BICHI OR CHIBI: ARGENTINIAN TOY MAKERS

I read this PDF with interest as I'm a fan of CHIBI BICHI space toys. Its the contents of a book about Argentinian toys that has been placed online, The Dictionary of Argentinian Toys 1880-1965.

https://ludotecaperfecta.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/diccionario_de_juguetes_argentinos__daniela_pelegrinelli.pdf

Its basically an A-Z of Argentinian toy companies. Bichi appears under B and the piece finally puts to rest a question I have often asked: which came first, Bichi or Chibi? The answer is clearly stated. Bichi.

I have Google Translated the Bichi section and left it as a large raw text in case you are interested.

BICHI SRL: plastic and metal cars (c 1958 - c 1972).

Almost by chance or as a deserved reward for persistence,

antiquities hunters found at the end of the decade

we see with what precision, attention and responsibility are armed

and they test all the vehicles that make up the beautiful and

showy range of shots produced by Bellotti Hnos.

The factory remained active until the eighties. See

sugar yourself and Saic Escoda; photography and toys.

BEM: military panoplias (c 1942 - c 1967).

Who can resist the beauty of panoplies, their

colorful pieces displayed in lithographed cartons that

invite you to be another for a while? It is quite difficult to find them without

use or in acceptable conditions in the antique market; the

combination of its fragility - own of the materials with

what they are made of - and the kind of game they provoke

its irremediable deterioration. However, some of its

components - such as revolver holders - are often

Save yourself from being thrown in the trash. Who possibly

was the first to manufacture them in Argentina, the Austrian

Benzion Mamber (born 1892), arrived in our country around 1937.

As soon as he arrived, he devoted himself to his specialty, the elaboration

of trophies and insignia, costumes and military attributes, but little

Then, in 1942, he began to manufacture panoplies

military, when discovering that the item predicted a certain development

commercial. Employed national raw materials - cardboard, gender,

leather and wood - to make their first models:

uniforms and badges of soldiers, police and firemen.

Around 1950 he left the modest premises of Correa 2516 for

move to a larger plant, in Obligado 4199, where

the facilities were rationally organized in different

sections and included a large deposit of raw materials.

- 51 -

by girls who exchanged letters, figurines, molds, and

pictures of children's actresses who triumphed in Hollywood.

Some twelve years later, already in Buenos Aires, Bili has set up a

workshop in the bottoms of his own house, in Tres Arroyos 538, for

Become a doll maker There he produces a baby of

pasta that bears his name, whose delicacy and tenderness do not reveal at all the more than precarious conditions in which

she works -helping in the process of cooling the newly molded pieces with two household refrigerators-, but rather

rather they renew that dazzlement of childhood.

In the late 1940s, Del Giorgio and her husband, José

Novick, they are associated with Sergio Timone (see the magical brain)

and the precarious workshop is transformed into the Bili Dolls Factory.

In order to expand and consolidate production, they reorganized

space in different sectors: on the ground floor they placed a

of the armed group, they assigned a specific area for

combers and enabled a separate place to locate the milling machine, while the first floor was used for painting.

During those years, in addition to Bili, they made a doll called Graciela, one meter tall, head and limbs

of pasta and body of cloth, which they sold almost exclusively to

the Harrod's store. Bili, her most characteristic piece, is a baby

26 cm, body of five pieces and molded hair; enough with

see it once so that it takes root in the memory. Design

General was based on a model that by those years was well known both in the United States and in England.

Of the twenty thousand that came to be manufactured annually during

the fifties, most have painted eyes, but

they also came out with movable plastic eyes; likewise

They produced white skin or brown skin. Each copy

He left the factory marked with a blue stamp applied vertically on his back, in which his name is read, and dressed in

a set of pyrenean cloth, besides carrying its corresponding label (there was a luxurious series with a more

elaborated and another series that included the baby in a bassinet

cardboard covered in plastic).

By 1953, about twenty-five employees were working in the factory; in May of that year the Bili brand was registered (a

name of Sergio Timone and José Novick). Until that moment

they used unregistered marks, quite usual neglect in these

some inexperienced pioneers who made their way by force of

of ninety a stock composed of several dozen boxes with

remains of what had been a toy factory: parts of

cars, incomplete parts, friction mechanisms and hundreds

of decals. They were the vestiges of the firm Bichi SRL, founded

around 1958 by Augusto Bianco and the brothers Enrique, Luis and

Carlos Chialchia, who produced cars, mainly friction,

in a workshop on Calle Cabrera 3931, and reached its greatest popularity in the sixties.

During a fleeting period, collectors, always attentive

to the rewards that the outbreaks of this

improvised urban archeology, they knew how to take advantage of the reappearance of classic cars, revived in all their splendor to be

armed and decorated, as before, with the decals steamed.

In May 1960, the firm, which was under the heading Bianco &

Inc. Collective Society, registers the Bichi brand and throughout

the decade will produce plastic and metal pieces, among which

stand out the curious Murcielauto and Murciel-Lancha, appropriations well Argentinean of the bativehículos -well thought

to avoid the payment of royalties-, the Cipol Agent's car and the

Planetary Explorer Bichi (later Chibi). In the middle of the years

seventy, society -as it was SRL- reinvents itself as

Chibi SRL. Integrated by the same owners, it continued to elaborate

almost the same models but with the Carlos V and Chibi brands in

its plant of Combet 1243, José León Suárez, province of Buenos

Aires, until 1982.