Koala Swapcard

An Iconic Swapcard

Koala swapcard

Trading pictorial swapcards was a very popular activity among primary school children in Australia the 1960s, particularly for girls. In fact it was a pastime almost exclusively enjoyed by girls. Although boys may have trading football cards, the pretty picture cards were girls territory.

Single cards with plain backs could be purchased for 2 or 3 cents at the Newsagency but often the cards in circulation would have players marks on the underside, having at some point been commandeered from a deck.

Every recess, the swapcard girls would form a concentrated huddle in the playground and flip through their card stack - some girls had piles three or four inches thick, which they sometimes kept in purpose designed boxes or more rarely, in albums.

Deciding whether or not to swap was a serious business and of course, some cards were more desirable than others. Horses were very high on the list followed by cats, puppies and other cute furry animals. There were literally hundreds of designs in circulation - animals, people, places, toys, novelty pics etc.

The mother and baby koala card featured here, from a mid-century deck, was one of the desirables and widely traded on the swap card circuit in the 60s. It's significant in that it was one of the few designs that was uniquely Australian and likely to stir a nostalgic ripple in the memory of  anyone who was into swapcards in the 60s.  The koala card is still floating around on ebay and various places - selling for around $3.

Mickey Mouse Club Watch

Jimmy Dodd, cheerful host of the original Mickey Mouse Club

Hey There!
Many a nostalgic baby boomer will fondly remember Walt Disney's  Mickey Mouse Club, the long running US children's TV show famous not least for its serials and Mouseketeers - and a a host of teenage stars, some of whom went on to bigger, though not necessarily better things.


The show initially ran from 1955 to '59 but has been reinvented a few times since its inception. In the 50s, the Mickey Mouse Club was hosted by Jimmy Dodd, who wrote the defining musical number of the show, The Mickey Mouse Club March.

Nostalgia inducing Mickey Mouse Club watch case

The  collectible 1955-style Seiko Mickey Mouse Club watch includes a 'certificate of authenticity' and features original Mickey Mouse Club lettering, a red and yellow face, leather strap with red stitching and comes in a retro, tin mouse-ears case. Both tin and watch travel to you safely tucked inside a classic 1950s design, retail box. All in all, not bad value for $18.95

The Lunch Box

Lunch boxes galore. Image from wiki commons

Wags 'n Whiskers lunch box.1978. Wiki Commons

The humble lunch box, which really only emerged as a popular item in the 20th century, provides us with a pictorial history of pop culture. Lunch boxes were among the first functional items to be employed as 'marketing merchandise'. Each decade reflected its own particular lunchbox art and if something appeared on a lunch box -be it a character, toy, pop star or TV show, then it must have been reasonably significant within its own cultural context.

Although lunch boxes themselves had been around for a while, pictures on lunch boxes became particularly popular in the 1950s when lithographed images on metal (which had been used since the late1800s for the production of  tin toys) combined with the emerging  'youth market' of the 1950s and 60s and the aggressive marketing campaigns that accompanied it.

1935 Mickey Mouse lunch box. Smithsonian,

One of the very earliest licensed character pictorial metal lunch boxes was made in 1935 and depicted Mickey Mouse and friends on an oval tin with a pull out inside tray and a thin wire handle - designed by Geuder, Paeschke & Frey. As a collectible, the tin is now worth thousands. Since then of course, countless Disney characters have made their way onto children's lunchboxes.

From the 50s onwards, lunch boxes designed for school children were produced en masse, with anything from Nesquick and Hopalong Cassidy to Barbie or the Beatles imprinted on the top and they served the dual purpose of functionality and marketing. In more recent times, rust-free molded plastic and vinyl replaced metal as the lunch box of choice for manufacturers, though in 2002 consumer confidence  was shaken somewhat by revelations that some vinyl lunchboxes contained hazardous amounts of lead, compelling the industry to test lead levels before sale.

Classic early 20th century lunch box and thermos

21st century lunchboxes....

G.I. Joe

Action Classic
Hasbro's popular 12 inch G.I. Joe was introduced in 1964 and was the molded plastic front man for the toy company's Action series, G.I. being a generic term for an American serviceman. The series incorporated the four sections of the US military -Action Pilot, Action Soldier, Action Sailor and Action Marine and upon its release, the movable man was a huge success.

Given the relatively macho climate of the early 60s, Hasbro were careful never to call G.I. Joe a 'doll', since boys playing with dolls was considered not very masculine. Instead Joe was referred to as an 'action figure' - a fine distinction but evidently a significant one, as the term has become the default name for dolls for boys.

A G.I. Joe for every branch of the armed forces.

It's certainly true that G.I. Joe was all man and probably would have kicked sand in  Ken's (Barbie's metro boyfriend) face at the beach. Joe had a firm, square jaw, a steely gaze and just to seal his rugged credentials, a scar on one cheek. As the 70's approached however, the effects of Vietnam war and the protesting flower-power generation began to have a negative effect on G.I. Joe's hardcore image. Hasbro changed tack, giving him flocked hair (sissy!) and reinventing him via the less warlike concept of "The Adventures of G.I Joe".

The early G.I.Joes were individualists, however, from the 70s other "Adventure" team players came on the scene - Mike Power, Atomic Man and super-hero Bullet man. In addition there was a Kung Fu Grip action figure introduced, which had soft malleable hands that could grip with greater dexterity. When G.I. Joe was given his moving eye mechanism in 1976, Mike, Bullet Man and Eagle-Eye Joe became a team, fighting the forces of evil in the form of The Intruders--Strongmen From Another World. The 'eagle-eyes' however, were to be Joe's last evolutionary development, as the original 12 " G.I. Joe toy was retired with his military pension in 1976 .

G.I. Joe Official Site

Action Man 

In England Hasbro had sold the G.I. Joe licensing rights to Palitoy Ltd., which held them from 1966 to 1984. There he was copied and marketed with a similar military theme, under the name Action Man but over the years the company expanded the line to include other action men, such as footballers and cricketers.

The English version also got the gripping rubber hands, eagle eyes and even a special version, "Talking Military Commander", where a string was pulled and commands were barked out. These dolls too,  were eventually discontinued, in 1984...but relaunched as a smaller scale version in the early 1990s.

Old soldiers never die, they just quietly fade away...


Action Man HQ

Corgi James Bond Aston Martin DB5

Image from Vintage Toys and Games

Corgi's model of the James Bond Aston Martin DB5, complete with an impressive array of gadgets, won Best Boy's Toy of the Year in 1965, the year of its release. ...and was produced to coincide with the release of Goldfinger. This was despite the fact that it was painted gold and not silver as it appeared in the film. The reason for this discrepancy seems to have been that the silver colour made the toy look unfinished.

Almost 50 years after it's inception, the Aston Martin DB5 has become a hot collectible, not least because of the multifarious gadgets that were incorporated into the tiny toy car. Gadgets include a cool ejector seat that shoots the passenger up through the sunroof, mencing machine guns that emerge through the front indicators and a rear shield that rises up from the boot lid to protect the occupants against a potential rain of bullets. There was also a special agent Bond figure and an an envelope containing 'secret instructions', a lapel badge and a spare ejector seat, in case mum vacuumed the first one up.

Originally the car sold for a few shillings but one in mint condition with the original box and all the gadgets can go for hundreds of dollars. Still...a real, life-size DB5 used in Goldfinger and Thunderball and bought for $12,000 in 1969, sold for US$4,103,000 in 2010.

So many gadgets in such a little car.

Corgi Toys Batmobile, 1966

Vintage Batmobiles

Corgi Toys Batmobile, 1966
I have it on good authority that the Corgi 1966 batmobile is worth investigating. This British Batmobile is a pretty schmick item and highly collectable, especially if it's a first issue, which if in good nick can sell in the high hundreds and a thousand or more if it comes with the box. Collectors are often aging Babyboomers reaching out poignantly for their childhood toys and look upon the Batmobile as an iconic memory from their youth.

Scanlen's Metro Gum

Image from popculturalist.net

A 1963 Scanlen's metro gum wrapper sold at auction in Australia recently for a sweet $1600 - that's the wrapper, not one of the collectible cards that came inside. When you think of all the thousands of bubble gum wrappers that got tossed aside..well, hindsight is a wonderful thing eh?

The $1600 bubble-gum wrapper

Scanlens was a well-known chewing/bubble gum company, based in Sydney.

Since the 1930's they had been producing collectible trading cards for the Melbourne VLF (Victorian Football League) featuring, among other things,  football players.The series went out of production in 1991.

There's big money in the cards, needless to say. In 2007, thieves broke into a Melbourne house and stole a collection of football cards valued at $100,000. According to police it was planned robbery - they knew what they were doing.