Magic-Box was a manufacturer of ice cream truck music boxes.[3] It was based in Jacksonville, Florida and owned by Jeff Wray.[4] Their music boxes are rare and are hard to find on online stores. A Regular Magic Box was last seen on eBay on May 10th, 2021.
Regular Magic Box[]
The Regular Magic Box, often referred to as simply the Magic Box, is a music box that has 3 songs each supplied by a Holtek HT3810 series melody generator. The default songs are 10K, 11E, and 11G (see Songs) but they could have been changed without notice, depending on the supply of the melody generators.[5] Alternatively, the customer could choose the songs that came with the music box.
It uses an 8W audio amplifier[6] and like most ice cream truck music boxes, it can be powered by any 12V DC source such as a car battery, power supply, or an AC to DC adapter for use with wall outlets.
The Regular Magic Box has two knobs: a volume controller and a song selector. The volume controller also powers it on/off. The box is made from extruded aluminum and has a bronze and copper speckle finish, with slide mounting brackets on the bottom.
It appeared to be their best-selling product, with ~10,000 national sales and ~500 local sales as of 2001.[7]
Custom Magic Box[]
The Custom Magic Box uses the same design as the Regular Magic Box, but it could have 1-3 songs supplied by a sound chip with a song or songs supplied by the customer programmed on it.
Baby Magic Box[]
The Baby Magic Box is the rarest Magic-Box product. It is a pair of 2 stereo speakers designed to be used by pushcarts, mopeds, or other small vehicles such as golf carts. It has 1 song, supplied by the same melody generators as the Regular Magic Box. It uses a 3W audio amplifier and is powered by 6 C nickel-cadmium batteries, which are rechargeable.
It resembles a desktop computer speaker from the late 1990s-early 2000s.
Songs[]
There is a total of 74 songs to choose from, including 32 children's songs (10A-11G), 16 lyrical songs (12A-12Q), 13 Christmas songs (13A-13M), and 13 popular songs (14A-14M). So far, 18 songs, which are listed below, have been listened to: 12 children's songs, 4 lyrical songs, 1 Christmas song, and 1 popular song. However, only the children's songs (10 so far, including all 3 default songs and 2 that have not been listened to yet) are known to have been used by Magic-Box products.
Note: The videos in the "Audio" column are the best videos of the songs being played. They are not the only videos of the songs in most cases.
| Default Songs | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song # | Song Name | Composer(s) | Audio | Notes |
| 10K | Yankee Doodle | Public Domain | [1] [2] | |
| 11E | Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? | Frank Churchill | [1] [2] | |
| 11G | Mary Had a Little Lamb | Public Domain | [1] [IC] | |
| Optional Songs | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song # | Song Name | Composer(s) | Audio | Notes |
| 10E | It's a Small World | Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman | [1] [IC] [IC 2] | |
| 10I | When the Saints Go Marching In | Unknown Public Domain |
[1] [IC] | Under copyright until 2021, 14 years after Magic-Box closed |
| 10N | London Bridge / The Train Goes Fast (火車快飛) (Chinese) (Medley) | Public Domain (Both Songs) | [1] [2] | |
| 10Q | Little Brown Jug | Public Domain | [1] [2] | |
| 10X | If You're Happy and You Know It | Joe Raposo | N/A | Mentioned in an eBay listing, not listened to yet |
| 11A | I'm Popeye the Sailor Man | Sammy Lerner | [1] | |
| 11B | Row, Row, Row Your Boat | Public Domain | N/A | Mentioned in an eBay listing, not listened to yet |
| Miscellaneous Songs | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song # | Song Name | Composer(s) | Audio | Notes |
| 10A | Kalinka | Public Domain | [IC] | |
| 10B | Happy Birthday | Public Domain | [IC] | Under copyright until 2015, 8 years after Magic-Box closed |
| 10F | Home Sweet Home | Public Domain | [1] | |
| 10L | Oh! Susanna | Public Domain | [IC] | |
| 12A | Greensleeves | Public Domain | [IC] | |
| 12D | Für Elise | Public Domain | [IC] | |
| 12H | Yesterday (The Beatles) | John Lennon Paul McCartney |
[IC] | |
| 12J | Love Is Blue | André Popp | [IC] [IC 2] | |
| 13A | Jingle Bells | Public Domain | [1] [IC] | Used by a Santa Claus motionette |
| 14B | Wooden Heart (Elvis Presley) | Friedrich Silcher (Melody) | [1] | Used by a Music-on-Hold Device |
Decline[]
Beginning on January 30th, 2002[8] until September 2002, several users of the allscream.com message board claimed to have been ripped off by Magic-Box.[9] Specifically, in most cases, the payment was accepted by Magic-Box but the orders were never shipped. The company was also investigated by the State Attorney of Florida and the Jacksonville Better Business Bureau. However, the investigation by the former was stopped and thus the result is unknown.[10] On January 9th, 2003, Wray claimed that this was because of how his customers paid him[11] or did not buy insurance.[12] This resulted in a resurgence of complaints towards Magic-Box with the last one being made on October 13th, 2003.[13]
Magic-Box was forgotten about by 2004 and eventually closed permanently because of "MP3 and other stuff"[14] and possibly due to the discontinuation of the Holtek melody generators. The domain for magic-box.net expired on January 27th, 2007, and is for sale as of November 13th, 2022.
Post Closure[]
Contributed by the collapse of the allscream.com message board and Magic-Box's small number of customers, the company fell into obscurity and was only known by users of its products.
On November 2nd, 2018, almost 12 years after its collapse, Magic-Box was discovered via a news article and the URL of its website was found. It is currently archived on web.archive.org. Eventually, it was discovered by others and pulled out of obscurity by early 2019.
Today, Magic-Box products, particularly the Regular Magic Box, are still being used by ice cream vendors, although the number of vendors using them is declining.
Trivia[]
- "Old Folks at Home," the state song of Florida, where Magic-Box was located, is an optional song. 3 other state songs are featured: "Home on the Range" (Kansas), "Yankee Doodle" (Connecticut), and "You Are My Sunshine" (Louisiana).
- "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" appears to be the most common default song by a large margin and the most common song overall.
- For the optional songs, the most common song appears to be a tie between "It's a Small World" and "When the Saints Go Marching In." However, it is possible that these songs could have been chosen by Magic-Box, rather than the customer (see Regular Magic Box).
- The Regular Magic Box has a few similarities to the 32-song Nichols Electronics Omni, a much more common ice cream truck music box:
- They were both sold within the same time frame, though the Omni was introduced in 1998[15], 4 years after Magic-Box opened.
- They were both discontinued in the mid-2000s, possibly due to the discontinuation of the melody generators.[15]
- The Omni was discontinued in 2006.[15] Magic-Box permanently closed for business one year later.
- Speaking of which, they both use melody generators from Holtek; the Omni uses a Holtek HT3894A. This explains why the song names on both websites are similar to each other.
- Coincidentally, "Landler" in "Landler Tanz" is misspelled as "Lander" on both websites.
- The Magic Box and Omni are the only known ice cream truck music boxes that have songs with sound effects. This is the case with 23 songs on the Omni and many Magic Box songs. However, the only sound effect Magic Box songs have is a percussion sound.
- This feature was not advertised when both music boxes were sold.
- 27 songs on the Omni are the same ones offered by Magic-Box, including two default songs.
- The owner, Jeff Wray was infected with COVID-19 on the week of July 18th, 2021.[16]
- He also had a stroke about 1 year later, around July 2022.[17]
- One of their customers, Mobile Vending, an ice cream truck business in Sarasota, Florida owned by Gene Bovinett, was the only user of the allscream.com message board who did not have any issues with Magic-Box at first. However, he turned against the company two months later.
Goofs[]
- "Magic-Box" has an unnecessary hyphen.
- There are many misspelled words on the Magic-Box website. For example, priority is misspelled as "priory." The song list is the highest offender:
- Almost all of the song titles are incorrectly capitalized and a few of them are incomplete.
- The title of "Sleigh Ride" is extended to "Sleigh Ride Through the Snow." The last three words in the extended title could have been mistaken for "Dashing through the snow," the first lyric of the verse of "Jingle Bells" that is usually performed first. However, the original song list does not contain this error.
- The song list on the website is aligned to the left, rather than the center compared to the other tabs. This is likely because the website was made on a monitor with an 800 x 600 display resolution, which was more common at the time.