tomy and toyroyal?

heres one for our resident sleuths...

we picked this up yesterday at a charity shop. clearly marked tomy on the front, but the back says toyroyal, a brand i had never heard of. a quick google last night revealed nothing similar.

   

   

   

   

any info happily received. thanks

[Super]

Nosing around...ToyRoyal does have a web site
http://www.toyroyal.co.jp/about/index.html

thanks, will have a proper look after work.

If I were to take a guess, maybe Tomy was the distributor for ToyRoyal in some Western territories?

I know Tomy did distribute products for other companies in some territories, most notably being Epoch Co.'s export partner for years, selling products like the Barcode Battler video game system and Sylvanian Families under the Tomy name, albeit with Epoch markings on the products themselves.

By the looks of it on their website, ToyRoyal don't seem to have ever had an international division that I can see, so we can assume in this case that they partnered with Tomy to sell the toy - Incidentally, their primary market seems to be toys for very young children and babies, something which Tomy is also known for, so I guess it might not be a stretch to assume there are more ToyRoyal products branded as Tomy, probably within Tomy's line of baby and pre school toys...

Incidentally, the markings on the toy refer to both 'ToyRoyal' and 'Royal Co. Ltd' - These are the same company according to the history, but before the early 1990's the company was mainly known as Royal Co., changing to ToyRoyal in the 90's to reflect the company's main product line, although legally they are still known as Royal Co.