The Original Vintage 1961 Fisher-Price "Chatter" Toy Telephone (also known from Toy Story)

The Original Vintage 1961 Fisher-Price "Chatter" Toy Telephone (also known from Toy Story)

• Manufacturer: Fisher-Price
• Manufacturing date: 1961

Description
This Chatter Phone was Fisher-Price's best-selling product for much of the 1960s and 1970s. This copy comes from 1961 and is made of sturdy hard plastic.

With this smiling phone, preschoolers learned to get acquainted with numbers and colours. Nice old telephone from Fisher-Price with dial and eyes that blink when you push it forward.

The Fisher-Price telephone has a dial with the numbers 0 to 9, rotating eyes, a smiling mouth and a funny nose.

Since it was featured in the film “Toy Story 3”, this toy phone has become a true collector's item.

Condition
This 1961 toy telephone is in an original vintage condition with traces of use and age-related traces of wear. Pictures are part of the description.

Size

• Height: 9 cm.
• Length: 16 cm.
• Width: 18 cm.

Fisher-Price is an American company that produces educational toys for children and infants, headquartered in East Aurora, New York.

Founded in 1930 by Herman Fisher, Irving Price, Price's illustrator-artist wife Margaret Evans Price, and Helen Schelle, the name Fisher-Price was established by combining two of the three names. Fisher worked previously in manufacturing, selling and advertising games for a company in Churchville, New York. Price had retired from a major variety chain store, and Helen Schelle previously operated Penny Walker Toy Shop in Binghamton, New York. Fisher-Price’s fundamental toy-making principles centred on intrinsic play value, ingenuity, strong construction, good value for the money, and action. Early toys were made of heavy steel parts and ponderosa pine, which resisted splintering and held up well to heavy use. The details and charm were added with colourful lithographic labels. Mrs Price was the first Art Director and designed push-pull toys for the opening line, based on characters from her children's books.

In 1931, three of the four founders took 16 of their wooden toys to the American International Toy Fair in New York City and they quickly became a success. The first Fisher-Price toy ever sold was "Dr. Doodle" in 1931. (The same toy, in excellent condition, would be worth a considerable amount in today's collectables market.) In the early 1950s, Fisher-Price identified plastic as a material that could help the company incorporate longer-lasting decorations and brighter colours into its toys. "Buzzy Bee" was the first Fisher-Price toy to make use of plastic. By the end of the 1950s, Fisher-Price manufactured 39 toys incorporating plastics.

During the 1960s, the Play Family (later known as Little People) product line was introduced and soon overtook the popularity of earlier toys. Herman Fisher retired at the age of 71 in 1969 and the Quaker Oats Company bought Fisher-Price the same year.

In 1991, Fisher-Price regained its independence from The Quaker Oats Company and became a publicly-traded company. Two years later, in November 1993, Fisher-Price became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mattel. A new management group set the company’s focus on basic, infant and preschool products and began expansion into international markets. By 1997, Mattel decided to market all of its preschool products under the Fisher-Price name.

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