fall inside a hole
Illco Mickey Mouse Loop the Loop (~1979-early 1980s)
First written August 30, 2024Toy Town (later Toybox)'s Aerial Tank Engine (びっくりレール空中きかんしゃ) was first released in 1976 in association with Tomy, featuring a motorized clicking steam locomotive that would climb up a translucent set of rails and then traverse and swing down a gravity-run course before reaching the bottom and climbing its way back up the trackway. The toy was released in North America as the Flying Stunt Loco not long after, being sold at Sears throughout the later 1970s. Some time before late 1979, a very similar Mickey Mouse licensed toy from the Illfelder Toy Co., better known as Illco, appeared for sale with the same trackway and mechanisms as Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Loop the Loop.
In August 1979 Toybox filed a lawsuit against Illfelder Importing Company over this copy of the Flying Stunt Loco. According to Toybox's petition for appeal, Illco had purchased a Flying Stunt Loco at Sears and had it copied. The judge concluded that the combination of the vehicle's functions and the track elements themselves were not novel enough to be patentable, and the original US patent for the toy was declared invalid. Toybox appealed arguing that the specific combination of features was not something that a regular toy maker would think of, but when broken down to its basic components (a free-wheeling vehicle with cogs out the side, a bridge, a gravity fed course, the flipping action which had already been used on the Flippity Flyer and other toys...) I suppose I see what they mean. The toy also had a design patent, but the court found that this was also not valid... it seems to me that even if the basic components of the toy are not novel, the specific shape and order and operation, the particular elevation of each section as covered in the design still would be... I can't say for sure, but I know that Tomy lost a similar lawsuit to Durham when they made a Mickey Mouse Starship themed ripoff of Tomy's Drive Yourself Crazy, and the court also found that regardless of being a direct rip of the mechanism and the outer case (even being the same color, just with different stickers and a Mickey Mouse figure), the Mickey Mouse toy was still lawful. In any case, the Flying Stunt Loco was knocked off a near-uncountable number of times in the decades following, still being produced by inexpensive overseas toymakers, with the original Toy Town toolings having been copied and changed and degraded to the point that the cheaper ones often do not function entirely correctly.
These sets were based on the post-1978 version of Flying Stunt Loco with the railings for the curved tracks. On the box you can see that Mickey's roller coaster car is on a direct copy of the green steam locomotive chassis (it could potentially even be the original Toybox-Sears chassis that Illco copied).
Set contents| Quantity |
Item |
Photo |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mickey Mouse roller coaster car |
 |
| 1 | Bridge base |
 |
| 1 pair | Sky rails |
 |
| 1 | Turn rail |
 |
| 1 | A rail | |
| 1 | B rail |
 |
| 1 | C rail |
 |
| 1 | D rail |
 |
| 1 | Mickey Mouse Loop the Loop sign |
 |
| 1 | Donald figure |
 |
| 2 | Guard rail |
 |
| 2 | Supports |
 |
The Mickey Mouse car has unpowered wheels but two spinning cogs sticking out the side, with a static cog on one side to make the engine flip as it lifts itself up the sky rail. The car takes one AA battery and has free-rolling wheels underneath.
The entire mechanism is more or less a direct copy of the original, including the noisemaker and weights. Similar to several other variations of Flying Stunt Loco that I own, the plastic cogs sticking out the side were split and slipping on their axles.
A Donald Duck statue fits into the flying bridge and rotates around with Mickey as he passes. The two I have from slightly different production runs have aged differently. The sign on top is rather large.