With vintage toys, the original box can sometimes double the value, or the asking price, if not even more than double, sometimes, depending on the artwork and rarity. This 1964 Mattel V-RROOM! bicycle booster “engine” (sound-maker) comes with its original box and instruction sheet, as you can see here on the eBay listing. It’s located in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the seller is asking $179.95. Thanks to PRA4SNW for the tip!
This “engine” is somewhat related to one I found a little over two years ago for a 1966 Mattel Stallion, and I paid almost $500 for that one in NOS condition. We saw that one attached to the restored bike here on Barn Finds on March 4, 2024. It doesn’t seem like it has been two years already. That V-RROOM! “engine” is powered by a couple of D-cell batteries, but this one is powered (the sound part, I mean) by pulling down on that red lever on top. It makes three sounds, the top is a whining sound, sort of like my normal voice, then there’s neutral, with no sound other than cheap plastic parts spinning faster than they should, and the bottom setting sounds like your stomach late at night after a stop at a gas station for a couple of roller dogs.
Here’s the painful part to me: the original box! About a week ago I bought one of these (here’s the listing), but it didn’t have the box. It works great, it just showed up a couple of days ago, and the seller was a gem of a human being. But it was about the same price, and it didn’t have the box or any paperwork. Arrrrrgh. I have half a mind (according to my wife) to buy this one just for the box and instructions. I’ll give it a couple of days, and if one of you doesn’t buy it first, I may snag it.
Mattel offered these plastic and metal (that’s an actual thin metal part that’s chromed) sound-maker motors/engines for its line of V-RROOM! bikes and other wheeled goodies in the 1960s, and they’re pretty fun. I cleaned up the one I just got with some soapy water and a toothbrush. Then I used just regular polishing compound, and it looks almost perfect, but I really want that box. Mattel made some very cool and heavy-duty bikes, and even a three-wheeler called the X-15, meant to get in on the space race. I have one of those, but it’s in line to be restored. I should have done that this winter.
After you crank the red handle a few times to power the gyro, the sound comes out of the left side, as seen on the bottom in the photo above. That’s the only open part, and you can see the cone and other sound-making bits in there. Having the box and instruction sheet would be nice for any of us hoarders, I mean, collectors. Are any of you into collecting unusual things like this 1964 Mattel noise-maker engine?
Many of us make that whining sound when we see something we just can’t live without-or justify the cost for accordingly..
Pretty cool find, Scotty-more expensive than just some playing cards clothespinned to the forks but such was the price in place riding a real motorcycle!
We used baseball cards, and the “springy” type of clothes pin, mom never had enough of. We tried to use the “dud” players for that, probably worth a fortune today ,,:0
I hate to say it,Howard,makes me sick,but in 1965 I was using Mays,Mantle cards in my spokes. Another great memory .I begged for a vrrooom motor back then.Mom took me to work at the deli,she said ” sweep the floor,you might find the $5.00 you want. Sure enough,there it was,but we had,t had a customer yet. Good ole mom
This is really neat. This is a great find PRA4SNW!! I honestly dont know how items like this actually survive for 6 decades in its original box!!! I feel your pain Scotty. Years ago I’d scour Ebay for vintage slot cars, finally bid and win, and then like a few days later something better or closer to what I’d been looking for would pop up…. I get it Scotty… But you met a great seller and you have a nice one.
Thanks again gor a great stroll down memory lane!!!
You should snag it now rather than wait until it is sold, and then say i should have bought that at a great price with the box. The listing does not say if it works.
Who, at 8 years old was sportin’ that kind of cash? I read,and don’t want to step on the authors toes if already mentioned, but this came out in 1962, and cost $5.99( batteries not included, what 4 “D”s for a buck?). That was a lot of money for a kid, usually a toss up between that, or that new 1/24 slot car you’ve been cutting grannies grass all summer for. Not to be a grump, but those of us that had to rely on mouth noises and the baseball cards, this was kind of lame( although we secretly wanted one). They didn’t survive well in a crash either. There were several kinds, but I had the luxury of a REAL motorcycle at age 8,( Honda 50) so there was no need for one of these. Cool find.
Didn’t know that about you. I too had a white Honda 50 around that age. My uncle gave it to me. It looked like a girl’s bicycle with the plastic leg guards and banana seat. When they saw me riding it and figuring out how to shift, dad wheeled it in the garage, clicked it into 1st gear and removed the shifter. So, I could only go as fast as 1st would allow. I found a pic of my parents posing on it, taken around 1969.
Great pic Cooter 👍
What 8 year old was buying this with their own money? None! Mom and Dad loved giving these as a birthday or Christmas gift.
AND, you had an actual motorcycle when you were 8? What a dream come true for any kid that age.
Many a small boy’s dream back then. There you are, sitting on your Schwinn Stingray or Murray
Wildcat, riding around your neighborhood, pretending that you’re riding a real motorcycle.
Leaning into turns and dropping
your left foot 🦶🦶 to balance,
just like the older cooler guys did.
I learned how to do it from my Dad, who owned a real live Harley
74 Electraglide back then. Always wanted him to take me to
school on it but Mom put the kibosh on that. Back then, folks
that rode a motorcycle 🏍️ were
often portrayed as Hell’s Angels or some other biker gang of the day. That, as I found out, wasn’t true at all. A lot of folks like MY
MOM, my uncle, and my BIL often
used them as a cheap way to go to school or wherever else you wanted to go. Mom rode a well used ’41 Indian before she went to the Army-Navy store and bought a war surplus Harley 45
still smothered in Cosmoline. She would tell me later that she could get 2 weeks travel from a tank of gas. She even thought about buying a new motorcycle during the gas crunch in the ’70s
after riding my future BILs Honda
305 Dream one day in ’73. Wished I could’ve been home to see that! Anyhow, a kid’s love of
motorcycles started with one of these Mattel motors and a Stingray style bike. Nothing else like it anymore.
$19.95 for that X-15 trike in 1964 was serious coin for a kids toy. My dad would often rebuild hand me down bikes from the neighbors for us to use.
I always wanted a Raleigh CHOPPER
Bought a CHOPPER back in day .Cut grass,raked leaves and shoveled snow to buy it..It was yellow w/ a,single gear.When my dad saw it he said “why didn’t I buy a Schwinn”.He was Irish!
I was chompin’ for a “CHOPPER” but then Winky Johnson sped past the house on a ten-speed touring bike with the drop handle bars. First time I’d ever seen one and I knew right then that was my future. Winky was a trend setter. He was also the first one in the neighborhood to show up with a ski-doo, the classic 1966 ‘Bubble Nose” aka ‘Black Stripe”. He was also the first to sport an authentic Air Force snorkel parka…silver green, orange quilted lining, and actual wolverine pelt around the hood. The local Army/Navy store turned out to be a gold mine.
As a side note… I celebrated the nation’s bicentennial (1976) by peddling
my orange Schwinn Varsity from Massachusetts to California. No joke, a Varsity. Wire baskets on the back. Gross weight was 92 pounds. I was twenty years old and it was an epic journey. My ridding partner was Barry Camille. This summer we celebrate the 50th anniversary of our trip. Going to take a cross-country drive and retrace as much of the route as possible.
I’m 70 now, I still ride but there is fear. The roads are not as safe as they once were. I limit my exposure by riding early Sunday mornings on long residential routes, main roads only to cross. There’s no commuters, no hot dogs, no phone people, just lawn sprinklers and the occasional dog walker, it’s quite peaceful. All I have to worry about is losing my balance.
I had the one like Scotty posted on my Schwinn Sting Ray
My brother had this!
Many years ago Mattel made lots interesting and fun toys . . . now they keep recycling the same toys year after year . . . instead of toy designers they have bean counters.
I loved the Sizzlers with the “Fat Track” racing set and the VertiBird helicopter toy when it came out. Got modern reissues of each when my boys were young, but it just wasn’t the same experience.
we used small balloons tethered to the front fork for that deep Harley sound
I kind of remember having something similar to that attached to my five speed Schwinn fastback, but it looked like a silver motorcycle engine. It was electric and had to control mounted on the handlebars with a key but I still it was called V-rroom engine.
I also had a cool bike radio mounted to the handlebars that came from RadioShack
We had the speedometer and saddlebags mounted to ours, instead of the radio, but I vaguely remember the radio. A bit too pricey for my budget at the time, as our allowance was $0.25 a week at the time, LOL!
Packs of baseball cards were $0.06 each, with five (5) cards and a piece of pink bubble gum inside. It was my first taste of inflation, a they went up a penny, from five cents a pack, so I could only buy four (4) packs of cards each week instead of the five (5) packs I used to get! Rats!
Hi Robert, that gum was so stale it cut our cheeks. I don’t recall the price, but a quarter was a big deal then.
My brother and me each had one of these on our first two-wheeled bicycle, a fetching Sears model, painted red and white, LOL! It was tough to pull the handle to make the motor noise while riding with one hand, the guys with the battery-powered versions had it easier, LOL! Within a couple of years, we graduated to a Huffy “Stingray” when we outgrew those first bikes, painted metal flake green, with a rear “Cheater Slick” tire, “banana” seat and high handlebars! By then, we had learned the trick of folding baseball cards to flap in the spokes while clipped to the frame of the bike with clothespins to simulate the motor sound, no money or dexterity required!
I had on in 64, put on my stingray bike. Other kids made fun of it but I thought it was cool.
Scotty just buy the one with the box or you will regret letting it go, you can always sell one without the box to recover some money. As far as the wife I’ve found after 35 years it’s always better to ask for forgiveness than permission… they always get over it eventually.
John D and Howie, you’re probably right. The bad part is that I contacted the seller to ask if it actually works, and the seller wrote back a few days later saying they can’t find it, but they’ll have someone try to locate it. They have 22,916 things for sale on eBay! I’m glad I didn’t hit the buy-it-now button.
Just in case anyone wants to hear what these sounded like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXKj_1SiI4w
Fantastic, I should have posted a video, but thanks for doing that, sir!
Still no word back from the seller yet, weird.
Robert, I had the same things too
on the 26″ Schwinn I had after I out grew my Murray Wildcat. Along with the saddle bags, I had
dual mirrors, turn signals, and a bike pals generator kit so that I
NEVER had to buy batteries for my head or tail lights nor my turn
signals. Just mount the 12 volt
generator on the frame, and adjust it to rub the rear tire and spin up enough juice 🥤 to power
anything you had on your bike. Old Red sure came in handy when I started tuning up people’s
cars at our church on Saturday
mornings. I”d strap my toolbox 🧰 to the cargo rack above the
wire saddle bags, throw the other
stuff into the saddle bags, and off
to the church I went. I did what
would be called “meatball repairs” like changing or cleaning
spark plugs, changing thermostats, hoses, and maybe a
water pump or two on occasion.
Never made much money from it
though. I did it to help my friends
in the congregation that needed
simple things done to their cars
and didn’t have the dough to pay
a real mechanic 🧰. And in the end, the Lord always looked after
me. And with his help, I always
made it through. All that ended in
1970 when I parked Old Red, put
my tools away, and started playing music 🎵 on my first tour
when I was 15. Great times for
sure!
Ours had the generator set also, for two (2) reasons. We were too cheap to buy batteries and it included a taillight! Boy, it sure did make it hard to pedal though, and losing the lights every time you stopped wasn’t great, LOL!
Yes, that’s very true. You could’ve added a 6 V battery and a diode in between it and the generator.
That would have given you lights when you stopped and the diode would keep it from discharging back into the generator trying to make it into a motor.
Is the Stellantis powertrain department selling this off now that the Fratzonic exhaust has been completed?
Yes, I had a Generator as well and I had a cool speedometer that went up to 60 miles per hour and it wasn’t round, it was rectangle and I even put a light in it. I remember telling my grandfather that I wanted him to help me remove the training wheels. Everybody was laughing at me.
I was 12!
My grandmother was overprotective.
I think i had this in 1973 plus my baseball cards in spokes….. seems like a distant memory.. Good times
Hi Cooter, I’ve posted this before, my old man came home with a 1965 Honda 50 in ’65 that was almost like new, but had been vandalized by “you know who”( hint, Milwaukee). I think he traded a room air conditioner for it. Me and my brother rebuilt it, and used it extensively at our lake cottage and camping. this is me about 11, my late sister about 6, and what me and my brother put that poor thing through, can’t be described here.
I really should reread my posts before submitting, what me and my brother put the Honda through, not my sister. She died of a brain tumor at 41. :(
Howard, that is so cool you have a pic of the same bike, and with you on it! So sorry about the loss of your sister. I have an older sister who is still with us, and she is a ball of fire at 70. My younger brother died a couple years ago at age 53 of congestive heart failure. Life is short
Howard, I’m sorry about your sister, cancer is evil…
Thanks, that was a long time ago, but you never get over it. I’d like to hear more about the “ball o’ fire” sister”,,,:)
That’s a great picture Howard. And glad you have those memories too. Ironically, this Month os the anniversary that my Sister died when she was 40, a month away from.turning 41 back in 2002. She had fought cancer several times. I’m very sorry for your, and your families loss Howard. -Dave
Thanks Dave, that’s kind of creepy you and I went through the same thing at about the same time. Missed out on a lot. The doctors told us, they were in the dark, and the only consolation , they told us, was maybe what they learned could help someone later on. We’ve made big strides in research and treatment, but to me it’s still a death sentence.
At Christmas 1966, Dad presented me with a “new” used bike that he customized into a “Stingray” type bike. High rise handlebars, banana seat, and yep, a battery powered Mattel V-Rroom “engine.” It didn’t last too long, as I recall. Too many jumps and bad landings.
Sorry for your loss too Dave. Howard, here is one of my favorite pics of sis, taken in Clarksville TN. last year standing up to the Frank Sutton statue! That is his hometown. They made him at least 7 ft tall as she is 5′ 11″. Even Sgt. Carter can’t back her down!!