Gallery: The Bizarre Toy Cameras That Heralded the Age of Instagram
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A new coffee table book, *Camera Crazy*, catalogs the wave of toy cameras that flooded the market from the 1960s onward. Nestlé released this cow cam in Italy, to promote their Fruttolo yogurt line. Collectors could get one in the mail in exchange for stickers found on yogurt packages.
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Once toy plastic cameras became cheap to manufacture, corporations started using them as promotional material. In 1971, for three StarKist can labels and $4.95 anyone could get this Charlie the Tuna camera.
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The 12-ounce can shape lent itself easily to handheld cameras, so beverage brands—Bud, Heineken, Pepsi, and Fanta, to name a few—released these 110 and 135-film models.
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Some toy cameras were just that: toys. Novelty product maker Accoutrements released this brand-less Deluxe Fry Cam more recently, in 2000.
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This Fred Flintstone novelty camera from 1975 cost $5 at the time.
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When Nintendo released their Gameboy camera in 1998, it was the smallest digital camera made. It also featured a then-revolutionary feature: a swiveling lens, allowing for early selfies.
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The packaging on this 1984 Gobots camera from Tonka read: “A real camera just like Mom’s and Dad’s!”
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The Voltron camera from 1985 did more than just tout a brand...
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...it transformed into a robot from the animated television series *Voltron: Defender of the Universe.*
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Not every toy camera marketing effort worked. Barcelona-based company Certex rolled out this *Indiana Jones* camera in 1987. It was perhaps too late for the fans; the company went bankrupt.
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Toy cameras are a huge part of consumer culture in Japan. Cult Toyko-based maker SuperHeadz made this pocket-sized Demekin fisheye camera.
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“In novelty shops there are these huge sections with nothing but cameras, and Polaroids and Fuji cameras are huge there,” says Christopher Salyers, who wrote *Camera Crazy* with Buzz Poole. This Japanese camera by toy company Fuuvi is a point-and-shoot designed as a juice box.
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The tiny digital Necondo camera was a Japanese model, based off cat illustrations by Swedish ceramic designer Lisa Larson.
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Even though the novelty camera market slowed down when digital photography started to crowd out film, some makers persist. This Lego digital cam was released in 2011.
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A collectible: the Snoopy-Matic, from 1980.
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Some companies did early experiments with new ways to frame the film and add novelty to the prints. The *Star Wars* Picture Plus Image Camera from 1999 uses slides to superimpose six rotating characters onto each frame.
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Lomography, the quirky analog camera company, is keeping the novelty camera market alive today. This Supersampler is one of the Austrian company's smaller offerings.
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One the earlier toy cameras: this dictionary-in-disguise is from 1970.
