In a little detail about my life that will likely shock precisely nobody, my desk is pretty well covered with little toy cars and robots and electrical components that are fun to hold and other, you know, crap. My kid, Otto, likes to come down and inspect all the crap for treasures he may have missed on prior inspections, and the other day he hit paydirt: nestled amongst all the other stuff on the weird shelf above my desk lurked four peculiar little toy cars, decidedly different than any of the other toy cars on the shelf, or, really, in any toy aisle or rack at a drugstore. That’s because my toy cars are relics of not just an era long gone, but a whole aesthetic that, while maybe not completely extinct, is at the least endangered. It’s an aesthetic that I think grew from the underground comics movement of the 1960s, became weirdly mainstream in the 1970s, and mostly died out by the late 1980s. But, before that happened, it gave birth to some of the strangest little toy cars to end up in sweaty kid hands. Let’s look at these.
I have four of them — a kind of sad-sack-looking cop car, what seems to be some kind of woody wagon, a lumpy ambulance, and a little blue pickup truck:
All the cars are plastic, but look like they’ve been sculpted out of clay or plasticine, perhaps by someone not entirely sober. The toys have a sort of whimsical, haphazard look, a little misshapen and forlorn but also charming and full of character. So what the hell are they? They’re Funkymobiles! Made by the Wallace Berrie & Company corporation (then Applause, which is gone now), whom you may know best because in 1979 the company got the global rights to crank out Smurfs — you know, the little blue beings who used their own name as a catchall part of speech as often as possible. These guys:
So, Wallace Berrie made these guys, which I’ve known because the name was mouled into the plastic on the bottom. I had always thought that these were the strange creations of old Wally B, but when I was researching them I found what seems to be the one page on the internet that goes into the history of these ridiculous things, and that’s when I had my mind blown: Funkymobiles are a knockoff.
Go ahead and take a moment to wipe off the no-doubt generous aftermath of your spit-take from your monitor, and take an extra moment if chili was involved. Because here’s the truth: Funkymobiles, made in 1976, were actually pretty blatant copies of a line of cars called Road Rovers, licensed by Hallmark from yet another company, LJN Toys, back in 1974.
So you can understand the level of knockoffery we’re talking about here, this is how I remember, for example, the Funkymobiles I own being packaged:
I don’t have the little boxes anymore, but I remember them: they were little illustrated tableaus, little scenes of where the cars would have existed, rendered in the same cartoonish and sort of loose style of the cars themselves. They also had a little clear plastic sleeve you could slide on and off. Okay, so now, take a look at some Road Rovers in their packaging, from a bit earlier:
Heeeyyyyyy. Those Road Rovers there were from 1975, and the first Funkymobiles came in 1976. There’s no real defending the Funkymobiles here, really: they saw something that worked for Hallmark and made about as blatant a ripoff as you could get away with, from what I can tell. Especially the cop cars up there, which look like two- and four-door variants from the same municipal police department, and even the box art is remarkably similar, as Darren Wheeling points out in his writeup of these, using the two fire truck examples:
Look at the basic scene in there: fireman on pole, windows with those circle-on-a-string pulls, boots by the floor, hats hanging – nothing unexpected for a fire station, but it really looks like the Funkymobile artist was tossed a Firey Fred and told to make that, but, you know, different.
The big difference between the Funkymobiles and the Road Rovers is that the Funkymobiles were made of injection-molded plastic, while the Road Rovers were die-cast metal. The plastic allowed for a bit more detail in the mold, so things like door cutlines are actually incised and not just painted, but overall the look and level of detail are remarkably similar.
So, let’s get back to this whole look, because that’s what makes these little cars so novel and strange. It’s actually not really a look you see rendered in three dimensional objects, like these cars are, but the aesthetic does seem to translate, partially because the handmade nature of the cars feels almost illustrative:
Really, they’re like toy car sketches, quick and dirty, but somehow rendered in plastic you can hold. If you look at the original blister packs that Road Rovers came in, you can see much more obvious illustrations:
If you look at these, I think it’s pretty clear that the original inspiration for this look came from the root wellspring of the underground comics movement of the late 1960s, especially the work of R.Crumb, and then mainstream-ized via the somewhat sloppier, less detailed illustrative style of 1970s greeting cards and popular comic strips like the bald, pantless Ziggy. That’s this guy:
These are unlikely inspirations for something like toy cars, but as you can see on that Zap cover, cars were of course something that wanted, maybe needed to be drawn.
I don’t really feel disappointed that these little weird-ass cars I’ve had rattling around in my life for about 40 plus years turned out to be shameless knockoffs. In fact, that just kind of makes them even better. They’re a product of that childhood decade I remember — a strange, exuberant, sloppy time. It was a time when a knockoff of a toy car based on a look defined by countercultural underground comics just somehow made sense.
(Any pics I didn’t take of my few Funkymobiles are from Darren Wheeling)
This make me want to smurfing smurf.
Interpret that how you like. 😉
“Fuzz Mobile” has now entered my vocabulary.
My mom has a little toy moving van that is suspiciously similar to this aesthetic; I’ll have to find out who made it. (It’s not the “Merry Mover”; this one is blue with green highlights and “MOVE-IT” on the side.)
I’d love to see more automotive-adjacent posts about stuff like this tucked in to the posts about real cars and wrenching. We don’t need a whole series about the virtues of working doors on Matchboxes versus the coefficient of friction on a Hot Wheels axle (or do we?) Anyway, there are probably plenty of toy-focused sites for that stuff and we don’t want the Autopian to stray too far off topic. But I gotta think there are some things that would be right in the illustrious founders’ wheelhouses, like some really good red- and amber-colored transluscent plastic marker lights (Torchinsky) I remember on the ones I had in the ’70’s or a deep dive into what I consider the vastly inferior Tootsietoys, plenty of which turned into rust after I left them in the back yard (Tracy).
I’m 99% sure I have the Road Rover Mail Truck in my tub full of diecast cars. Can I trade it to Jason for an Autopian Membership?
I had the Fuzz Mobile when I was a kid. Memories! It’s probably in a shoe box tucked away in a closet.
I never had these growing up, but I do still have a ceramic bank of a car that is in the same aesthetic. My mom was into ceramics and made it for me one Christmas. It still sits on a shelf in my office collecting dust instead of pennies.
I feel like I remember seeing these at thrift stores in the 90s/early aughts, mixed in the bags with Happy Meal Hot Wheels and random k-nex pieces.
Ramblin’ Wreck is a registered trademark of the Georgia Institute of Technology so that particular model was a double ripoff.
Oh man I had those Smurfs!
Maybe I’m imagining things, but there was a line of Sesame Street toy cars in the 80’s (I have Bert’s taxi cab), and I feel like I can see the line connecting that droopy, bulbous R.Crumb aesthetic to these, the same way the tune for Manana was apparently lifted from an Italian soft-core film.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/6/6f/Bertstaxicab2.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090919050329
Things lost their ‘cartoony’ shape in the 1990s. If there’s not faux realism there’s something very ugly about the attempts to be soft edged and cute.
John Kricfalusi, the now disgraced ren and stimpy creator, used to rail about this lack on his old blogspot where he was attempting to teach people how to draw and think in the old caricatured cartoony style. We need to go back!
“Things lost their cartoony shape in the 90’s”
It was because of the rise of the CADs. Computers have no sense of humor and cannot do curvy organic lines. Imagine SKYNET drawing a flower for you, or making a child’s toy.
However, since I am personally neither curved nor kinked, I welcome out straight-lined, straight-laced Overlords, and I’m workin’ Boss, I’m workin’.
Honest!
clay or plasticine?
My first guess was candy or frosting.
And the Smurfs? Our kids’ collection has tiny screw eyes in their heads and hang on the Chrismas tree every season — along with all the old Happy Meal toys.
Wow, I’m almost positive I remember seeing either these, or another knockoff of a knockoff, for sale at Rite Aid when I was a kid and honestly haven’t seen or thought of them since. I’ll admit they’re kind of charming, but I’m not starting a collection anytime soon, I own too much crap already
So, is Benny the Cab from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” a Road Rover or a Funkymobile?
They look like toys out of a happy meal.
This article is triggering perhaps a long-lost memory, because seeing that side profile of Ramblin’ Wreck is making me almost certain I had one of those, and perhaps a couple others in the same product line. I’m going to have to go to my parents’ house and see if they’re there somewhere.
Whoa, I had some of these as a kid. Never knew what they were since they were just passed down from my grandad who lived into his 90s. Thank you for finding an answer to childhood memories that I wasn’t looking for.
I had a few of these as well — loved them as a kid! The only one I remember (looking at all the pics) is Ramblin’ Wreck. I wonder if there could have been any others, since I feel like I’d remember them.
Looks like there were others. Gallopin’ Grape was another I had for sure. I suspect it’s in a box somewhere in my disaster of a garage.
I gotta say, I like the Funkymobiles better than the Road Rovers.
Right? Maybe it’s because of the different production method, but the overall “style” is better. The Road Rovers are really blobby and lacking character.
Ugh, I can’t stand the R. Crumb aesthetic… the sloppy, globular, pulsating look just makes me uncomfortable. The writing is pretty good, though. It’s like the Circus Peanuts of illustrations.
Keep in mind that these and R. Crumb comics are a sort of extension of the Sixties. A youthful response to the remaining rock-ridged, military strait-laced mainstream culture left over from the Fifties where even deep into the 1970s, someone as innocuous as “Fonzie” was a feared counterculture figure, and not allowed to a leather jacket on TV. It’s supposed to make you uncomfortable. Well, comfortable with being uncomfortable, actually. Get loose, relax and enjoy.
I used to hate Ed Roth’s Rat Fink and anything George Barris for years until I re-evaluated the art through a cultural lens. Such will never be favorites, but at least now they don’t inspire a visceral mental retch whenever I see them.
Definitely a 70’s underground comix vibe. A college track teammate, Steve Lafler, created a strip, “Aluminum Foil,” for the school daily newspaper that he expanded into a comic that’s still out there online (what isn’t) and very much concurrent with this artistic style. I’d say the Funkymobiles also have a little genetic material from the LSD trip that was 1930s Looney Tunes.
Got a link? Google is foiled by that description of the comic.
The Road Rovers may have predated the Funkymobiles, however the Road Rovers were missing one thing.
Everyone needs a Golden Gooch
They offend our understanding of “car-ness” because they lack symmetry. Back when I was doing some work at the GM Heritage collection and they were 3D scanning classic cars for video games and other licensing purposes they told me that they generally just scanned one half the vehicle and mirror imaged the point cloud for the opposite side because…symmetry.
That strategy would absolutely not work for a lot of classic Italian coachbuilt cars
Keep on truckin…
When I saw the header picture I thought the cars looked familiar. Turns out I have or had a Merry Mover. I last saw it a few years ago in a pile of toy cars my son had accumulated.
My mom kept a lot of my childhood toys in preparation for grandchildren. Every GI Joe figure and vehicle, every He-Man figure and Castle Greyskull, and all my toy cars. Turns out the rubber band connecting Joe’s torso to his legs tends to dry rot over 35 years, probably more accurately depicting what the aftermath of a conflict with Cobra would actually entail. Some of the He-Man figured appendage joints also became brittle and snapped off while my niece was playing with them. She still had Barbie’s Dream House and the GMC Motorhome to play with, though (Originally my sisters).
If the cartoons are an accurate depiction of what a GI Joe/Cobra conflict looks like (and of course it is), I can definitely see more of them dying of the ravages of old age than being wounded in combat. Neither side could hit the broad side of a barn with those blue/red laser rifle things they all carried.
I always enjoyed watching the pilots eject out of the fireball after the plane exploded.
What’s the wait time for a new rubber band through the VA?
Not sure, but I do know you can get a bag of them off Amazon. My brother-in-law gave him his old GI Joes, and both Mrs. Six and I have learned how to replace those little rubber bands.