Tiny music

Children's toys and technology have always had an appeal, even playing a part in a ultimately unsuccessful blog that was folded into this one but one thing you might not get is the connection between the evergreen Etch-o-Sketch and a incredibly small record player for children.

You see Ohio Arts were the people that distributed that drawing toy we all knew and loved and as a organization were into all sorts of novelties.

The Mighty Tiny was a product of the late 1960's thinking coming into market in 1970 where things were still pretty groovy in more than one way and this was another way following the PocketDisc of 1968 of trying to miniaturize record playing for children accustomed to parents and older siblings having standard records.

Records you could take with you when you played.

The records were themselves really small, not much bigger than the diameter of your thumb unlike the four inches of the PocketDisk so had smaller groove dimensions but played around 90 rpm. 

That is the turntable, powered by a AA battery with a tiny arm that came out of a recess on the top which had a needle that went to a plastic acoustic reproducer.

If you had certain dolls, you may of had something similar built into them but that meant they didn't play for more than just over ten seconds!

For all that ten seconds counted for great attention was paid to providing a record sleeve worthy of something bigger.

The target audience was mainly girls although you might feel theirs something rather Addams Family like about the box illustration!

I shouldn't need to say reproduction from a steel non replaceable needle to a plastic baffle isn't quite hifi but that didn't stop the attempt to upsell with a record storage unit and even a " stereopex" a stereogram although let's be honest this system was strictly mono from how the records were cut but you had a miniature unit that looked like your parents who if they were like mine had such big wooden music playing pieces of furniture back then.

To me it's more like dolls furniture but hey if you loved your dollies and lots of tiny shiny things this would of been just your thing back then.