Vintage Love: vintage Fisher Price mini bus toy

Fisher Price toys were such a huge part of my childhood. I think some of my earliest memories consist of me pulling the Chatter Telephone around the living room. This mini bus was also an early addition to the family toybox. I blogged a little while ago about my vintage Fisher Price Hospital, which is still going strong. My Mum has kept many pieces of my Fisher Price childhood collection. My daughter loves to play with them when she visits Grandma's house, some are nearly forty years old. Proof, if proof were needed, that good toys never go out of date.

We had a Fisher Price circus train, followed by this mini bus, the hospital mentioned above, an A-frame woodland retreat and finally the 'Main Street' toy. The mini bus is a favourite of mine, mainly because I love the way the people bobble up and down as you push the bus about. It was a rough ride across the kitchen floor, but the Little People never stopped smiling. I loved all the Fisher Price toys given to us by our parents, each new addition fired my childhood imagination and added to the world inhabited by the Little People.

I only noticed the other day that the label on the back reads "copyright 1969 Fisher Price Toys Division of the Quaker Oats Co". I had no idea Quaker Oats owned Fisher Price toys. After a bit of online searching I found this interesting page from Collectors Weekly detailing the history of Fisher Price Toys. The site explains in more detail:
"Up until 1969, Fisher-Price was owned by the four (original) founders and a handful of stockholders. From 1969 to 1991, the company was a subsidiary of Quaker Oats. Briefly, in the 1990s, the company became independent again, only to be swallowed in 1993 by Barbie-making toy behemoth Mattel, which still owns the brand today."


Fisher Price toys are still going strong and manufacture many of the best selling toys available to babies and preschoolers today. Our daughter has grown up playing with many of the modern Fisher Price toys alongside my 'vintage' versions. I hope they will become as big a part of her childhood memories as they are for me.

If you'd like to see more retro goodies, head on over to my "Vintage Finds" board over on Pinterest...

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