Sunday, December 13, 2009

Toys & Games by Variety Product Sales

I had an epic day last Wednesday, what I thought would be a boring trip to a storage unit turned out to be an amazing discovery! When I found the records and remnants of my father's 1970s toy distribution business including these funky signs he used to use. I have been looking for one of these for years.

My dad's company provided toys and novelties to smaller chain stores (especially Mac's Milk locations) across Ontario and provided them with mostly rack toys and closeouts. While I haven't unearthed any physical toys (yet), I sure have some groovy artifacts in the many invoices and pay ables he had, VPS dealt with all the big names and carried all the Brands, Mego, AHI, Larami, Barton, Aurora, Parker Brothers, it's pretty extensive, here are a couple of examples:


This cool invoice from Grand Toys (distributor for Azrak Hamway and later Mego) shows an order of 576 Batman parachute figure figures, I'm salivating, I don't own one now! Looking at how much AHI Superhero stuff VPS carried, it's not surprising I'm totally obsessed with it now.

This invoice from Aurora shows a big order for the classic comic scenes kits, these are really happy memories for me. I remember putting every single one of these together as a kid and playing with them as if they were action figures.

I've got tons of this stuff and I've never been happier to go through a pile of boring old company records before!


5 comments:

Ally said...

That's so awesome. I love it!

rob! said...

That sounds fantastic.

chunky B said...

That is really cool. All of it!

Unknown said...

Man, how cool is that?!? I love seeing old nomenclature like this!!

John III said...

Not only the toys, but I bet it brings back some fond memories of your father when you were a kid. That's really awesome Brian!

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