Vintage 1960s Wonder Mobile — Neon Horse Heads & Horseshoes Blacklight Art 🐴

Size: 12 x 5.5 inches ~ New old stock, still sealed on its card. They vary a little one to the next.

🐴 Five horse heads, five colors, and not one of them has ever been out of the package. This is the Wonder Mobile, item no. PA-309, from Asahi of Japan - a strip of die-cut horse heads and horseshoes in electric fluorescent color, each one wearing a little bridle and a wiggle eye that rolls when you tip the card. They're still strung on their wire, still hooked to the metal ring meant to hang them, still sealed under the original film. I love finding these completely untouched.

🗓️ Dating the card. The foot of the card reads ASAHI, N.Y. 10010 - and that's the detail that actually dates the piece. Five-digit ZIP codes didn't exist before July 1, 1963, so a card printed with one can't be any older than that. This is a 1960s piece, plain and simple.

🗽 That ZIP code is a neighborhood, too. 10010 is Manhattan's Flatiron district, and for most of the twentieth century that neighborhood was the toy business's front door to the country. The Toy Center at 200 Fifth Avenue - put up in 1909 - filled with toy and novelty showrooms from the First World War onward, trade ads called it "The Toy Center of the World," and every major American toy company kept a room there for the yearly Toy Fair. The ZIP on this card puts Asahi's New York address squarely in that district, in the years when it was the center of the whole industry.

🇯🇵 Asahi Toy Co. Asahi means 'morning sun' in Japanese. The lower-case asahi mark and MADE IN JAPAN are printed right on the card. Asahi Toy Co. was a Tokyo toymaker founded in 1948, one of the Japanese firms that spent the postwar years shipping toys and novelties out to the rest of the world - this little mobile is a bright, cheerful piece of that export trade.

🐎 The mobile itself. Five horse heads in bridles, each one framed by its own studded horseshoe, strung across the card in blue-and-green, pink-and-blue, green-and-blue, yellow-and-orange, and orange-and-yellow. The fluorescent inks were made to jump off a shelf - the kind of ink that also does something fun under a blacklight, if you've got one handy. Never opened, never hung, never touched - exactly how it left the factory.