New Zealand’s iconic toy brand Fun Ho! celebrates its 90th anniversary this year.

Basic and sturdy, Fun Ho! toys were almost indestructible. Any sent to the factory for repair until circa 1977 came back fixed free of charge. Fun Ho! always stood by its product.

The story began with Jack Underwood’s experiments with making lead slush toys in the basement of his Wellington home in the 1930s.

Assuming the catalogue numbers for the Lead toys range that began the Fun Ho! history in 1935 are in catalogue number order, No.1 Fire Engine Pump was the first produced. A lead model called Truck appeared as No.4 in civilian livery from 1935. The first Fun Ho! truck was also made as No.10 Army Truck, and as No.10a in Air Force finish.

No.93, the Small Half-Ton Truck, the first of the Cast Aluminium series lorries manufactured, went into production at the Wellington factory in 1942. During its 23 years of manufacture, the half tonner saw several modifications to the finish. The first version had the five windows cut out. They eventually all got filled in and sometimes were painted silver.

Lead toys continued in production until 1945, the year the factory moved from Wellington to New Plymouth. Introduced in 1947, when the factory was at New Plymouth, No.161, the Fire Engine Fixed Ladders, stayed in production for 29 years until 1976. The toy is arguably the most famous Fun Ho! product, after its depiction on the 40-cent postage stamp from the 1999 Nostalgia set in the Millennium series.

Fun Ho! relocated to the nearby town of Inglewood in 1949, where most of the production took place. During the 1950s and 1960s, the brand name thrived in an era of tight import controls for toys.

A popular toy introduced at Inglewood is No.522 Heavy Dump Truck. The dumper had a Commer cab and stayed in the catalogue from 1956 to 1981, becoming one of the most successful Fun Ho! toys, with 25 years in production.

When the same cab was fitted to No.543 Ditch Digger in 1964, the attempt to create a more sophisticated model failed. Only one production run of an estimated 100 units occurred. This ambitious sand-cast aluminium toy proved difficult to make, time-consuming and plain uneconomic.

All the Midget models originated at the Mamaku Street, Inglewood, factory, which served as the home for the original Fun Ho! Toy Museum from 1990. Fun Ho! Midgets filled a gap on the domestic market when shipments of Lesney’s Matchbox Toys were infrequent. Despite lacking the sophisticated features of the English imports, these rudimentary models cast from zinc really took off. The copper- or chrome-plate early Midget models can form a collection in themselves.

By 1962, Streamlux, an Australian company, had stopped making die-cast model vehicles. Underwood Engineering bought the dies, from which it cast the original Fun Ho! Midgets.

A half-and-half Midget, No.18 Austin Articulated Truck, comprised the Streamlux Austin cab and a trailer designed and produced in New Zealand. Fun Ho! deleted all the Austin cab models in 1972.

When the manufacture of the original Fun Ho! toys ended in 1982, these durable toys could no longer compete against the growing number of cheaper imports in an increasingly deregulated economy. A few models in the gravity-cast ‘800’ Series Sandpit Toys were returned from 1986 to 1997.

In 1996, the museum introduced its new Repro series, aimed at collectors. The cast-aluminium models were handmade from the original moulds and stamped Repro on the reverse side. A baked-enamel paint finish and more hand detailing in the trim were other ways of telling them from the originals.

Some stored Midget castings were assembled as Repro models in 1996, with the cockpits receiving blue glazing in this issue.

The museum relocated to the current Rata Street building in May 1999, where Richard Jordan and Phillipa Peters now produce handmade Repro versions of Cast Aluminium Fun Ho! toys in the museum’s purpose-built foundry.

More information can be found at funho.com.

Pre-loved Cast Aluminium toys photographed for the article at the Fun Ho! National Toy Museum.