The Pleasures of Vintage Toys

If you want to find some neat vintage toys to sell on eBay, you might want to look at toys that were popular in the 1990s. It's my recent experience that women who are in their 20s and early 30s are eager to buy some of the toys they enjoyed as kids, such as vintage Polly Pockets and the original Littlest Pet Shop toys.

It's interesting to consider these two lines of toys in particular because both are still available--but the current toys are a lot different than the originals! The new Polly Pockets are much bigger than their old-school counterparts; I'm sure there must have been some kind of choking issue with the teeny tiny dolls from the early sets. There really is a charm to the older toys as the cases are like little compacts.

Meanwhile, the new Littlest Pet Shop dolls look a lot different than the 1990s ones. The new ones seem to have been influenced by Japanese animation and have large head and large eyes in proportion to their bodies. On the other hand, the old-school LPS are more realistic looking in their depiction of animals, mostly household pets like dogs, cats, bunnies, turtles, and so on.

What prompted this post is that we just sold a vintage Lewis Galoob Pretty Castle set of toys which also date from the 1990s. The dolls are very similar to the Polly Pocket dolls--little tiny figures that you can place into little pieces in the floors of the different rooms of the castle. It really is a cool playset. Below are a couple of pics.

What are your favorite vintage toys (I use "vintage" a bit loosely!)?