This is takin’ it waaaay back — people were joking about creepy vintage mechanical toys on Twitter, and it totally reminded me of the mechanical monkey I had when I was not much older than a baby. It was originally manufactured and marketed as “Musical Jolly Chimp” between the 1950’s and the 1970’s by Japanese company Daishin C.K., according to Wikipedia. But it was resold under various names on the street in New York City.
My guess is that my father picked it up for me after work in the 1970’s. (He was a municipal bus driver in Manhattan.)
It was loud. It did scare me — but I also remember loving it too, and it remained in my toybox for years. (Maybe I had a split personality as a little kid or something.)
Anyway, you can see the thing in action over at Youtube, courtesy of echelon16.
Photo credit: YuMaNuMa, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
