Australian Toys & Ephemera Archive

  • Toltoys 12″ Figures

    Toltoys Week Part Two: 12 Inch Figures One of the shortest lived lines of the original Kenner Star Wars release was the series of 12 inch figures. Great sculpts and tailored cloth outfits weren’t enough to create the sales that Kenner wanted, and so after barely limping across the line into Empire Strikes Back marketing…

  • Toltoys 12 and 20 Back Star Wars

    Star Wars Week on Toltoys.com! One of the “must do’s” when I started this blog was to eventually showcase a pic of every Toltoys logo Star Wars carded figure. So far I have been spectacularly unsuccessful with that, chalking up a grand total of none at all. Well hold on to your potatoes kids, ’cause…

  • Licensed Australian Ice-Creams

    Licensed Australian Ice-Creams It all seemed so natural. You went to see the latest summer blockbuster. You became obsessed overnight. You had to buy the toys, the posters and the swap-cards. You cut out articles about the movie from magazines and newspapers and kept them in a folder. You bought the cereal and tried to…

  • Mego and Toltoys

    Mego and Toltoys The US based Mego Corp had a wonderful knack of making successful action figure lines in the 70’s, either by gambling on the popularity of old properties like the Wizard of Oz, or trusting in semi-current ones like Planet of the Apes or Star Trek. Australia received these wonderful toys thanks once…

  • LEGO Birkenhead Point Keychains

    The Keys to Successful Collecting Promotional items are amongst the most sought after and valuable pieces in any line of toy collectables. From store displays such as Kenner’s Star Wars to salesman samples and awards such as Mattel’s Hot Wheels we all love having items in our collections that are outside the standard production stuff…

  • Kenbrite Pocket People / Playmobil

    Kenbrite Pocket People As a kid who loved Lego in the 70’s I recall being a little sceptical when my brother bought home a Playmobil set one day. The figure (a fireman) was kind of clunky, his articulation was pretty limited and he was an odd scale – somewhere between my little Lego dudes and…

  • Toltoys Mr Potato Head

    Idaho or Tasmania? The Potato. Or, if you spell like Dan Quayle, Potatoe. Either way you’ve got to admit that it is one hell of a popular vegie. In fact you could say that they are the shrimps of the vegetable world. You can boil them, dice them, fry them, dip them, chip them and…

  • Toltoys Power of the Force figures

    The Little Aussie Battlers! It’s a pity when a great toy line goes out with a whimper and not a bang, but more often than not that’s exactly what happens. Kenner’s Star Wars line of 1977-85 was no different. After re-writing toy sale records and re-inventing action figures and film-licensed products the mighty Star Wars…

  • Welcome to Toltoys.com!

    Hi All! Welcome to Toltoys.com – The Australian Toy Connection. The purpose of this blog is to showcase Australian released versions of the popular (and sometimes unpopular!) toys many of us enjoyed whilst growing up in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. So what can you expect to see? Well obviously with a blog called Toltoys.com…