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.
image: Etsy
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:
Images: Etsy, eBay, Worthpoint
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:
Image: Etsy
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:
Images: eBay
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.