Hammer & Mold brings together original vintage toys, the companies that made them and the stories that made them famous. Explore the history. Watch the commercials. Buy the originals.
Live auctions on original vintage toys. Place a bid, or take it straight away with Buy now.
We organise the collection the way it was built: publisher first. The publisher is the empire; its toy lines live beneath it. Filter the lines by their maker, or sort them across the years.
The line that invented the modern 3¾-inch action figure, and sold an empty box one Christmas to do it.
Enter the Empire →Proton packs, ecto-plasma and gross-out mutations. The strangest, most inventive toys on the shelf.
Enter the Empire →Soft-vinyl monsters from Tokyo's tokusatsu boom. Godzilla, Ultraman and the beasts of late-night television, hand-poured and hand-painted.
Enter the Empire →Mutant reptiles, pizza and ooze. The line that turned a black-and-white comic into a worldwide phenomenon.
Enter the Empire →The gentle alien of 1982. Poseable figures, glowing fingers and the most famous bicycle in cinema.
Enter the Empire →Mr. T, machine guns and a black van. No plan survived contact, but the toys did.
Enter the Empire →The toys about toys. Pull-string Woody and Buzz, straight from Pixar's first feature.
Enter the Empire →Anyone can sell an old toy. We want to tell you what you're actually looking at.
Year, maker, series, scale, accessories and condition. The details collectors actually want to know.
Who made it, when it appeared and what made it special. The story behind the plastic.
The original TV commercials that introduced these toys to the world, right where they belong.
The ship that didn't make the first wave. When it finally landed in 1979, it was the biggest, most coveted toy Kenner had ever built.
In 1977, Kenner had the kind of problem most companies only dream about. Star Wars had become the biggest film on Earth, every child wanted the toys, and Kenner had almost nothing on the shelf. There was no way to tool, mould and ship figures in time for Christmas.
So they sold a promise. The Early Bird Certificate Package was, essentially, an empty box with a cardboard diorama and a mail-away voucher. Post it back, and sometime in early 1978 four action figures would arrive: Luke, Leia, R2-D2 and Chewbacca. It should have been a disaster. Instead it sold in the millions.
The figures that followed in 1978 invented a format the whole industry would copy: the 3¾-inch action figure, small enough that a child could own a galaxy. Vehicles came next. But the one everybody wanted, the flagship itself, was held back.
The Millennium Falcon did not arrive until 1979. When it did, it was enormous for its day: a light-up cockpit, a spinning radar dish, a training remote, and the little chess table from the film. It was the toy you asked for and rarely got. Forty-odd years on, a complete one is a small monument to how much a plastic ship could mean.
The full story of the line: the Early Bird gamble, the figures that changed the industry, and the eleven years that followed. Every artifact links back here.
The company that turned licences into legends. From a toy oven that actually baked to an empty box that launched Star Wars, Kenner spent five decades deciding what a generation would find under the tree.
In 1947, three brothers, Albert, Philip and Joseph Steiner, started a toy company in Cincinnati, Ohio, and named it after Kenner Street, where their office stood. It was a small beginning for a firm that would end up shaping the shelves of nearly every toy shop in the Western world.
Their early hits were toys that actually did something: the Give-A-Show projector in 1959, and in 1963 the Easy-Bake Oven, a miniature oven that genuinely baked, sold by the million and never really gone. Spirograph followed in 1966, and by 1976 a rubbery strongman called Stretch Armstrong had joined them. Kenner had a knack for turning a clever idea into a phenomenon.
When Kenner won the Star Wars licence in 1977, there was no way to tool, mould and ship action figures in time for Christmas. So Kenner sold a promise instead. The Early Bird Certificate was, in effect, an empty box with a mail-away voucher. Post it back, and four figures would follow in early 1978. It should have failed. It sold in the millions.
The 3¾-inch (9.5 cm) figures that arrived in 1978 set the template for action figures everywhere: small enough that a child could own a whole galaxy. Sales doubled to $200 million that year, and by 1983 more than 300 million Star Wars items had been sold. The Millennium Falcon landed in 1979, and for a while Kenner was less a toy company than a machine for manufacturing childhood.
The short version of a long history: how a Cincinnati start-up became the maker behind the toys people still hunt for today.
Kenner's licences read like a childhood. These are the ones represented in the collection.
The line that started with an empty box and ended up on every shelf. The Falcon is in the collection now.
View the toys →Proton packs, ecto-plasma and gloriously gross mutations. Pieces arriving soon.
Coming soon →Six Million Dollar Man, Strawberry Shortcake, Super Powers, Batman, Jurassic Park. A back catalogue of icons.
Coming soon →The television spots that sold the toys the first time around. Six from the Kenner vault. They play inline here; the title opens the clip on YouTube.
Two cartoonists, a kitchen-table joke and an idea that got wildly out of hand. In four years the Turtles went from a 3,000-copy black-and-white parody to the action figures on every shelf in the Western world.
One night in November 1983, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were trading silly drawings in their apartment in Dover, New Hampshire. Eastman sketched a masked turtle standing upright with a pair of nunchucks, and scrawled three words above it as a gag: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was a parody, poking fun at the biggest comics of the day, Frank Miller's ninjas, the New Mutants, Dave Sim's Cerebus. It was never meant to leave the room.
But they couldn't let it go. With a tax refund and a loan from Eastman's uncle, around $1,200 between them, the pair self-published a single oversized black-and-white issue in May 1984, under an imprint they invented on the spot: Mirage Studios, so named because the studio didn't really exist. They printed 3,000 copies, priced at $1.50, and mailed out a press release that made the tiny print run sound like an event. It sold out. The gritty little comic became the most talked-about book in the independent scene, and first-printing copies now change hands for the price of a car.
A licensing agent named Mark Freedman saw what the comic could become, and brought it to Playmates Toys, a modest California firm with no action-figure line of its own. Playmates was interested but cautious: they wanted the Turtles on television first, to prove the audience was really there. A five-part animated miniseries aired in December 1987, and it changed everything about them.
Television softened the Turtles into the version the world remembers. In the comic all four wore red masks; on screen each got his own colour so children could tell them apart. Michelangelo got the nunchucks and the one-liners, pizza became an obsession, and a whole cast, Krang, Bebop and Rocksteady, the Technodrome, was invented for the show and the toys. When Playmates shipped the first figures in 1988 the line didn't just sell. Within two years the Turtles stood shoulder to shoulder with Star Wars and G.I. Joe as the best-selling toys on Earth.
The short version of a long story: how a parody comic became one of the biggest toy empires of its decade.
Playmates didn't just make figures. It built a whole world in plastic, and these are the pieces collectors still chase.
If the figures were the army, the Technodrome was the empire's fortress. Released in 1990, it was Krang's rolling war-machine rendered in plastic: a giant motorised eyeball that rose from the top, prison cells, a working lift, escape hatches and a firing cannon.
It is the piece almost every collector remembers begging for, and the one that still anchors a serious Turtles collection today. Complete, boxed and unbroken, it is the blue-chip of the range.
The very first vehicle. A soft vinyl blimp the Turtles flew over the city, and one of the pieces in the debut assortment.
Michelangelo's skateboard, moulded to clip a figure on for the ride. One of the earliest accessories and a fixture of the early line.
The armoured van from the cartoon, complete with periscope and spring-loaded cannons. The line's signature vehicle.
The Turtles' underground lair. Trapdoors, a fold-out sewer and a working lift, the first true home base of the line.
A catapult on wheels that flung little plastic pizzas. Half vehicle, half weapon, entirely absurd.
The Foot Clan's answer to the Party Wagon, and the siege engines that filled out the villains' side of the shelf.
The television spots that sold the toys the first time around, straight from the Playmates vault. They play inline here; the title opens the clip on YouTube.
The company most people can only name by its rainbow. LJN made the first E.T. toys, the rubber wrestlers that ruled the '80s playground, and a run of games so notorious the logo became a punchline. Behind those three letters is a stranger story.
LJN was founded in New York in 1970 by Jack Friedman, and the three letters have puzzled collectors for decades. They aren't his initials. In the 1960s Friedman worked as a sales rep for a toy man named Norman J. Lewis. When he struck out on his own, he named the company after his old boss with the name reversed: Lewis J. Norman, L.J.N. It has been hiding on every box the whole time.
Friedman had a nose for a licence nobody else wanted. In 1982, when Steven Spielberg's E.T. was still an unknown quantity and the big toymakers were nervous, LJN took the film rights for a reported $35,000, pocket change even then, and produced the first-ever E.T. toys. It set the pattern for everything that followed: LJN would buy the licence others were too cautious to touch.
In 1984 LJN won the licence for the World Wrestling Federation, and the Wrestling Superstars line changed the schoolyard. At eight inches these were giants, moulded in solid rubber so they survived any beating a child could hand out. Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Roddy Piper, a whole roster you could actually throw across a room. For Thundercats a year later, LJN built its clever 'Battle-Matic' spring action into the figures. For a while it could do no wrong.
Then came the other half of the story. MCA/Universal bought LJN in 1985 for around $66 million, and in 1987 the company began publishing games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Here is the part few remember: LJN never actually made a single game. It only put its rainbow logo on titles built by others, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Back to the Future, many of them so poor that decades later the logo became internet shorthand for a bad game. Same three letters, two opposite reputations.
How a New York licensing house became a byword for both childhood treasure and gaming infamy.
The licences that made LJN, from the treasured to the infamous.
The licence nobody else wanted, and the first toys of the world's favourite alien.
Eight inches of solid rubber. The figures that ruled the '80s playground.
Lion-O and the gang, built around LJN's spring-loaded Battle-Matic action.
The rainbow chapter. Games LJN published but never made, now a byword for the era's worst.
The spots that sold LJN's giants the first time around. They play inline here; the title opens the clip on YouTube.
A family firm that began with a wind-up monkey and nearly died twice, then saved itself by making the smallest cars in the world. Galoob's back catalogue hides a courtroom victory that changed gaming, and a toy recalled for putting eyes out.
Lewis and Barbara Galoob started their company in San Francisco in 1957, selling toys and stationery out of a modest operation. Their first real hit is one you have almost certainly seen even if you don't know the name: a battery-powered Jolly Chimp that banged a pair of cymbals and grinned. That same wide-eyed monkey later became horror-film shorthand for dread. It kept the lights on through the 1960s.
In 1970 Lewis fell too ill to run the business, and his 21-year-old son David dropped out of the University of Southern California to take it over. It was the first of several moments when the company's survival hung by a thread. Galoob licensed television to stay afloat, and in 1983 one of those licences was The A-Team: Mr. T, a black van and a squad of toys that rode the show straight onto every shelf.
By 1987 Galoob was in real trouble. A run of failed electronic toys and chaos in its shift to Chinese manufacturing sent sales down 40 percent and left a loss of nearly $25 million. What pulled it back was tiny: Micro Machines, launched that year, miniature vehicles with a level of detail no one expected at that scale, sold by a fast-talking pitchman who became a phenomenon in his own right.
Two more secrets sit in the catalogue. Galoob was behind the Game Genie, the cheat cartridge Nintendo sued to kill, and Galoob won the landmark case, establishing that letting players modify a game they owned was perfectly legal. And in 1994 it launched Sky Dancers, foam-winged dolls that flew when you pulled a cord, a smash hit that sold tens of millions before being recalled after the spinning wings caused eye injuries. By the time Hasbro bought Galoob in 1998 for $220 million, the wind-up-monkey company was the third-largest toymaker in America.
How a San Francisco family firm survived long enough to become America's third-largest toymaker.
The licences and inventions that carried Galoob through four decades.
Mr. T, machine guns and a black van. The show's toys, moving as fast as the plots.
The tiny cars that saved the company, sold by the fastest mouth on television.
The cheat cartridge Nintendo went to court to stop, and lost.
A galaxy shrunk to pocket size, and one of the '90s' best-loved licences.
Foam-winged dolls that really flew. A blockbuster, until the recall.
The fast-talking spots that made Galoob's smallest toys famous. They play inline here; the title opens the clip on YouTube.
The tiny Canadian company that said yes when Mattel and Hasbro said no. Thinkway won the worldwide rights to Toy Story because the giants thought a computer-animated film was too big a risk, then built the toy every child on Earth wanted for Christmas.
Thinkway Toys was a small, low-profile company in Markham, Ontario, when it walked into the story of the decade. At the Toronto Toy Fair in January 1995, Thinkway's Albert Chan was approached by the head of Disney's Canadian licensing arm about an upcoming film. He was shown a handful of drawings, a cowboy and a spaceman, and asked if the company wanted to make the toys.
What Chan didn't need telling was that the giants had already passed. Mattel and Hasbro had both looked at Toy Story and turned it down, unconvinced a feature made entirely on computers was worth the risk. Thinkway said yes, flew to the New York Toy Fair a month later to present to Disney's U.S. office, and in February 1995 walked away with the worldwide master licence. A company most people had never heard of now owned the toys to the most important animated film in a generation.
By August 1995 Thinkway had its first figures ready: a pull-string talking Woody and, the crown jewel, the Buzz Lightyear Ultimate Talking Action Figure, with a light-up laser, pop-out wings and a bank of phrases straight from the film. When Toy Story opened that November demand was ferocious, and Thinkway simply couldn't make Buzz fast enough. The figure sold out across North America and stayed sold out.
The scarcity became legend, and Pixar nodded to it directly in Toy Story 2, where a toy-shop aisle groans under a wall of identical Buzz Lightyears, the abundance no child could find in 1995. Thinkway held the worldwide master toy licence for Toy Story for 26 years, from 1995 all the way to 2021, across every sequel, quietly making the definitive figures of one of cinema's biggest franchises while barely anyone learned its name.
How an unknown Ontario firm ended up holding the biggest licence in animation for a quarter of a century.
Three figures that defined how the world played with Toy Story.
Pop-out wings, a light-up laser and the phrases every child could recite. The toy of the decade, if you could find one.
"There's a snake in my boot." The cowboy half of the pair, straight off the screen.
Screen-accurate reissues for the children of 1995, now grown. Woody's boot even hid the signature.
The spots for the toy nobody could keep in stock. They play inline here; the title opens the clip on YouTube.
A private collection that grew into something bigger. This is where it comes from, and what we hunt for.
What began as a handful of childhood pieces turned into a hunt: for the odd, the overlooked and the wonderfully strange. The finding, the careful cleaning, the search for a missing weapon or a lost accessory, the stories behind each toy. Somewhere along the way the collecting became a way of living.
We are drawn to the weird ones. Toys that were played with, loved and actually handled, over the pristine pieces sealed and graded never to be opened again. A toy locked in plastic, never to be read or felt, becomes a frozen artifact. We would rather keep them alive.
Have a collection of your own? We buy and take on whole collections and single pieces. Tell us what you have, send a few photos, and we will look after it.
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