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2010 Toy Fair: Quick Look at Car Toys, part I

February 16, 2010 Toys 1 Comment

Toy Fair is the annual convention of the Toy Industry Association. Each year hundreds of toy manufacturers, toy store owners, and distributors gather in New York City to show off their latest products and hopefully make a few deals along the way. I had the opportunity of attending this convention and of course checking out the toys that a carguy would love his children to play with.

I focused mainly on car toys, but I also looked into classic toys that I have grown up with. After spending several hours at the fair I have found a lot of toys that were simply not good in one way or another, the below listed toys, however, were all clear winners. All these show high build quality in all aspects, including packing and directions. All were designed with a great amount of detail, all encourage creativity and enhance motor skills.
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Bruder

Bruder is a maker of high quality toy trucks, tractors, and other heavy machinery. The trucks are exact in many ways including: winches, water cannons, and lifts. All of the trucks are made under license from the various OEM manufacturers, making them rich in detail. Recently Bruder has launched a new line of trucks for kids ages two and up, called the Roadmax Series. These are more generic looking vehicles and omit smaller details making them safer for smaller children. The icing on the cake is that all Bruder vehicles were designed to be used indoors and outdoors.

LEGO

Lego should not need an introduction. Offering creative products for kids as young as 18-months, to some kits that would even offer an endless amount of fun to an old geezer such as me, Lego has everyone covered.

The Duplo line offers an entry into the building world for your toddler. This year the line will expand from the existing city and farm themes to movie themes. This will allow children to recreate their favorite movies scenes over and over again.

The standard Lego sets, for the lack of better term, offer all kinds of themes. Those include realistic city themes, movie themes, and various Lego-specific fantasy themes. All Legos are always compatible with one another, including Duplo, so your kids can mix and match and never stop playing.

Children over seven will probably like the Creator sets. Each set offers directions to build three distinctively different models from the provided blocks. While the pieces are compatible with the above, the Creator sets were not designed with the little Lego people in mind, but you can make them fit!

Technic line, for kids ages 10 and over, is the most challenging of all Lego series to build. The creations are really amazing, but it takes serious ingenuity to build something different than what the set suggests. In recent years Lego has introduced a series of electric motors and even remote controls into these sets which make them more enjoyable to play with once assembled.

Norscot

Norscot is actually a company that makes promotional products for other companies. One of their lines is die-cast models of Caterpillar heavy duty equipment. More detailed models than toys per se, the vehicles are made of very high quality materials which make them actually quite heavy. Just about every piece of equipment made CAT is available in five different scales, including the popular 1:87 HO scale, a railroad modeler’s favorite.

Recently Norscot has signed a licensing agreement with Kenworth/Peterbuilt and now makes their popular tractors and trailers in 1:50 scale. Order your truck with a lowboy gooseneck trailer and tow your favorite piece of Caterpillar equipment all over your desk. Yea, so it’s not really for your kids but who ever said that adults don’t like to play with toys?

Playmobil

I think of Playmobil as the anti-Lego. When I was growing up you either had Lego or Playmobil, never both. Playmobil are everyday life scenes recreated on a smaller scale. There is no building of anything and very little assembly, but all structures are much more life-like.

There are more than thirty (!!) different themes, with several sets available in each theme. Usually in each theme there are one or two big sets, such as a hospital for instance. Adding onto the hospital theme are series of smaller sets such as various ambulances, helicopters, operating rooms, and similar.

Playmobil offers a really amazing amount of toys. The buyer is limited only by the size of the playroom and parents’ wallet. This is really the kind of toy that, much like Lego, has stood the test of time and can be passed on from generation to generation.

Madame Alexander

Last, but not least, are Madame Alexander dolls. I actually do not know anything about this company and its line of collectible products other than the fact that they have just released a set of Radio City Rockettes dolls. In order to promote the new dolls, actual Radio City Rockettes were on hand and they posed for this picture for me. That is all.

Big thanks to Alex Nunez from AutoBlog.com for informing me about this Expo.

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