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Tomy Bring-Along-A-Song

First written November 23, 2024

Beginning in the 1980s Tomy released a series of wind-up portable music-box toys that were shaped and designed to emulate the way different "real" audio devices like record and CD players were used, although not their mechanisms. These were referred to as the "Bring-Along-A-Song" series after their portable nature and were released in several regions and in different color variations over the years.

Bring Along A Song Tape Player

This Bring-Along-A-Song tape player was first released seemingly around 1983. The box shown here is seemingly an earlier American release - later prints of this box called it specifically the Bring-Along-A-Song Tape Player.

The tape player itself is similar in design to real portable kid's cassette players aimed at slightly older children who could operate a traditional tape deck (and be trusted with tapes).

The player is chunky and feels like its made out of fairly thick plastic. The buttons at the top start and stop the mechanism and open the tape door, revealing the pin-reader mechanism and the drive gear that spins the disc inside the cassettes.

A slot in the rear tooling holds the second cassette when one is playing. This release was produced in Singapore.

The two cassettes really are cassettes of a sort, with the outer plastic housing holding the double-sided disc containing two songs that can be read by the mechanism in the tape player. Two "tapes" are included, a red one containing London Bridge and Hickory Dickory Dock and a yellow one containing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and This Old Man. A cutout in the cassette reveals the pegs that hit the music box pins as well as disc identifiers.

I think one of the little pins isn't hammering quite right, it seems like one of the tones is missing, but here it is playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Around 1992 this cassette player was released in yellow in Tomytime-style packaging, retaining the wood boarder but adding a blue light to the black background of the older Tomy packaging, as well as being released in European Tomy Big Fun! packaging.