Every boy wants a Remco toy. That confident voice on the television stated it like a law of nature, and generation after generation nodded because it was true. The tank that fired plastic shells across the bedroom floor, the bazooka that could dent a garbage can lid, the walkie-talkies that turned a backyard into a battlefield, the toys that did things, loud things, moving things, things that drained batteries and drove parents out of their minds. The walkie-talkies came first.
Two plastic boxes connected by the idea that a boy on one end of the street should be able to talk to a boy on the other end. They were heavy, they ate batteries, and the range was terrible, 50 feet on a good day, 30 on a bad one. If your friend walked behind a tree, you lost him entirely. The static was louder than the voice.
You pressed the button and said “over” when you were done, not because the device required it, but because that was how soldiers talked, and you were a soldier and the backyard was a battlefield. They cracked, they hissed, and they died in the middle of an operation that was saving the world from an enemy whose identity changed depending on what movie you had seen that week. When the batteries went dead, you always went inside and asked your mother for new ones, which meant explaining why you had burned through four D cells in two hours. She always said the same thing, “Those batteries are not growing on trees.
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But the walkie-talkies were just the beginning. The men who made them were not toy designers. They were military engineers, and the things they built next were machines: small, plastic, battery-powered machines that fired projectiles, smoked, moved, and broke. The Bulldog tank was the one you begged for, a dark green plastic tank with rubber treads, a rotating turret, and a cannon that fired small plastic shells.
It came with a wired remote control, a big box with buttons that you held while the tank crawled across the floor. Forward, reverse, turn left, turn right, fire. The shells traveled farther than the box said they would and hit things that were not supposed to be targets. You said it was an accident.
Your father said it better not happen again. Then it happened again. The batteries lasted about forty minutes, then the tank slowed down, the turret stopped rotating, and the treads started grinding. You sat there pressing the buttons harder, as if pressure would squeeze more life out of the cells, watching the Bulldog die on the kitchen floor like a real tank in a real battle.
You changed the batteries three times a day until your father announced he was not buying any more until next month. There was also the bazooka, a green plastic tube about three feet long that fired projectiles with enough force to thump against the garage door. One boy’s uncle modified his, adjusted the spring, widened the barrel, until it could launch dirt clods and golf balls across the yard. That boy got banned from the neighborhood war games.
He could only play if he left the green tube at home. The Monkey Division was Remco’s answer to every boy who wanted to be a soldier but could not enlist for another decade. It was a complete military kit: a helmet, a canteen, a belt, a holster, walkie-talkies, grenades, a rifle, everything a boy needed to wage war on the block from breakfast to dinner time. You wore the helmet to the grocery store.
Your mother made you take it off before going inside. You put it back on in the parking lot. The Whirlybird helicopter flew, not well, not far, not where you intended, but it flew. When it lifted off for three seconds and then nose-dived into the lawn, you called that flying.
The Barracuda atomic submarine dove underwater in the bathtub, and you pretended it was hunting Soviet subs in the Atlantic because it was 1962 and everybody was hunting Soviet subs in the Atlantic. The Screaming MeeMee rifle made a screeching whistle when you pulled the trigger, a sound that carried through the entire house. Your mother told you to stop. You stopped for five minutes, then pulled the trigger again because the sound was too good not to make.
Then television changed everything. Remco understood something no other toy company had figured out yet: if a boy watched a show on Wednesday night, he wanted to live in that show on Thursday morning. Remco was faster than anyone at turning a television show into a toy. When Lost in Space became one of the biggest shows in America in 1965, Remco was ready.
They made a battery-powered version of the B-9 robot, two feet tall, walking and talking on its own, its chest plate flashing red while it said “Danger, Will Robinson. ” If you had one, every kid on your block came to your house after school to watch it fall off the table. They also made a full-size clear plastic space helmet with a built-in microphone and flashing lights. You wore it in the backyard and you were Will Robinson, not pretending, being.
When Batman exploded in 1966, Remco was there too. They made a Batmobile dashboard, a big plastic console with a working steering wheel, gear shift, and horn that you set up on the floor and sat behind while you made screeching tire sounds with your mouth. They made a Batman wrist radio, a working transistor radio strapped to your arm just like the one Adam West wore. They made Beatles figures, Star Trek figures, Munsters figures, and a Munsters coach that drove across the floor with Herman Munster grinning behind the wheel.
Whatever was the biggest thing on television that week, Remco made a toy out of it before any other company could get to the factory. The men who built all of it were not Hollywood executives or Madison Avenue marketers. They were two cousins from Brooklyn whose parents had come to America from Russia with nothing. Isaac Heller, everyone called him Ike, was born in 1926 in Ellenville, New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.
He grew up in Brooklyn, went to Brooklyn Technical High School, and joined the United States Navy as an electronics technician. That was where everything started. Surrounded by radio equipment, radar systems, and electronic components the military discarded by the ton, Heller began building toys as a hobby. He took apart a walkie-talkie headed for the scrap pile and rebuilt it smaller.
He put a motor from a broken generator into a wooden box with wheels. Saul Robbins, born in 1922, also in Brooklyn, Heller’s cousin, went to Rutgers University and then served in the United States Army during World War II. When both men came home, they found themselves in a basement in New York City with an idea and a pile of parts. The idea was simple: take the military surplus nobody wanted, the electronics the government was selling by the truckload for pennies, and turn it into toys.
Not delicate toys, not quiet toys. Loud toys. Toys that moved and fired and flew and rolled and beeped and crackled and drove your mother insane and made your father say, “Will you turn that thing off? ” They named the company Remco, short for remote control, because every toy they made did something from a distance.
You push a button over here, the thing obeys over there. That was the whole company in two words: remote control. They became the first toy company in America to advertise on television, before Mattel, before Hasbro, before anyone. They understood, before anyone else in the toy industry, that if you showed a boy a toy on a screen, showed it moving and firing and flying, that boy would not rest until he had it, and his mother would not rest until she bought it.
The six words at the end of every commercial were not a slogan. They were a fact. Every boy did want a Remco toy. In 1966, Heller and Robbins sold the company.
They had built it from a pile of surplus in a basement into one of the biggest toy companies in America in seventeen years, and they walked away. Heller went into commercial real estate and founded a child care center in Edison, New Jersey, wanting to give the next generation something quieter and kinder. Without the two men who had started it, Remco lasted five years. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1971.
The factories in Harrison, New Jersey, closed. The machines that had stamped out Bulldog tanks and Monkey Division helmets were silenced. The brand name was bought by Azrak Hamway International, which used it to sell monster figures in the 1980s. In 1997, Jax Pacific bought what was left.
Today, Remco exists only as a trademark on a piece of paper somewhere. There is no factory, no basement, no cousins building toys from military surplus, no voice on the television saying the six words a generation knew by heart. Saul Robbins died on June 13, 2010. He was 88.
Isaac Heller died on March 7, 2015. He was also 88. The New York Times obituary for Heller described what Remco made as “boyhood in a box, batteries not included. ” That is the most accurate description of any toy company in the history of American manufacturing.
You had to supply your own batteries, and you did, by the case. Every boy wanted a Remco toy, and now every boy is a man, and the man remembers: the weight of the walkie-talkie in his hand, the sound of the Screaming MeeMee in the hallway, the sight of the Bulldog tank grinding to a stop on the kitchen floor, and the absolute certainty that if he had enough batteries, he could do anything. He still feels it.
He just needs more batteries.