Fans of Schylling Toys know they live in an age of computer algorithms and LED-screen entertainment, but it’s their love of nostalgia that draws them to colorful mechanical toys like jump-roping circus bears, jack-in-the-box delights, and mid-century wind-up robots and race cars.
And it’s this world of play that is the centerpiece of Tin Toy Story, an exhibit currently running at the Wenham Museum celebrating Schylling Toys. The show runs through March.
The exhibit will surely appeal to kids and their parents alike. The toys are impossibly out of step with today’s world, and that’s a good thing. They pop, whirr, click, and chime. The wind-up tin robots waddle with deliberate, charming clumsiness. The jack-in-the-boxes—one in the exhibit is from PBS’s Arthur—still know the precise moment to startle.
Tin Toy Story is a small but packed exhibit, greeting visitors with the feeling of a holiday morning stacked with toys. That’s exactly what Jane Bowers, exhibits curator and manager at the Wenham Museum, was going for in designing the show.
“We wanted to create a fun sense of crazy abundance,” said Bowers. And it’s true. Each case in the exhibit follows a theme, from “Futurama” space-age toys to animal menageries to vintage football players.
That serendipitous moment changed Jack’s life. Within a year, he had left for Europe where he found the manufacturer whose wind-up "TIM Birds" were made in Marseilles. The young entrepreneur could afford to import just 72 birds in his first order. When they arrived, he packed them into his car and headed to Boston’s Quincy Market, where he set them out on display and began flying them to the delight of local tourists.
“Two and a half hours later, all 72 birds had sold, and I was in my car on the Tobin Bridge, heading home,” Schylling laughed. And thus, the idea for Schylling Toys was born.
Over the next 40 years, Schylling, ever the tinkerer, and his brother David would carve out a small but valuable space in the massive, multibillion-dollar toy industry, where his success was built on harnessing nostalgia. His designs, featuring gorgeous graphics by Essex graphic designer Ron Majors, were the exact opposite of typical retail toys, which were dominated by plastic, blinking lights, and computerized sounds.
“We call the toys that were popular in mass retailers back then ‘landfill toys,’ and that’s not what we were doing,” Schylling said last week while visiting Tin Toy Story. “We designed toys from rolled-out tin, painted them with beautiful graphics, and then formed them into toys that were propelled by humans, not batteries.”
Schylling’s toy company has lasted nearly five decades, surviving the rise of video games, the fall of big-box toy stores, and the shifting tides of consumer taste. His toys may not compute, but the good news is they’re still running—decades after they came out of the box.
At the Wenham Museum, these toys are on display for anyone to enjoy. There are the wind-up robots, tiny chrome and tin contraptions that seem to have wandered in from a 1950s sci-fi matinee. And yes, there is even a case displaying TIM Birds, the bright yellow and green wind-up ornithopter that started it all.
“You wind it up, and it does what it’s meant to do,” Schylling said.
An adjunct exhibit to Tin Toy Story is Tin Things, which features tin artifacts from the Wenham Museum’s own collection. This exhibit explores the history of tin and how it has been used to make everything from ancient Greek sculptures to food wrapping for the past 3,000 years.
Jane Bowers said that, like all Wenham Museum exhibits, there are several hands-on components in the galleries. Visitors can play with many toys in the exhibit and touch samples of metal ingots made from tin, aluminum, and bronze. A play station for kids sits right in the middle of the Tin Toy Story exhibit cases, packed with Schylling Toys mechanical toys that are charmingly old-fashioned. And that’s precisely what gives them their soul.
