Tracing the Origins of Fisher-Price Little People

3 months ago 3

Having kids means experiencing the flea market season on an entirely different level. Last Saturday we returned with a cardboard box full of assorted Fisher-Price Little People toys: a bunch of vehicles (a minivan, a school bus, a safari jeep, and a smaller tractor and car), a few set pieces (roundabouts, swings, gates and the like), and most important of all: the little figurines. There’s only one problem: it’s a disassociated mess.

Not that kids mind mess—they seem to prefer and attract it. But for an early GenY person that grew up with free LEGO booklets and a strange categorization twitch, I couldn’t help to try and determine where which toy piece came from. To my big surprise, especially compared to LEGO, attempting to categorize Little People is much more challenging as the company went through a couple of “breaking changes”. The Fisher-Price Collectors Club has got you covered:

Sadly everything changed around 1990. The Little People toys made after 1990 had a whole different look and feel. The figures were made bigger and rounder (nicknamed the “Chunkies”) and there were far less pieces, and the sets were made out of cheaper light-weight plastic. After 1996, the Little People toys evolved into ones made of some rubbery-plastic material with an entirely different shape and faces, with sets made out of cheaper thinner plastic.

Being unfamiliar with the toys, I didn’t even know they were first produced in the late 1950s, looking very different from the “Chunkies” that we scored. But even the Made In China ones from the nineties and noughties aren’t all the same either. The really old figurines were wooden and could be placed in a hole in doll houses, while for the plastic ones, sometimes there’s a hole but sometimes there’s a circular nob with small protrusions to keep the Little People in place, and on a few of the Safari-themed ones, the nob differs in size to trigger some kind of sound not unlike the VTech things I inspected last year. Since we only have the figurines, we didn’t initialize recognize this possibility.

a small collection of assorted Little People figurines.

If you flip them over, depending on the age of the figurine, you’ll see different things. Here’s a selection from oldest to newest:

The woman with red glasses and nightcap/pyjamas: © 1998 FISHER-PRICE INC. CHINA
The Asian pink girl with apple: © 2001 MATTEL, INC. CHINA 08/10TL
The dad with phone: © 2001 MATTEL, INC. CHINA 04 09 EF
The dog with scrub: © 2007 MATTEL, INC. CHINA 05/10 TL
The lion: ZooTalkers™ © 2011 MATTEL 1186 MJ-1-NL 06/11D MADE IN CHINA

I first thought that the numbers (e.g. 05/10 TL) were some kind of ID I could use to look them up but that would have been too easy: it’s a mould number for internal quality control. Our oldest figurine from 1998 is clearly made with another kind of harder plastic than the more recent rubbery ones up to the point that it almost feels as if it will break if thrown. The newest one is the one with peculiar holes should be part of the interactive zoo set that we don’t have.

Is there a way to find out to which set which character originally belongs? The most amazingly helpful resource I could find was a website called This Old Toy that unfortunately needs to be resurrected using archive.org. It meticulously categorized all components—including vehicles—based on year and characterizations such as colour. That site is amazing. It’s so sad to see it gone. Most of the photos are gone rendering its use limited to the matches that we did find.

An entry from the 'This Old Toy' database.

It turns out that a lot of figures reappear in different sets making it difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the ones we bought at the flea market. With This Old Toy being partially gone, another option is querying search engines and pattern matching the images by hand, hoping to end up on an eBay link that mentions the entire set. Reverse image searching yielded good results as well. The red mechanic with blue cap and oil filter in hand should be riding in a red tow truck. Oops.

Reverse image searching can get very time-consuming depending on the size of your collection. Another option is asking the collectors by requesting help on forums but since our “Chunkies” aren’t that sought-after I doubt many people there care. It feels weird to me that big toy companies like Fisher-Price (or should I say Mattel) don’t keep such a neat public archive themselves. Wouldn’t that boost their reputation and sales?

What’s even weirder is that they went through a couple of “breaking changes” in the design of the Little People. Even in the recent sets, like the aforementioned interactive zoo one, the lion can’t be placed in regular Little People slots. It’s incompatible with old stuff and old stuff is incompatible with the new set yet it’s called Little People. Why? Is this just my GenY brain screaming Does Not Compile? Something that would be unthinkable for LEGO: imagine a new set with pieces that don’t fit on your existing components.

As for the characters themselves, there seems to be a recurring theme: for example, the boy with blonde hair is called Eddie and usually holds a pet frog called Freddie. That’s why many of the figurines look alike: they portray the same character but in a different activity or profession. There are even a bunch of animated shows produced for the Little People franchise. In case you also don’t understand the frog thing, this should clear things up: