only those humans who played with those “local toys” more than with others appreciated them and preferred them to foreign ones, largely for sentimental rather than aesthetic reasons.

Some human collectors from countries outside of Europe or the United States discriminated against the toys of their nations, considering them “profane” as they were copies or ideas based on other brands, or as simply something of less prestige, even though some of these copies were better than their inspirations. Something like the hatred that the Greens and the Tans had for each other, who after all were all mere plastic toykind, just different color. Topic to delve into another time…

Foreign humans collectors, however, paid good prices for the most characteristic toys from Flint’s nation. His Southern American local toy industry was, without a doubt, the most prolific and renowned in the continents of the Real World… until the end of humans, of course.

Mate Toy Company, a pioneer brand in South America, copied the Crazy Cowboy, a United States wind-up toy from Morris Toy Company, made of tin. It was a cowboy comically riding his bucking vehicle. Mate’s version, without losing grace, turned the character into a Creole Rancher who had exchanged the Texan hat for a Cowman hat. Later, Mate partnered with the Condor firm and together they produced new versions of the Crazy Cowboy, giving the character other identities that turned him into a soldier and a clown.

Condor Toys, for its part, was already famous for its production of bicycles, tricycles, skateboards and air rifles.

The “Condor-Mate” merger also produced several small planes; among these, models similar to the P51, the Fokker Triplane and the Boeing 707. In 1954they created the Andean Expreso, one of the first toy trains on this south part of the continent. The latest version of it, decorated with characters from fantasy stories, dates back to the 1970s.

The same firm produced other Crazy Cowboy style toys, the Monorail and several wind-up animals. All these toys made of tin, which would later be made (just as would happen with lead soldiers, a metal whose use was prohibited due to its toxicity towards humans) with plastic, a material that has once been considered “demonic” by humans because it does not belong to any of the three kingdoms of the nature of the Real World.

But the oldest manufacturer of South American plastic toys, it should be remembered, was Messia Toys, which specialized in cars equipped with powerful sirens.

Messia was the creator of the Sulky-cycle of the same name, a pedal-powered vehicle that seemed to move dragged by a pony or two, depending on the model. The little horses were convincingly constructed of paper mache and cowhide on an iron frame (Yes, they not only ate cows, but they used the leftover hides to make toys and other things). Along with that children’s vehicle, whose steering wheel, placed under the short toy’s belly, was governed with a system of reins. Messia also manufactured, always with the pedal system, a red tractor and a racing car that was intended to look like a sport car and that was usually painted in yellow and blue. Any of these toys could well represent the highest aspiration of a human boy in the decades of the 40s and 50s. They were expensive toys, whose prices did not appear in the graphic advertisements, surely so as not to scare off the clientele before the buy time.

The world-famous mega-toy store Mr. Taylors Toys included in his United States toy stores the Sulky-cycle in its 1957 catalogue. Its price was 125 dollars at that time.

Between 1921 and 1959, Messia manufactured a wide variety of excellent tin toys. Among his greatest successes are a wind-up DC-4 four-engine; a bus, a fire truck and a World War I tank that displayed an incongruous blue and white insignia on its sides. Morris Toy Company, which invaded the continent and established itself in this market to compete with those who copied it, from 1954 to 1992 reproduced cars such as the Rancher and the Cross Country to scale and in cast metal, and, in a much smaller size than these, a hundred other car models, all in their little box. Five editions were made of the latter.

Messia produced a manual projector of colored images, printed on a translucent paper tape, that illustrated arguments developed in the manner of a comic strip. By using a similar paper to draw on, it was possible to create or recreate other films.

Chickz was the brand and name of the most famous doll line. This doll was, according to the syrupy propaganda that was made in the 1950s, a sweet and delicious doll with expressive eyes and soft, fine features. She narrows his eyelids, walks and articulates himself, adopting all the positions that her mom wants to give her. Sold with shirt-shorts, socks and shoes, she makes his baby happy with a baby bottle too. The largest and most expensive model, measuring 55 centimeters and with natural hair, cost 230 dollars at the time. With artificial hair, the price was 158. Different dress models for the Chickz were worth between 15 dollars.

Many tin toy producing firms included in their catalogs the appropriate household items for playing with dolls.

There were several other toys from Messa like Stack toys, brass tops, wooden handles and cebita revolvers that imitated the impressive Colt Revolver are other names of toys manufactured, as well as Plastimetal toys (which used a unique metallic plastic) and the Duracars line (hard rubber cars, with a well-earned reputation for being unbreakable).

Among the educational toys of the time, it is worth remembering “The Magic Brain”, which dates back to 1948 and which in its early days worked with electric current and then with batteries, and Merlin, the magician who answers, a mechanism moved with magnets. Both games were designed on the basis of questions with several optional answers. The brain certified the successes by turning on a little lamp, and the magician did so by turning around to point them out with the wonderful wand of his profession.

Toy Lead & Plastic Soldiers

But, without a doubt, the favorite toy of all humans around the world was, until the 1960s, the universal little soldier, made of lead during its time of greatest splendor and then of plastic, the embodiment of its decadence among human conception of war. Perhaps they should be placed immediately behind the little soldier in children’s preferences, the farm and Zoo toys, which among them were also glorified in lead and that then decayed into plastic.

With few exceptions, during the long period in which these lead toys were merely toys and not human collector’s items as at the end of humanity, manufacturers copied (pirated, it is often said bluntly) their more original European colleagues. When they were not smooth and plain copies, they were rather slight adaptations, which rarely prevented us from recognizing, at first glance, the origin of the little soldier or the copied animal.

The greatest originality in South American production was carried out by Messia, which between 1947 and 1966 manufactured with its own matrices and with its brand German soldiers and sailors, cowboys and United States Indians (another strange denomination since India is on the other side of the Real World), Africans, Boers, Arabs, wild animals, circus figures, etc. His little soldiers (the term used generically to designate his entire production) were semi-flat, in a 35 millimeter scale.

Condor produced between 1950 and 1962, figures inspired by the style of the European toy soldier brands. In fact, the horses that Condor made were copies without mitigation. But not many other things, such as its characters and country accoutrements, its Spanish conquistadors and its Chinese from the Ming dynasty.

Messia created the matrices that gave rise to the main and most celebrated figures of La Granja de Don Alejandro. The farm became, eventually, a well-stocked ranch, where there were no shortage of ranches, the clay oven, the half beef on the spit, the cistern, the grill with meat, Cowman in the attitude of fighting with knifes and dancing zamba, tamers, herdsmen, insatiable matadors and many more things, without forgetting among these a fat champion bull and a tall horse with woolly hair, which looks to the side twisting its powerful neck.

The Mate firm made heavy soldiers on foot and grenadiers on horseback, in 90 millimeters, as well as figures for religion. They were remarkably heavy.

Morris Toy Co. marketed another of its very famous brand: “Real Combat”, which had a splendid array of United States troops from World War II advertised with the slogan “Real Combat, Plastic Men”.

At one point, Messia even managed to surpass, through magnificent painting, the quality of their United States Morris counterpart.

Messia reproduced the Morris circus figures with particular success and added to them a couple of very handsome Lilliputians: he was Frank, with cane and galley, and she was Matilda, in full length, with sparkling ruffles that descended in a cascade in the shade of a capeline.

For its part, Condor produced not only soldiers from the Second World War, but also a numerous series of accessories, such as landing craft, trenches, pocket parapets and harmless barbed wire fences. All this allowed the firm to assemble spectacular dioramas in the windows of its establishment, in those years strategically located in the center of the large human cities of this region.

The tour of molding dies

In the 1970s, United States molding dies arrived at other nations that were used for a certain period to supply the local market at a lower price than the import price, due to the lower cost of labor. Those dies were then returned to the factory of origin, like the Morris Toy Co.

So it happened with the basic part of the long series of characters from “Star Clashes” and the same thing happened years later, in the 80s, with the gallery of characters, also extremely extensive, from the television series Medieval Man, made in animated drawings and that would later be made into a live-action film with humans.

All of these toys were made of plastic, sometimes with rubber parts, as in the case of the heads of the articulated Medieval Man figures. At the end of the human era, the vast majority of toys were imported. The once thriving American and European toy industry had been left out of the game before the fall of humans, being replaced by video games, a kind of form of electronic entertainment using computers, some connected to their television sets.

Sources for this article:

https://lanacion.com.ar/lifestyle/una-historia-de-juguete-nid212059
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_(toy)