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

Remember Blacklight Art? 🐴 Vintage 1960s Wonder Mobile, Neon Horse Heads & Horseshoes

Size: 12" x 5 1/2" ~ New old stock, still sealed on its card.

🐴 Five horses, five lucky horseshoes, and enough fluorescent ink to light up a stable. This is the Wonder Mobile, item no. PA-309, made in Japan and sold under the asahi name - and every one of these is still sealed on the hanging card it shipped on, never once strung up over anybody's crib. I'm a sucker for a mobile nobody ever took out of the package. It's a little time capsule: the thread still knotted the way the factory tied it, the wire arms still bundled up top, the colors still loud enough to make you squint.

🐎 What's on the card

Ten die-cut pieces, not five. Each horse head is its own cut-out, and it hangs on its own black thread inside its own studded horseshoe. The thread runs from a hole at the top of the shoe up to the wire, and from a second hole on the shoe's inner rim down to the top of the horse's head. So once it's hung, the whole thing moves twice over: the shoe turns on its wire, and the horse turns inside the shoe. That's a clever bit of design for a paper mobile.

Every horse wears a bridle with a round ring and a little diamond or square buckle in a contrasting color, and every one has a clear-domed wiggle eye stuck on. The pairings, left to right:

• Blue horse in a green horseshoe
• Pink horse in a blue horseshoe
• Green horse in a blue horseshoe
• Yellow horse in an orange horseshoe
• Orange horse in a yellow horseshoe

Above them, a bundle of thin wire arms lies across the header, tied with black thread and fitted with a metal split ring to hang the whole works from. The pieces sit on a black backing card striped with pairs of white bars - it looks just like the rails of a horse stall. The tan header is printed WONDER MOBILE in big black capitals, with ITEM NO. PA-309 and the asahi mark tucked into the corner, and the card is sealed under clear film.

🗓️ The ZIP code that dates it

Down at the foot of the card it says ASAHI, N.Y. 10010, and that five-digit number is the whole dating story. The Post Office introduced the ZIP Code - short for Zone Improvement Plan - on July 1, 1963, and sold it to the public with a cartoon mail carrier called Mr. ZIP. A card printed with one can't be older than the summer of 1963.

Before that, big-city mail ran on numbered postal zones, started in 1943 in 124 cities. A New York address like this one would have carried a zone number instead - something like "New York 10, N.Y." - and when the ZIP arrived, the last two digits in the big cities generally matched the old zone. ZIPs weren't even required at first; bulk mailers had to use them from 1967. The card still spells the state N.Y., with periods. The Post Office's two-letter NY came along that October, though plenty of firms held on to the old style for years. Everything else about this mobile, from the ink to the Japan mark, is right at home in the 1960s.

🗽 10010: the toy trade's own ZIP

Here's the part I love. 10010 is a slice of Manhattan that takes in the Flatiron District, Gramercy Park and part of Kips Bay - and it is the ZIP of 200 Fifth Avenue, the Toy Center, the building the American toy business called home. Asahi's New York address shared its ZIP with the headquarters of the whole trade.

The building went up in 1909 as the Fifth Avenue Building, sixteen stories designed by Robert Maynicke and Julius Franke, on the site of the old Fifth Avenue Hotel, looking out over Madison Square Park. When World War I choked off toy imports from the European makers who had long stocked America's shelves, the toy companies moved in, and the building became the center of the American toy industry. Most of the big names were there by World War II. Trade ads called it "The Toy Center of the World" and called the street "The Street of the Toy Makers," and Kenner, Tonka, Hasbro and Mattel all kept showrooms under its roof.

The 1960s were when the place really dug in. The building's managers, Helmsley-Spear, began renting new space only to toy companies. In 1967 the Toy Center took over a second sixteen-story building at 1107 Broadway, and the next year a glass pedestrian bridge over 24th Street joined the two at the ninth floor. A.C. Gilbert, the Erector set people, kept their New York showroom at 200 Fifth until the company folded in 1967. Every year the American International Toy Fair - a show that goes back to 1903 - ran through the place, bringing as many as 10,000 buyers, and by 1981 its 600 tenants handled 95 percent of the toy business in the United States, worth about $4 billion. The trade drifted out in the early 2000s and the building was sold in 2005, but for most of a century, if you sold toys in America, you did your deals in that ZIP.

🌅 Asahi: the morning sun

Look at the mark in the top corner: an arch-topped box holding a lower-case "a" with a solid red dot set into it, the word asahi underneath, and MADE IN JAPAN at the foot. Asahi (朝日) is Japanese for the morning sun - asa, morning, and hi, sun - and that red dot is the sun coming up, right there on the card. It's one of my favorite little logos.

JAPAN turns up twice on the card, once in that box and once in white at the lower left, and the reason it's there at all is the law. Under Section 304 of the Tariff Act of 1930, imported goods, or their containers, have to be marked in English with the country they came from, so the American shopper knows where a thing was made. And it's plain MADE IN JAPAN, not "Made in Occupied Japan," the marking Japanese exports had to carry from 1947 until the rule was lifted at the end of 1949 - many kept using it until the occupation ended on April 28, 1952.

This mobile comes from the years after the great Japanese tin-toy boom. Collectors put the heyday of those tin toys at roughly 1952 to 1962; after that, plastic took over, labor costs climbed, and more and more toymaking moved to Taiwan and Hong Kong. A bright paper mobile with a Made in Japan mark and a New York ZIP is a cheerful piece of that trade's later years.

✨ Why it glows

Those colors aren't ordinary ink. They're fluorescent, and that kind of color starts with two brothers in Berkeley, California. Robert and Joseph Switzer began experimenting with black light and fluorescence in the 1930s and made the first black-light fluorescent paints; in the 1940s the brothers developed pigments that glow in plain daylight by turning ultraviolet light into visible color. That's the trick behind the almost-too-bright look of these horses, and it's the same science that makes fluorescent color light up under a blacklight.

After the war, advertisers grabbed daylight-fluorescent color to make things stand out: Tide's box went fluorescent in 1959, and clothing, posters and hula hoops all got the treatment. In the 1960s it became the look of psychedelic art - think of the cover of Cream's 1967 album Disraeli Gears - and the brothers' company took the name DayGlo Color Corp. in February 1969. Blacklight posters caught on with the psychedelic crowd in the United States between 1967 and 1969. This little horse mobile comes from the same bright, loud stretch of American taste.

👀 Those wiggle eyes

Every horse has a wiggle eye - a googly eye, if you grew up calling them that. They're built as a white backing under a clear, hard plastic dome with a loose black disc inside, so the pupil rolls around whenever the piece moves. The story goes that the "googly" name traces back to Barney Google, the comic-strip character with the exaggerated eyes. On a mobile that turns in every draft, they give each of these horses a slightly goofy, slightly startled look that I can't help grinning at.

🎐 Why we call it a mobile

The word has its own good story. In 1931 Marcel Duchamp suggested "mobile" for Alexander Calder's early moving sculptures, and the name stuck. The form became a nursery favorite too, hung over cribs. The Wonder Mobile is that same idea done in die-cut card and fluorescent ink, with a set of horses that never stop turning.

🍀 Luck, heels down

Here's a bit of old horseshoe folklore that makes this mobile better than it has any right to be. Horseshoes were iron, long believed to keep evil spirits away, and tradition says a shoe was held on with seven nails, seven being the luckiest number. Then there's the old argument over how to hang one. Ends up, the saying goes, and the shoe catches luck and keeps it from running out. Ends down, and it pours its blessings on whoever passes underneath - and blacksmiths hung theirs heels-down on purpose, so the luck would spill onto their work.

Every horseshoe on this card hangs heels-down, the blacksmith's way. So by the old rules, hang it over a desk, a window or a doorway and it's tipping five shoes' worth of luck onto whoever sits below. And there's an older legend still: St. Dunstan, the blacksmith, nailed a shoe to the Devil's own foot and only pulled it off once the Devil promised never to enter a house with a horseshoe over the door. I'd hang one of these by the front door just to be safe.

📦 Condition

New old stock. Each one is still sealed under its original film on its original card, the pieces held in place by their little tabs, the wires and split ring still bundled across the top. None of these has ever been hung, so you'd be the first to let those horses spin.