I'm not keen on the idea of having my fortune told. Call me superstitious. It is however a staple of seaside piers and this Zoltar was ready for some telling in Llandudno.
Made famous by Tom Hanks in Big, they've always been a plastic novelty item, especially now.
You can get them small ...
And big!
Not to be outdone by the men, ladies have been doing it for themselves too.
Here's Esmeralda on a pier somewhere.
And a rather witchified toy teller with a light-up ball.
By far my favourite though is the vintage Japanese Gypsy Fortune Teller by Ichida. It's just so damn classy and gothic.
During the Midsummer weekend visit my daughter, Miss Moonbase, left this fortune card, which she'd been vended [is that a verb?].
As soon as I saw it I recognised it as similar to the the card Tom Hanks gets in the film BIG from the Zoltar Speaks machine. which I think was on Coney Island [maybe it's still there?]
The Zoltar Speaks fortune cards were and still are issued by Characters Unlimited of Boulder City in Nevada, USA, as are the machines themselves!
It reminds me of an uber-cool vintage Japanese toy from the Sixties called the Gypsy Fortune Teller by Ichida.
A fabulous companion to the battery-operated Mod Monster, I first came across this beautiful toy in one of the very first books on vintage toys I ever got, in 1990:
Yesterday's Toys 3: Robots, Spaceships, and Monsters Paperback, 1989, by Teruhisa Kitahara (Author), Masashi Kudo (Photographer)
[have you got this book too?]
The Ichida Fortune Teller is in action on several You Tube clips. Here's one showing the card being palmed.