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Tomy wind-up toys

First written October 2024

Tomy began producing many windups toys in the 1970s, both small vehicles and animal style moving windup toys and a long series of pocket games and other games that incorporate windup mechanisms.

Different series of related wind-up toys like the Tomy Comics, Rascal Robots, Pocket Pets, and Flip Floppers were released. Even if you don't know it was originally made by Tomy, many common and copied spinning and walking mechanisms were developed for these toys.

Some of the smaller Tomy wind-up toys in my collection include...

Year Name Description Photo
1981 Double Decker Bus Uptown-Downtown bus that spins around with its upper level raising and lowering
1997 Little Percy Windup Percy from Thomas the Tank Engine with periodic spinning action

Tomy Pocket Games

In 1975 Tomy began producing a series of wind-up and/or spring-loaded "pocket games" which were mechanical games that could fit in a pocket. These were fairly successful in the era before the Game Boy and other portable electronic devices and games. In Japan these were sold as Tomy Pocketmates, in the U.K. they were known as Pocketeers, and in the U.S. they were called simply Pocket Games. Some games were also sold by Milton Bradley. A website showing many variations of pretty much all of these games can be seen here.

Some of the Tomy wind-up pocket games in my collection include...

Year Name Description Photo
1980 Motocross Landscape motorcycle-themed American release of the Japanese F1 Racing and U.K. Pileup game

Tomy wind-up playsets

Tomy also produced a few alliterative wind-up portable playsets with carrying case playing surfaces.

Year Name Description Photo
1982 Tote-Along-Train
Bring-Along-A-Train
Windup train toy that travels around a figure eight
1997 Thomas Tote-Along-Train
Thomas Bring-Along-A-Train
Thomas the Tank Engine-themed version of the previous Tomy Tote-Along/Bring-Along-A-Train toy

Other Tomy wind-up toys

Mechanical geniuses that they were, Tomy produced other larger toys that used wind-up mechanisms for timers, music boxes, and other moving features

Year Name Description Photo
1980s-2000s Bring-Along-A-Song Series of portable wind-up music boxes shaped like traditional audio equipment

Capsule Plarail

Appearing around 2000, Tomy began selling a series of gachapon toys based on Plarail with windup trains that could pull cars around small tracks. Eventually, I will cover some of my Capsule Plarail collection on its own page(s).