Space Pets were a line of pneumatic-powered

toy A toy or plaything is an object that is used primarily to provide entertainment. Simple examples include toy blocks, board games, and dolls. Toys are often designed for use by children, although many are designed specifically for adults and p ...

s designed, manufactured and marketed by

TOMY (trade name, trading as Takara Tomy in Asia and Tomy elsewhere) is a Japanese toy company. It was established in 1924 by Eiichirō Tomiyama as , became known for creating popular toys like the B-29 friction toy and luck-based game Pop-up Pi ...

(Takara) for the American market in the early 1980s.

Design

The basic principle was to use a small air tank to capture, compress and controllably release air power and convert it into mechanical motion. Each Space Pet shipped with a "Tomy air pump" that was used to recharge the air tank. The air pump resembled a bicycle pump, although smaller. The flagship model was the "High Hopping Hoomdorm", which was something of a mechanical

grasshopper Grasshoppers are a group of insects belonging to the suborder Caelifera. They are amongst what are possibly the most ancient living groups of chewing herbivorous insects, dating back to the early Triassic around 250 million years ago. Grassh ...

that would hop furiously (and somewhat erratically) across the room. Other models included the "Stretch Legged Stoomdorm" which propelled itself in an

accordion Accordions (from 19th-century German language, German ', from '—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a Reed (mou ...

-like fashion, the "Fleet Footed Floomdorm" which sort of shuffled along on pie-shaped feet and the "Lurch Along Loomdorm" which raises up by means of scissor action, then fell forward and retracted its feet. There were four models in total. The entire Space Pets line was closely related to TOMY Air Powered Vehicle line. Variations of Space Pets were sold under other names outside of the US. For example, the "High Hopping Hoomdorm" was packaged and sold as the "Sky Hopper" in the United Kingdom. Likewise, "Lunar Legs" was an alias for the "Stretch Legged Stoomdorm". Hoomdorms, in particular, were manufactured in two places:

Singapore Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...

for distribution in Australia, and Japan for the United States.

External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/20091018190432/http://geocities.com/SunsetStrip/8410/hoomdorm.html * http://www.jeffbots.com/stoomdorm.html *http://www.collectiondx.com/toy_review/1981/stretch_legged_stoomdorm 1980s toys Physical activity and dexterity toys {{Toy-stub