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.
Don’t cable companies and ISPs still run this same racket where you can’t buy your own equipment? You have to lease their DVR or Gigachad modem.
Left off the list was the football helmet phone I had in my room growing up.
It varies by company. My current ISP provides a list of compatible devices if you don’t want to rent, and they’ll even help you set them up for free. I’ve had others though that required you to lease their gear.
They ‘encourage’ you to lease their equipment, but my current ISP didn’t have a problem with me buying a compatible modem and whatever router worked best for me.
Mine gives it to me “for no extra charge”, which means I’m paying for it no matter what.
Long term its definitely cheaper to buy your own equipment, if you have the skillset to set it up properly. I do but I’ve always leased the equipment because I wholeheartedly believe they would insist any performance issues are because I didn’t have their equipment.
Nobody wanted a VW Beetle shaped phone in the ’80s because nobody wanted a VW Beetle in the ’80s.
I think it had something to do with imminent global thermonuclear destruction, which informed every choice people made in those days, and explains a lot of the cocaine and Ferraris. Beetles just couldn’t party hard enough to keep up with Van Halen and Ivan Boesky.
There is a lot of truth to the 80’s obsession with nuclear armageddon. Especially with Ronnie Raygun’s tough talk scaring the shit out of the Ruskies.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was sort of a buzz-kill. All of a sudden nobody had an excuse to party so hard.
The lead-up to it… Perestroika, Glastnost, Lech Walensa and the Solidarity movement; that felt like shit was about to get real.
Yeah, it got real… boring. Grunge. Monica’s cum stained dress. Jerry Seinfeld.
What a rip-off.
I remember going to swap meets as a kid in the ’80s and seeing whole tables of novelty phones for sale, including car phones.
I remember having a stock car phone in my room. It wasn’t the Dale one though; I think it was blue? I do remember it sounded like crap compared to the “real” handsets.
Correction Torch, it’s 48 volts to the house not 24
And look out when the phone rings! It’ll pop your little light bulb.
IF anyone calls… the wires are still live even if there is no phone number associated with the line.
Line voltage is 48, ring voltage is 120! will get your attention
We had the push-button phone that still used the pulse tones to dial because the phone company wanted an extra $5 a month to enable touch tone dialing.
We still had that when 911 started and I could never figure out why they used the looonnngest pulse/rotary number to start an emergency number. Were we supposed to spend that time debating whether it was REALLY an emergency?
It was so that it was unlikely the number was being dialled by accident – a 1 would have been relatively easy for a toddler, but a 9 took a bit of effort.
In the span of one week a year or so ago at my agency, we had three people (I was one of them) that made the mistake of dialing 9 (for external line), and then 1, forgetting that I dialed that one and then another…only to get the police showing up at our door (as a community mental health center they don’t fool around). It hadn’t happened before that in the five years I worked before, and hasn’t happened in the year since. Weird.
VW Beetle phones should’ve had the separate handset like on a Garfield phone. Holding the entire car up to talk is cumbersome. Of all the landlines I had, I never had a novelty phone, not even one of those clear cases.
I think that’s how the fancier one works, the convertible uptop is the handset.
Edit: nope, that’s obviously the chassis plate in the second pic of it.
“Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me !”
In Earth Girls Are Easy all of the telephones are novelty phones. They’re in so many scenes that I couldn’t help noticing it when I re-watched the film a few years ago.
Wasn’t the Ericofon available in the U.S. in the ’60s & ’70s? I know we had one in the ’80s. I’m not sure if that counts as a ‘novelty’ phone.
My favorite of these isn’t the car itself, but the brand logo. The Jaguar Leaper Phone.
I had that Dale phone. It sucked. The mic was so far down on the phone you had to practically yell for the other person to hear you.
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.
What, no mention of the Sports Illustrated football phone?! Not only was it a football shaped phone, but it was a bonus gift for subscribing to a physical magazine, for which the whole thing was pitched on network TV in these not quite an infomercial but also not a regular ad bits.
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.
Back a few years ago when we still had DSL we had copper lines down to the big box at the end of the street. They had converted the connection from the big box to the central site with over-the-air technology. So, during a several-days-long prolonged power outage, AT&T attached a small generator to the big box so we still had our DSL and folks with a landline still had a phone. AT&T is actively trying to get people off landlines now, so eventually they will disappear. Looks like I can finally get rid of the two landline phones (not special novelty ones) I kept around to diagnose whether it was my house with the problem, or if it was between the house and the utility pole.
Our house was new construction 10 years ago. Neither the house nor the neighborhood is wired for a landline system.
They’re still cool! I had one that had the circuit board and all the internal components either made or painted in neon colors; I would spend far too much money for a cellphone with the same treatment.
Sports Illustrated used to have a football phone as a promotion when you subscribed to their print magazine. Also the sports bloopers VHS. Lots of commercials back in the day. . .
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!
Literally just a $50 box you plug into the handset these days, I’m afraid. Not much of a project.
I figured there was probably something for it now
In the mid-80’s I built a hold button that played music. It just wired into the wall jack and basically kept the circuit closed when you hung up the receiver. The music module was from one of those singing greeting cards that were new and novel at the time.
There was a box that did that. I had one back in the days when you would just set your phone down when you got home and wouldn’t look at it again. I think it was called Xlink BT. It would connect up to 3 phones to the landline and you could make calls from your landline phone and it would ring the landline phone when your cell phone rang.
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
I’ve still got mine, too. No landline, but it displays well with the Lego collection.
I never knew those existed! I would have really wanted one (vaguely still do?). Made me wonder which home devices would be cool to recreate in lego now, but most things are just boxes with radios. Maybe instead I just need to stick a little lego pad to my dashboard and then put a spaceman there.
You should take a peek at the Melgeek Pixel.
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.
YES! How could you just drop that picture in and give us nothing more!