Brands
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Aluminum Model Toys (AMT) is an American brand of scale model vehicles. The former manufacturing company was founded in Troy, Michigan, in 1948 by West Gallogly Sr. AMT became known for producing 1:25 scale plastic automobile dealer promotional model cars and friction motor models, and pioneered the annual 3-in-1 model kit buildable in stock, custom, or hot-rod versions. The company made a two-way deal in 1966 with Desilu Productions to produce a line of Star Trek models and to produce a 3/4 scale exterior and interior filming set of the Galileo shuttlecraft. It was also known for producing model trucks and movie and TV vehicles.
The AMT brand was bought in 1978 by the Lesney company of UK, then by competitor Ertl in 1983, then by the Round 2 company in 2012
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The Andy Gard Toy Company was founded in 1950 by brothers Andrew, Vincent and Samuel Giardina of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. The company manufactured plastic toys and household goods including remote-controlled cars, dolls, toy soldiers, plastic baseball bats and balls. A fire in 1967 destroyed their manufacturing facility, leading to receivership in February 1967. In 1971, Andy Gard merged with Meridian Industries of Southfield, Michigan, and the brand was discontinued.
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BMC Toys was founded by Bill McMaster in 1991 and began producing original historically themed plastic soldier playsets shortly thereafter.
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DFC (Dimensions For Children) are best known for at least six fantasy playsets in the early ’80s. However, they also produced a Dinosaurs and Cavemen Prehistoric Action Playset with an outstanding figure set as well as some military playsets including "The Battle of Pork Chop Hill" and "Invasion of Anzio", and finally a Western Playset called "Fort Courage"
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Donruss was a US-based trading cards manufacturing company founded in 1954 and acquired by the Panini Group in 2009. The company started in the 1950s, producing confectionery, evolved into Donruss and started producing trading cards. During the 1960s and 1970s Donruss produced entertainment-themed cards. Its first sports theme cards were produced in 1965, when it created a series of racing cards sponsored by Hot Rod Magazine.
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F. & F. Mold and Die Works was a company run by the Fiedler brothers, Joseph and John, that started as a tool shop in 1940. The company became known for developing a method for welding plastics using injection molds. They are noted for cereal premiums from the 1950s and 1960s.
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Franklin Mint Precision Models were made by the Franklin Mint, originally a private mint founded by Joseph Segel in 1964 in Wawa, Pennsylvania. The company is now owned by a private equity firm headquartered in Midtown Manhattan New York City, and Exton, Pennsylvania. Besides diecast automobiles, the Franklin Mint manufactured and marketed coins, jewelry, dolls, sculpture and other collectibles.
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Hasbro made the original G.I. Joe action figure. The idea for the toy came from a licensing agent named Stan Weston, who pitched the idea to Hasbro in 1963. Don Levine, Hasbro's head of research and development, created the first G.I. Joe prototypes.
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Ideal Toy Company was an American toy company founded by Morris Michtom and his wife, Rose. During the post–World War II baby boom era, Ideal became the largest doll-making company in the United States. Their most popular dolls included Betsy Wetsy, Toni, Saucy Walker, Shirley Temple, Miss Revlon, Patti Playpal, Tammy, Thumbelina, Tiny Thumbelina, and Crissy. The company is also known for selling the Rubik's Cube.
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IMC Model Kits
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Irwin Toy, was a Canadian company founded in 1926 by Sam and Beatrice Irwin. It started as a distributor of dry goods and clothing, eventually focusing on toys and becoming a major Canadian toy distributor, especially known for licensing and distributing popular American toys like Star Wars action figures and Atari.
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Kenner Products, known simply as Kenner, was an American toy brand owned by Hasbro. Kenner Products began as a toy company founded in 1946, going on to produce several highly recognizable toys and merchandise lines including action figures for the original series of Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Batman as well as die cast models.
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Lido Toys was a toy company founded in 1947 by Seymour and Effrem Arenstein. They produced a variety of toys, including soldiers and space sets, until 1964 when they sold the company to Bala Industries.
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Shop a vast selection of Lindberg Toy Models & Kits for hobbyists. Find rare vintage kits, modern classics, and detailed models for your collection.
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Manoil Manufacturing Company was an American metal and plastic toy company that was established in 1935 and ceased production in 1959. From June 1940 on, the company was located on Providence Street in Waverly, NY, in Tioga County. It was most successful from 1937 to 1941 when it produced hollow-cast lead toy soldiers, known as dimestore soldiers. The company also produced toy airplanes and cars, as well as farm and western playsets.
Manoil was founded by brothers, Maurice and Jack Manoil who began manufacturing toys in 1934 in their Manhattan factory. After first producing diecast toy cars, Manoil began to produce toy soldiers in 1935. They were sculpted by Walter Baetz.
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The Louis Marx and Company was an American toy manufacturer in business from 1919 to 1980. They made many types of toys including tin toys, toy soldiers, toy guns, action figures, dolls, toy cars and model trains.
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Mattel, Inc. is an American multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment company headquartered in El Segundo, California. Mattel has a presence in 35 countries and territories; its products are sold in more than 150 countries. Mattel was founded in Los Angeles by Harold Matson and the husband-and-wife duo of Ruth and Elliot Handler in January 1945.
It is the world's second largest toy maker in terms of revenue, after The Lego Group.Two of its historic and most valuable brands, Barbie and Hot Wheels, were respectively named the top global toy property and the top-selling global toy of the year for 2020 and 2021 by The NPD Group, a global information research company.
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McFarlane Toys is an American company founded by comic book creator Todd McFarlane which makes highly detailed model action figures of characters from films, comics, popular music, video games and various sporting genres. The company, a subsidiary of Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc., is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona.[1]
As of 2021, McFarlane featured products with licenses of games and companies such as DC Comics, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Bleach, Warhammer, Mortal Kombat, Disney, The Princess Bride, and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
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Mego Corporation is an American toy company that in its original iteration was first founded in 1954.[3] Originally known as a purveyor of dime store toys, in 1971 the company shifted direction and became famous for producing licensed action figures (including the long running "World's Greatest Super Heroes" line), celebrity dolls, and the Micronauts toy line. For a time in the 1970s, their line of 8-inch-scale action figures with interchangeable bodies became the industry standard.
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Monogram is an American brand and former manufacturing company of scale plastic models of cars, aircraft, spacecraft, ships, and military vehicles since the early 1950s. The company was formed by two former employees of Comet Kits, Jack Besser and Bob Reder.
Mattel acquired Monogram in 1968, and the firm passed through various owners and was merged with Revell, the combined company being bought by Hobbico in 2007. Along with Revell, AMT, and MPC, Monogram is sometimes called one of the traditional "Big 4" in plastic modeling
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MPC, is an American brand and former manufacturing company of plastic scale model kits and pre-assembled promotional models of cars that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. MPC's main competition was model kits made by AMT, Jo-Han, Revell, and Monogram.
Traditionally a Michigan company, since 2011 the "MPC" brand name has been part of Round 2 of South Bend, Indiana (which was also acquired by Japanese company Tomy for $ 640 million.
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Nichols Industries was a toy gun manufacturer in Texas that produced millions of cap guns after World War II. The company is credited with helping to shape Cowboy culture.
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Palmer Plastics is was one of the early plastic scale modeling companies.
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Payton Toys of Brooklyn, NY mainly sold figures in header card bags. Payton may have been taken over by fellow Brooklyn, NY concern Winneco Industries in the 1970s. Winneco was formed in 1972 as a shell company to manage the takeover of Palmer Plastics which was also located in Brooklyn. By the late 1970s Payton, Winneco & Palmer were all absorbed by H-G Toys.
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The Pyro Plastics Corporation was an American manufacturing company based in Union Township, NJ and popular during the 1950s and 1960s that produced toys and plastic model kits. Some of the scale models manufactured and commercialised by Pyro were cars, motorcycles, aircraft, ships, and military vehicles, and animal and human figures.
The company ceased activities after being sold to Life-Like in 1972.
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Racing Champions was founded in 1989 and pursued a vigorous acquisition strategy in the subsequent fifteen years, going public with stock issues in 1997. In 1999 it bought AMT/ERTL, splitting the company back into its original components.
This rapid expansion resulted in a cumbersome collection of companies with subsidiaries creating unrelated product lines so a reorganization of Racing Champions/ERTL was initiated in2003 following the acquisition of Learning Curve.
Renamed RC2 Corporation in 2004, the company opted to refocus onto its original product lines of die-cast toys and models, and, after it bought "Learning Curve International, Inc." (2003) and "The First Years Inc." (2004), on toys and learning material for the very young. ERTL was dropped from the company name and was relegated for exclusive use as a subsidiary brand. Product lines that did not fit the new company profile were liquidated or sold, which included model kits as carried by AMT and Polar Lights.
A vigorous acquirer of companies, RC2 was acquired by Tomy in 2011.
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REL PLASTICS was a mold making company that started up in the 1940s by Larry Fattori son of Lazzaro Fattori. In 1936 Lazzaro imported what might be one of the first plastic injection machines into the US. Larry bought into the idea and in the 1940s started a plastic molding company. Using the initials of the first names of his sisters Rose and Ester and himself he named the company REL. REL made molds for the home and auto industries. In 1948 REL started making molds for toys. To sell the toys from their molds a subsidiary was created, the Plastic Art Corporation. They compressed the name to PLASCO to use as a marketing slogan. REL made and sold tea sets and doll house furniture for girls and western themed figures and playsets for boys. They originally used styrene hard plastic but an ad from a 1957 Dearth's Hobby & Toy center has a western playset touted as being "made of soft, rubber like unbreakable plastic". Other toy companies like Lido Toys and Archer also switched from hard to soft polyethylene plastic in the mid 1950s as it was safer for children to play with. About 1963 REL stopped making toys to concentrate upon the auto industry. They went out of business in the early 1980s.
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Remco Industries Inc. was an American toy company. Founded in 1949, it is known for toys integrating technology and innovation from their inception.
The company's slogan in its early TV commercials was, "Every Boy Wants a Remco Toy...And So Do Girls!"
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The Renwal Manufacturing Company was started in about 1939 by Mr. Irving Lawner (the name “Renwal” is Lawner spelled backwards) in New York. The company produced toys from1945-1958 and then went on producing other products until 1976
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Revell GmbH is an American-origin manufacturer of plastic scale models, currently based in Bünde, Germany. The original Revell company merged with Monogram in 1986, becoming "Revell-Monogram". The business operated until 2007, when American Revell was purchased by Hobbico, while the German subsidiary "Revell Plastics GmbH" (established in 1956) had separated from the American firm in 2006 until Hobbico purchased it in 2012, bringing the two back together again under the same company umbrella. After the Hobbico demise in 2018, Quantum Capital Partners (QCP) acquired Revell.
Some of the scale products manufactured and commercialized by Revell are cars, aircraft, ships, and commercial vehicles.
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Rubenstein was a US company that produced plastic figures and had a strong association with cereal companies who used their figures as cereal box prize premiums. Rubenstein also retailed many of these same figures in header-card bags with figures cast in colors different from the original cereal prize products.
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The Stuart Manufacturing Company was founded by Samuel W. Levinson in Cincinnati, Ohio. Stuart produced miniature Western figures, accessories and horses from 1953 to approximately 1969. The Stuart promotional slogan was "Stuart quality is first quality".
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John Baumgartner's Anchor Brush Company started Tim-mee Toys making plastic toy figures in 1948.
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The Topps Company, Inc. is an American company that manufactures trading cards and other collectibles. Formerly based in New York City, Topps is best known as a leading producer of baseball and other sports and non-sports themed trading cards. Topps also produces cards under the brand names Allen & Ginter and Bowman.