Vintage ATC Asahi Japan Tin Friction Car 1962 Chevrolet Chevy 4 Door Impala Red
Vintage ATC Asahi Japan Tin Friction Car 1962 Chevrolet Chevy 4 Door Hardtop Red. Reference book calls it simple a 4 door hardtop - it is either a Bel Air, Biscayne or Impala as all were quite similar.
Measures about 11 1/2 long. The car is in excellent condition and is complete all original with 1 small exception being it is missing 1 hub cap (check my last photo). Should be easy to replace with most any other ATC generic wheel cover and they also make modern replacement parts. If you collect Japan tin vehicles you already know this is one of the rarest and most desirable ever made and a fine example of an early 60's Chevy tin toy car. In photo number 11 I have shown a scan form page 49 of The Big Book of Tin Toy Cars which reference this exact model.
I think red color would be even more desirable! The friction action mechanism works fine and makes that classic whirring sound.
Tin toys had been made in Japan before the second World War but they reached new heights of realism in the 1950s. The post-war American occupation of Japan gave Japanese toymakers ready access to the lucrative American toy market and as a result most of the tin toy cars made in this period were based on American vehicles like Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Buicks, Oldsmobiles and Packards.
Like the real things, these tin toys were big. A small one would be around eight inches long, with some of the largest stretching to eighteen inches. As such, tinplate was the ideal medium to capture the look of American styling of the 1950s, a period when size mattered and car manufacturers tried to outdo each other with the extravagance of their designs, the size of their tailfins and the amount of chrome. During this era of consumerism, Japanese toy production was at its peak, with exotically-named manufacturers like Marusan, Bandai, Yonezawa and Alps turning out vast quantities of tin toys. It proved to be a short-lived phase in the history of toy production.
By the early 1960s, tin toys were falling out of fashion for various reasons: their sharp edges gave rise to safety concerns; die-cast models were becoming increasingly realistic and sophisticated, with many action features that appealed to children; the development of plastics in the toy industry made tin toys look increasingly old-fashioned. Half a century later, there are very few surviving examples of these magnificent play things.
Before World War II, Japanese companies such as Masudaya, Tomiyama, Saito, Kuramochi, and A. Toy were making tin streetcars, locomotives, and even the tracks they ran on. Tin toys in which balls were kicked or sent to the tops of towers so they could roll down again were all the rage. Water-landing aircraft were also popular in the 1920s and 30s, as were trios of airplanes and biplanes that spun in circles from the tops of clockwork-powered merry-go-rounds. But things got really interesting after the war, when Japanese toy makers produced armies of tin toy robots, fleets of tin spaceships, and stockpiles of futuristic tin weaponry, which produced everything from eerie ray-gun sounds to sparks.
Toy cars were also a hallmark of the Japanese tin-toy industry, some of the most beautiful of which were built by Yonezawa, Marusan, Bandai, K. Toy, Ichiko, Asahi and Mitsuhashi. ASAHI ATC Founded 1950, Tokyo, Japan. Best known by their Santa Claus logotype, Asahi was a major post-war builder of mechanical and battery-operated toys, with particular emphasis on scale-like models of then contemporary vehicles. Asahi's disposition remains unclear to this day.
IT IS MISSING 2 HUB CAPS, NOT 1. SOORY I MADE THAT ERROR.
PLEASE NOTE : MISSING BOTH BACK HUB CAPS. The item "Vintage ATC Asahi Japan Tin Friction Car 1962 Chevrolet Chevy 4 Door Impala Red" is in sale since Sunday, January 08, 2017. This item is in the category "Toys & Hobbies\Vintage & Antique Toys\Tin\Vehicles". The seller is "spooknook" and is located in Weymouth, Massachusetts.This item can be shipped worldwide.