Choice MARX Vintage Dollhouse Nursery Rom Furniture, Babyland Nursery Playset, 1/2" Scale, Hard Plastic

Louis Marx & Company's 1:24 scale (1/2" scale) dollhouse furniture is a staple of mid-century Americana. Marx is famous for their lithographed tin houses.

The Marx Babyland Nursery Playset is one of the more unusual—and today, quite scarce—playsets made by Louis Marx & Co. during the great Marx playset era of the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike Fort Apache, the Alamo, Battleground, Cape Canaveral, and the company's other adventure-oriented sets, Babyland was explicitly designed around a nursery full of babies. It was one of Marx's relatively few boxed playsets marketed primarily to girls.

The basic story
Babyland Nursery is a 1955 release. That's significant because 1955 was right in the formative period of the classic Marx boxed playset.

Marx's formula was generally to put a surprisingly large miniature world into a cardboard box: lithographed metal buildings, molded plastic figures, scenery and numerous accessories. The company's ability to reuse tooling and manufacturing techniques helped it sell elaborate sets at comparatively modest prices.

Babyland followed that philosophy, but with a completely different subject.

Instead of cowboys, soldiers or dinosaurs, you got:

a nurse, six babies, cribs, high chairs, bathtub, scale, sterilizer, bottles, blankets, medical equipment and an entire nursery building.

That makes Babyland something of a bridge between the Marx playset line and Marx's extensive dollhouse/doll-furniture business.

The Babyland Nursery building
The centerpiece was a fairly substantial lithographed tinplate nursery building.

It was made from the same basic building design Marx used for at least two other products—the Marx Pet Shop and Schoolhouse. This was classic Marx economics: create an expensive metal structure/tooling and then change the lithography to turn it into something entirely different.

The building was open at the rear so a child could arrange the nursery furniture and babies inside.

The exterior was considerably more cheerful than the interior. The outside featured colorful decoration, flowers and the word BABYLAND represented in children's alphabet blocks.

The interior was also lithographed, but surprisingly institutional-looking—almost like a small hospital ward rather than the colorful nursery we might expect today.

There were two large front windows.

Marx supplied clear acetate window inserts printed with red lines, dividing each window into approximately 20 panes. That's exactly the sort of easily lost component that makes assembling a truly complete Babyland set difficult today.

The figures
Babyland contained a wonderfully peculiar little figure group:

1 nurse + 6 babies.

And the babies weren't simply duplicates.

Marx sculpted six different baby poses:

Baby with bottle
Baby with rattle
Baby with cup
Sitting baby
Baby lying down
Baby lying down and waving
The nurse was another unique figure.

There was even a separate paper nurse's hat.

Apparently the nurse figure has a small projection on her head intended to retain the paper hat. Without the hat, it can look rather odd. Needless to say, a tiny paper nurse's hat packaged with a children's toy in 1955 had very poor odds of surviving seventy years.

Interestingly, the Babyland figures are smaller than the figures Marx normally supplied with its dollhouses, further supporting the idea that Marx considered Babyland a true playset rather than simply another dollhouse accessory.

The accessories
This is where Babyland becomes especially interesting.

The set reportedly contained a 26-piece group of hard-plastic nursery accessories, originally molded in white plastic.

Among them were:

Four baby cribs
Cupboard with sterilizer
Sterilizer cover
Desk
Desk chair
High chair
Scale with separate basket
Milk-bottle tray
Diaper hamper
Baby bathtub
Another high chair with attached table
Room divider
Oxygen bottle
Six tiny baby bottles on a sprue
The desk alone is reported to measure approximately 1⅞ inches wide, which gives you some idea of the miniature scale involved.

There were also multi-piece accessories. The scale, for example, consisted of the scale plus a separate basket, while at least one high chair had a separate tray.

Consequently, a set can look reasonably complete while actually missing quite a few little pieces.

And then there were the really tiny pieces
Marx went considerably further than simply supplying plastic furniture.

Babyland apparently included:

four felt blankets — two blue and two pink.

There were also:

five cotton balls, a roll of gauze, the paper nurse's hat, and ten tiny paper baby-name cards.

The name cards could be attached to the cribs.

Think about the survival prospects of those items: little pieces of felt, cotton balls, miniature paper cards, a roll of gauze and a paper nurse's cap.

That's why I'd distinguish between a Babyland set that looks complete and one that is factory complete down to its original paper and cloth pieces. The latter should be substantially harder to find.

There was also a Babyland accessory package
Here's another particularly interesting wrinkle.

According to information attributed to Plastic Figure and Playset Collector magazine, Marx also marketed the Babyland figures and accessories separately on a blister card.

And there's an important color variation.

In the boxed playset, the accessories were reportedly white.

The separately carded accessories were produced in pink or blue.

That's useful information for collectors because finding pink or blue Babyland furniture doesn't necessarily mean that a boxed Babyland Nursery originally contained those pieces.

Condition: All items should be considered in good played-with condition. A number of the pieces have become discolored over the years.

Items Marked RARE: RARE items include:
Items that are difficult for me to acquire
Items that are difficult for me to acquire in good condition
Items that are difficult for me to find in that color
Items that are difficult to find molded in hard plastic
A combination of the above

Important! I use stock photos to illustrate my items. Please understand that the piece of furniture you select may not be the EXACT piece depicted in the photo.

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