"Steel, lead and rubber were not the only toy-making materials being rationed and restricted during the war. Plastic was too. As a result, despite the plastic industry's attempts to promote new formulas to the toy industry before and during the war, few manufacturers were poised at war's end to introduce bright new plastic playthings for Christmas. One of the few was Dillon-Beck Mfg. Co. of Hillside. N.J., which, under its Wannatoys banner, introduced its 25-cent coupe. The Wannatoy Coupe was not an ordinary coupe. It sported a bubble top of transparent acetate, through which a simplified steering wheel and seats were visible. The bubble sat squarely on a streamlined body, vaguely reminiscent of a rowboat set keel-side-up. Children, or at least their buying parents, reacted with enthusiasm to its Art Deco-inspired futuristic design. In the new Atomic Age, it expressed the hope people felt about times to come. A million units moved off shelves in the 1946 Christmas season. The Coupe sold well into the next decade, at the lower price of a dime per car. With plastic toys being promoted as safe, tough to break, free of sharp edges and hygienically washable, even toddlers must have had their first lessons in Art Deco styling from this wheeled, bubbled bauble, a dime-store best seller at the dawn of the Baby Boomer years.
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