Packaging was now marked MULTIPLE PRODUCTS CORP A DIVISION OF MINER INDUSTRIES. They quickly realized they knew nothing about toys and in 1967 they sold MPC to Miner Industries. Packaging was now marked MULTIPLE PRODUCTS CO. They had been looking to buy unrelated businesses to expand their market. In 1965 having financial issues MPC was sold to the Loral Corporation who made components for rockets and other space gear. They had purchased molds from both Archer and Renwal. Plasticraft has the MPC ring hand GIs in their 1965 catalog and may have bought the mold. It seems the ring hand figures were phased out during this time period. They also made US & Russian toy soldiers with integral weapons. The new MPC Germans and Japanese were not “ring hands” but had their weapons integrally molded the same as Marx. Lido was sold in 1964 and their German & Japanese molds disappeared leaving MPC to duke it out with Marx. Kids went nuts and bought millions as they finally had bad guys for their US troops to whip. In 1963 Marx came out with WWII German and Japanese toy soldiers and Lido and MPC quickly followed suit. Mostly sold in header card bags, blister cards or small plastic cases (totters), but they did make play sets as well to compete with toy king Louis Marx & Co.īy the end of the 1950s competition from cheaper Asian markets caused companies to open factories in Hong Kong, Taiwan and or Japan and many started going out of business.
They continued to add more “ring hand” figures to their lineup including pirates, farmers, Revolutionary War, Civil War and WWII themes. They took the idea of using clip on accessories from the line of PECOs figures made earlier in the 1950s. Like other companies they may have been selling plastic items in several markets but they were selling toys by 1955.Īmong the first figures they made were copies of Tim-Mee Toys Indians and “ring hand” Ramar of the Jungle African natives and a big game hunter. They also set up a subsidiary in Canada known a Multiple Toys. By the 1954 time frame they were located at 55 West 13th Street in New York City with Marvin Ross as their president. They displayed a puzzle game “Ten Yen” at the March1950 American Toy Fair. They came into business after WWII and were in operation by 1950. One of the producers of plastic army men in the 1950s, 60s & 70s was the Multiple Products Corporation better known as simply MPC by collectors. His site is a mix of information along with a selection of vintage and current production available for purchase. Kent is the owner and proprietor of Toy Soldier HQ, and one of the most knowledgeable folks around when it comes to plastic toy figures.
This bend turned out really well! Too bad I know almost nothing about electronics, there are lots of possibilities here.I'm very pleased to welcome Kent Sprecher as a guest on the BMC Toys blog.
Fundimensions manual#
Also, I added a contact point for manual pitch-bend/vibrato which makes the TONE preset more expressive. It turns out I could, and I added some slight variations of a couple presets. Finally, I wanted to see if there were additional sounds I could squeeze out of the machine.
Fundimensions free#
This would free up both hands to work the PITCH/SPEED/VOLUME knobs simultaneously. The second objective was adding a switch to engage the CONSTANT and FADE buttons. First, I wanted to add an output jack to run the Sound Gizmo through effects. My circuit bending goals, as always, were more practical than experimental. The author behind built a pretty cool enclosure for the demo cricuit (see also: this Reddit video). I did a little research and found Dan Veeneman at Decode Systems has datasheet scans of a similar chip distrubuted by Archer. My pictures below show this specific chip is from Texas Instruments.
The Sound Gizmo uses what I believe was a common IC chip at the time: SN94281N. Once open I could see the internals were predictably basic. The screwheads are tri-wing, so I also had to buy a bit (a #3 or #4 works). I wanted to circut bend one of these for a long time so I bought one off eBay.
Even though I have a childhood affinity for this device the general consensus is that it sounds like garbage! But could it sound better with. Dex of AEIOU has a short blog post about the Sound Gizmo, which links to an article about using a one on the Howard Stern Show, but other than a couple poor-quality YouTube videos there isn't much else beside chronicles of musicians using them in songs. This unit is rare and there is not a lot of information about it on the Internet. The Sound Gizmo is a very cool sound effects toy created in 1980 by Fundimensions, a division of CPG Products Corp (then owned by General Mills).
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