It’s odd to think about certain bits of technology that were once common in your life and now essentially no longer exist at all. This is, I suppose, a byproduct of aging, and it’s the sort of thing that happens gradually enough that we tend not to notice it until it just kind of pops into our head, unbidden, like a missionary at the door. But unlike a missionary at the door, you can’t just turn the hose on these realizations, at least not easily. The one that popped into my head today was the realization that novelty landline phones, specifically ones made to look like cars, are pretty much extinct.
That’s right! The other kind of car phone! These were once A Thing!
That also got me wondering if there were any Volkswagen Beetle-shaped novelty phones, because those seem pretty obvious to do, though I can’t recall ever seeing one. Usually, I think novelty phones tended to be generic-ish sports car, something between a Corvette and a Porsche 911 and a bar of soap.
It’s probably worth talking about why these novelty telephones became a thing, and why they did when they did. Novelty phones started to really become a thing in the mid-to-late 1980s. It may seem strange that they weren’t a thing before that, because there’s really no technological reason why landline phones couldn’t have been built with fun plastic cases long before.
But the reason they didn’t exist before the 1980s, specifically 1983, was for strange politico-economic reasons. Specifically, prior to the 1980s, nobody actually owned their telephones; they were rented from the phone company. AT&T/Bell System, who had essentially a monopoly on telephony in America at the time, would claim that third-party phones could damage their lines, so they did not make it easy for anyone looking to have a custom phone.
If you really wanted a fancy phone, the Bell System would give you some options you could buy/rent, like these from 1976 that featured a Mickey Mouse phone, a few nostalgia-focused fancy models, and a couple more modern designs:
Really, though, that was it! And by far most people just used whatever basic phones the company would lease them. But then Ma Bell got broken up by an antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department, and in 1982 people could finally own their own phones.
This all seems so weird, in hindsight. Leasing a phone? What the hell?
Anyway, after the Bell System was broken up into many smaller companies and phone ownership became a thing, companies started to make all kinds of novelty landline phones. You know those Garfield phones that keep washing up on that French beach because they fell off a container ship in the ’80s? Those were a product of this explosion of novelty phones.
At the same time, there were big strides being made in consumer electronics, so the combination of cheap new tech and a pent-up demand for silly phones meant that there were so many of these cheap novelty phones around, including many shaped by cars:
There really were a ton of these things. Some would be promotional giveaway kinds of things from gas stations or auto parts stores, and they would tend to be really flimsy and cheap-feeling. While touch-tone dialing was the standard in the 1980s, some of these phones would be super cheap and, while having a numeric keypad like a touch-tone phone, those buttons would only produce clicking sounds like an old rotary phone did, because the hardware to produce the dual tones that DTMF (dual tone multi frequency) dialing required cost a few pennies more.
Okay, back to my initial question: why have I never seen a VW Beetle cheap landline phone?
Considering how incredibly popular the Beetle was (and, really, still is) in the toy world, you would think there would have been phones that looked like one of the most easily identifiable cars ever built!
I mean, there were, it turns out, but somehow I don’t recall ever encountering one, which is weird to me. I’ve only managed to find two examples online so far.
First, this cheaper-looking one:
That looks like it’s based on a pretty early Beetle; I think it has either an oval or split window, which would make it a pre-’57 car. The other one seems like a fancier model, complete with its own wooden stand:
I suspect there must be more Beetle-phones out there, but I’m still a little baffled by their relative rarity compared to Corvette phones and Porsche phones and Ferrari phones, but I guess in a phone, people were looking for speed and status?
Who knows. These are all such relics of an extremely specific time in history, one that I think is more interesting that appears at first glance, too. And, they’re all essentially useless now. Even my old ’70s and ’80s computers and video game consoles I can still at least use, in some capacity. But an old landline? I haven’t had landline phone service in, oh, a decade.
You can pull about 24V out of a phone jack, though! I made a little reading lamp using that, once. I think the phone company hates that.
At different times I had a football phone and a hamburger phone. Both were crap, but the football phone had rough edges. Maybe more popular people smoothed them over through use.
Now that would be a car-phone to have!
speaking of relics of an extremely specific time in history that are car shaped, we had a red corvette shaped VHS tape rewinder! lol
Well, at that time, it was still important to be kind.
And who wants to waste the minute in the vcr rewinding when you can put another tape in!
I’m old enough to remember my parents renovating our house and having an AT&T saleswoman come in to advise them on where to put the phone jacks in the rooms and which phone models worked best in different places, apparently that was a thing they did
they still do, only for routers and repeaters now
It’s such delicious irony that we had so many phones that were shaped like cars, but they weren’t mobile phones.
I’m old enough to remember the clear plastic phones where you could see the guts being the epitome of cool. I think my sister still has a land line for some weird reason.
My parents still have our childhood landline because grandma remembers the number.
A land line will often still work if the electricity fails, because phone lines are wholly separate from power lines and carry their own electricity. Even in the age of cell phones with batteries, the land lines can stay up when the cell towers go down. So that’s potentially a reason.
In the early 00’s, at one point it was cheaper for me to have a land line plus internet service than to just have internet service by itself due to weird bundling deals.
It’s a fun project to convert these to use bluetooth, Torch. Right up your (back) alley as a maker.
Right when landline phones were dying off, I wanted to build a way to connect a cell phone into the POTS wiring in my house via Bluetooth, I never really looked at it, since it was a bit silly, but battery life was still pretty poor, so it kinda made sense.
You could do something similar here by pulling the guts out of one of these handsets, and making it a Bluetooth headset. Still silly, but you could have your novelty phone today!
The car phone! These were a must-have to sit on the end-table-desk-mail-and-junk collecting area every house was required to have back in the 80’s right next to the “car radio”. Those of course were genuine AM/FM radios disguised as 1/24 scale model cars that usually used a wheel as the on/off/volume switch. I actually have a ’64 Cadillac version of the car radio still in the box. It’s probably time I pick up a ’59 Cadillac car phone to park next to it.
I still have my Tyco ‘Lego’ Phone from 1988
Maybe they wanted the sports car phones so they could speed dial!
Burying the lede about the Volvo 740 phone though – a brick phone was already period correct, but a Turbo Brick phone is even more correct.