Showing posts with label windup toys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label windup toys. Show all posts
Thursday, July 6, 2017
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Harold Lloyd: it's play-time!
If I may repeat the obvious, this blog, formerly titled margaret gunning's house of dreams, has been renamed after Harold Lloyd's famed movie character. For reasons unknown, Harold called his screen persona the Glass Character, which is nice because it sounds so romantical-like and is also a great title for a novel.
Which I have written. Which came out in spring 2014 with Thistledown Press. Watch for it!
Meantime, the search for Lloyd curiosa is endless. I just keep finding things. He was the Star Wars or Sponge Bob of his day, spawning an entire industry of Harold "stuff". Back then the stuff was mostly tin, plastics being pretty much uninvented. These are toys that you just don't see any more, toys that in fact baffle me because I don't know what they frickin' ARE.
Harold Lloyd
Long-Leg, Long-Arm Sparkler
Description
Harold Lloyd Long-Leg, Long-Arm Sparkler Moving
arms and legs. Still emits sparks when plunged. Made by Isla in Spain. Circa
1925. Very rare. From the collection of Gary Selmonsky. Tin. 9".
(Excellent).
About this, I can only say *WTF!?* a few hundred times. I have no idea what a sparkler is, so I've had to come up with a guess. Judging by its arms and legs, which appear to be jointed, this thing must have had a sort of seizure while you "plunged" it. Plunging implying a sort of pumping up and down, as with those old spinning tops. Why would it throw sparks? No doubt the grinding of metal on metal, meaning it might also have made a hideous noise. In the wrong hands, this thing seems dangerous, perhaps a forerunner to the cigarette lighter or barbecue starter. Certainly it should never have been given to children. As for the eyes, or lack of them, I'm glad I don't have one of these around the house because it might turn out to have "powers", I fear of the wrong sort.
Harold Lloyd Bumper Car
Description
Attributed to Gunthermann, c. 1926, clockwork driven, famed character sits at amusement bumper car, very colorful tin lithography, extremely hard to find, scarce version. 51/4" h x 3 1/2" dia.
Now THIS is cute, and I wouldn't mind having one, especially if it still functioned, twirling all over my desk. The depiction of Harold in tin is nicer than most. It reminds me of the movie Speedy and various others in which he hangs out at Coney Island. Imagine if you had a whole lot of them: you could play Harold Lloyd bumper cars all over your desk!
Harold
Lloyd Mechanical Bank
Description
Tin. Saalheimer & Strauss, Germany. Circa
1920s. Pull the lever down. The mouth opens and the tongue sticks out. Place a
coin on the tongue and release the lever. Provenance: F. H. Griffith, Stephen
Steckbeck. Condition Near Mint.
This is also cute, and very fine because Harold looks a whole lot more like his sweet self, except that the eyes are brown which is wrong. Harold had black-Irish or Welsh/Celtic coloring, very black hair, blue eyes and fair skin with copious freckles, which never completely faded with time. No one got it quite right in tin. But this contraption seems all very charming, until you read the description of what it does.
It eats money. Pull a lever down and he sticks out his tongue, and you put a coin on on it and he - oh I don't know, I guess a lot of mechanical banks worked that way back then, and a child might find it enchanting. But it bizarres me out big-time. I hope they didn't have to smash him like a piggybank when he was full.
Harold Lloyd Scissor Toy
Harold Lloyd Scissor Toy
Description
HAROLD LLOYD SCISSOR TOY Die-cut tin scissor-hand held and operated toy with great lithography
Oh Lor', oh Lor', I'm going back to bed now. This is a NIGHTMARE. Harold has a frog on his hat and looks like a dead thing. He isn't even scissors, not actually, though you stick your fingers in those round things (I guess) and work them like scissors. Maybe he lifts up his frog hat or something?
Harold Lloyd Whatever-it-is
Description all written in German, but presumably it's one of those wretched walking windup toys that grimaces and rolls its eyes.
POST-BLOG. While scrounging around for Harold toys, I found this. It's not a toy, and not even an antique, but a darling little glass Christmas ornament made for "the new millennium" (remember that? The big date that completely fizzled?). Probably worth gazillions of dollars, because extremely fragile. My cat used to knock glass ornaments down off the tree and play cat-hockey with
them, stick-handling them under the sofa where they would moulder for years, or (more likely) batting them against the wall and breaking them. Let's just be
grateful he never got his paws on Harold.
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Collect this Golden Age of Hollywood, Christopher Radko "Millennium Clock" Harold Lloyd, mouth-blown and handcrafted Polish glass Christmas tree ornaments, 1999, 99-980-0, 99980.
Produced only for 1999 as one of the millennium exclusives, this European hand blown gl ass ornament promises to endure through the generations! Hard-to-find and sought-after!
The depiction of Harold Lloyd holding on to the clock handle draws upon the famous scene in 1923 film, "Safety Last". Classic ornament that combines the famous clock hanging scene with the onset of the new millennium!
Wearing a green check jacket, brown pants and his trademark hat, Lloyd hangs precariously from the hands of a clock, high above the street where spectators gasp with surprise and horror. Will he fall? And how did he get there?
The death-defying scene, one of the most famous in silent movie history, is taken from "Safety Last", released in 1923. After taking one dangerous step after another to scale the department store in which he works as a low level clerk, his straw hat falls away as he desperately holds on for dear life. However, he wins the $1000 prize by attracting the most ever attention and business to the store, fulfilling his promise to his girl to make good.
On the back of the clock, written in white and surrounded by confetti, is, "Happy New 2000 Millennium". Almost a century later, Lloyd continues to be remembered as one of the great Golden Age of Hollywood greats!
More information about Harold Lloyd:
Along with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd revolutionized screen comedy, becoming one of the most respected stars of Hollywood's Golden Years, He began his film career after tossing a coin that pointed him towards Hollywood and became the lead in over 200 films from 1915 to 1947. He was the #1 box office attraction from 1927 to 1928 and won an Honorary Academy Award as "master Comedian and Good Citizen" in 1952.
Approximately 4 1/2 inches tall, the ornament has outstanding promise and is a "must have" for the Hollywood Golden Age collector.
CONDITION OF ITEM:
Mint collectible with original Radko hangtag and Radko gift box in excellent condition. Stored in a smoke-free environment.
Listing ID: 64681
(Imagine finding THIS under your tree!)
POST-BLOG BLATHER: I nearly forgot the best part! There's a YouTube video of one of the best Harold windup toys of all. It's pretty hideous, as they all are, but damned if I didn't make them into gifs anyway.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Thursday, September 6, 2012
My Harold Lloyd doll: I got my mojo working
NO! This is NOT my Harold doll, notnotnotnotnot. This is a horrifying clip depicting a Harold Lloyd windup toy from the 1930s, one that actually appears to still work. The Harold we see here has a sad affliction, some sort of seizure disorder that causes explosions of frenetic movement. He doesn't walk so much as flail along. Toys like this are worth plenty, and are uniformly hideous. I've even gone into this subject in past posts, and frankly I'm pretty sick of it.
So we know that Harold toys have existed for a long time. There were even Harold dolls, sort of, which consisted of two flat pieces of oilcloth sewn together with a uniform pattern stamped on them.
But soft! What's this??
It's a Harold with features, a face, hair, in three dimensions even. And glasses.
A Harold complete with white straw boater and bowtie. A soft and cuddly Harold, unlike those tin things that scare the hemoglobin out of me.
A Harold with blue eyes and glasses and hair like he had, sort of wavy and slicked-back.
A Harold who can doff his hat.
A sitting Harold.
And, most importantly. . . a Harold with SADDLE SHOES!
I am not too shy to tell you that I made this doll myself, and with no pattern. He evolved under my hands. I had certain feelings when I began this project. I'd been thinking about dolls and writing about dolls (and if you're following this blog, you'll be tired of the whole subject by now) and their strangeness, creepiness. There's something eerily powerful about a human making an image of a human. It goes back to the Venus of Willendorf or something. It has juju, cachet, mojo, power.
I feel like I lost track of my mojo a long time ago now, and I want it back. It's funny that, though I initially got very excited about this project, I then fell off it for a while and didn't particularly want to do it.
I think it was the misery and despair of realizing that no one seems to have the slightest interest in publishing my novel, The Glass Character, a fictionalized treatment of Harold Lloyd's life and loves. Part of me died when that happened, for I had so many hopes for it and STILL think it's the best thing I've ever written.
It dropped with a clunk. It was like throwing a pebble into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
So I needed Something. I don't believe in voodoo or anything (though obviously some people do), but I wonder if I might be able to beguile a sort of reverse voodoo here, to have some sort of power over somebody's attention or perception or influence or something.
To get someone to notice.
Harold got noticed, believe-you-me. He stood out. Part of it was his fierce ambition, part of it his sleek and slightly vulpine good looks, blue eyes crackling with intelligence and life force. A hell of a lot of it was a talent that was surprisingly slow to bloom. Even by his own admission, some of it was "luck", whatever that is, which is maybe what made him so incredibly superstitious.
(I just remembered something from several years ago, a very strange story. My granddaughter Caitlin, then only about five, found my DVD set of The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection. She saw the photo of the man with the glasses and his hair standing on end and looked at me strangely, then asked, "Grandma, is that you?"
"Yes," I said. "It's me."
"Can we watch this?"
"Of course. But we'll just play the good part."
So I put on Safety Last, the climbing scene, and all through it she was totally absorbed. Every once in a while she'd say, "Ah!" or "Oh!" when it looked like he might fall. At one point Ryan, only about 3, mosied in, put his hands over his eyes and said, "He's gonna faw! He's gonna faw!" He watched the rest of it through his fingers.
But after the clock-hanging scene was over, the spell seemed to be broken. "That's not really you, is it, Grandma." It wasn't a question.
"No, it isn't. It's a man named Harold Lloyd. I wrote a book about him."
A little while later I could tell she was still thinking. I asked her what she was thinking about. Then she looked at me and said the most remarkable thing.
"You're Harold Lloyd, and Harold Lloyd is you.")
You can't throw your heart over the jump and have your horse get halfway over it and get impaled on it and throw you off so that you land on your head and are paralyzed for life. So much for THAT adage. And it's NOT true that "you can do absolutely anything you want in life, so long as you keep on trying". That's the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever heard, and do you know what? I hear it EVERY DAMN DAY, along with "everything happens for a reason" (childhood cancer? Random shootings? The Holocaust?) and "God never gives us more than we can handle" (so then why are our prisons and mental hospitals always full to overflowing?)
And here I go into a rant again. I need my Harold doll, someone to watch over me. And though I know this sounds incredible, his eyes, the rather rudimentary blue eyes that I embroidered on myself, DO appear to follow me around through those glasses, the glasses that made Harold who he was.
I made him. I made his face, his eyes, his body, his shoes and hat. Without me he'd be bits of yarn in a basket, nothing. He is me; he is mine.
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