And since this stuff is just so much fun to google and I enjoy procrastinating on more important things, here’s some illustrations.
Fire station with female firefighter:
Male baker:
Assorted doll houses that could conceivably be enjoyed by both girls and boys, if they’re into doll houses, without BUT THIS IS FOR BOYS/GIRLS I HATE IT MOM overly-gendered-marketing embarrassment:
Who could hate Playmobil, really? What is it with you people? This stuff is pure, distilled childhood fun.
In my circle of friends I see two camps: One grew up with Lego, the other with Playmobil. We ridicule each other with passion.
The Army of Unemployed
A complete set with over 4.3 million figurines, 1 employment centre, 1 chancellor (laughing), 1 government (incompetent)
That’s not a cop, it’s Kaiser Bill.
An excellent point, Millie. I have just this moment reported the issue to
and I would be satisfied with no less than a five-problematic rating.
He is wearing the red collar and cuffs of a Prussian municipal police sergeant with the double-breasted jacket of the Berlin capital police. Madness!
FWIW, this particular American mom is also a fan of Playmobil. I could open a store with what remains from my kids’ childhood…which is virtually all of it, since the stuff is basically indestructible. At least one of them better provide me with grandchildren so I can hand this stuff down!
Can’t we blame Treasure Island for that?
I’m not Dutch, I’m Belgian. So no Santa Clause, probably “Father Winter” then. The cultural arrogance reeks of the anglo world.
You want to talk reality of how insane this thing has become ? Black people in Suriname are painting their faces blue to avoid being called racist by white bobo’s. As related in this article (in dutch) which tells how they replaced Piet by “sugarfairies” (sexily clad young ladies with painted faces) to avoid being called racist due to the hubbub in a country half a world away. Also note how they are still celebrating Sinterklaas despite their government trying to ban it, twice. Yes, despite it being “horribly racist”, despite it being a “cultural remnant of the imperialist colonisers” these people still celebrate it. What an awful thing it must be.
You have no clue what you are talking about, which is OK. What is not OK is making serious accusations like racism based solely on your own preconceptions and biases.
Being indestructible is always welcome when it comes to toys.
Good thing that, Luke Skywalker hair aside, these dolls are probably the least dated example of 70s design I can think of. I can think of a couple of things from that era we’d be too embarrassed to share with new generations even if they physically lasted long enough.
Hrmm. I had totally missed that this character was supposedly a slave when I put this together with my 4 year old. He did do a lot of the assembling of characters, so maybe that was a part that he did. I’ll have to have a look tonight and see.
Ah. Thank you. Now I understand the value of having more of a ‘real world’ aspect to a ‘summer fun’ series, something I missed in KarlS’ somewhat scolding reply.
Black people are perfectly capable of internalising and perpetuating black stereotypes - it doesn’t make the stereotype any less racist nor does it mitigate the fact that these stereotypes were used to justify subjugation - which as a Belgian you’ll know all about, I’m sure.
I don’t know what a ‘white bobo’ actually is, but the only people I’ve ever heard to complain about the Zwarte Pieter tradition were black. I know that other colours have been tried, but since this has resulted in arrests and death-threats I think I’m on the right track, in that complaining about the figure has exposed the sentiments of white superiority for what they are - and the lengths that people will go to to defend that privilege.
I don’t hate Playmobil as much as you imply; I just think that it doesn’t have any advantage over Lego in the area of imaginative play, but doesn’t have the scope or flexibility when it comes to creative play.
The hands are pretty similar in both systems so no complaints there.
When I was talking about gendered and violent themes, I was actually talking about Lego - because there was a time when there were no guns at all (unlike in Playmobil, which has had guns at least as long as I can remember) and ever since the Lego Pirates were introduced in the 90s there’s been a slow creep of those sorts of parts.
I’m broadly in agreement with Ms Sarkeesian about the girls’ Lego brands and I think that the boys brands have similarly shifted to a more stereotypically gendered position. That said, Anita seems to lay that at the foot of Lego themselves, but I don’t think that this is entirely fair. Lego’s forays into toys for girls (and their evolution of the traditionally boys area) is based upon a great deal of observation of how kids play, and they have been demonstrated to play differently. I must clarify at this point I’m not a gender fundamentalist - I don’t think they play differently because they are ‘just wired differently’ or any such horse-shit. The problem is that Lego don’t get neat little blank slate kids with no interference from parents or other external influences. Well, with Duplo maybe they do. But by the time that they’re OK to play with Lego itself, they’ve spent a long time absorbing other people’s expectations of them and this impacts the way they play. I used to play with Lego a lot, with a friend from a really hippy family. This was in the time of Classic Space (it was just Space at the time) and Lego Town, and not much else - so the strong gendering of later themes hadn’t taken hold, but we never found girls to stay interested in it for very long.
Lego also has to overcome the barrier of getting adults to buy their sets for girls in the first place, which is probably what drives their colour-coding to fit into the Barbie/Bratz space. Now Lego has released some more on-message sets aimed at telling girls that they can be scientists and suchlike, which is much more like what I want to see, but I don’t reckon they’ll actually sell many of those sets, which sucks.
As stated above, you still don’t understand that this tradition is part of a larger whole of traditions from the world over. It’s about as racist as a black-masked Arlecchino or the painted black face of Haji Firuz, only you cannot see this larger context beyond the biases of your own culture. Which, unsurprisingly, you then decide to foist onto everyone as the Only Correct way.
A “bobo” is a “Bourgeois Bohémien”. So some the people who called it racist are black, so what ? Their skin color does not validate their arguments. Many more (both black and white) people defend the character in the low countries than protest it. For most people it is quite simply a non-issue. To justify taking away a tradition from a majority because a minority claim they have internalised some fantastical symbol of oppression is insanity.
The fact that some people are hot head idiots means you’re right ? How about the mobs that congregate to protest a parade organised for toddlers and children turning the whole thing into a siege ? The very worst thing about this is that they take a childrens party, enjoyed universally by all children involved and one of the few things that provide a universal experience shared among children of all backgrounds, and turn it into a political game for their own propagandistic aims.
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