Maybe they can replace all the guns with walkie talkies.
I think it’s a “loud talker”
Only one cat?
1 Like
I like how she has a TV and 3 pieces of audio-visual gear but none of her furniture faces the TV.
1 Like
My 22-year old son used to save all his allowance for new Playmobil sets. As soon as a child has a second set, or one or two add-ons, the story becomes his/her own. I defy the author of this article to find a child who insists on putting everything back in its own box, just to keep the sets intact. As you say, anyone* can be the hotel maid or the police officer or the park ranger, even Santa Claus!
1 Like
haven’nt plated with legos in years. I suppose the ban was against modern day firearms, and that went out the window with certain licenced sets.
Perhaps, but generally they have made sure that all the normal sets are playable on their own. They have a range of spare parts, too, but those are usually kept separate from their main range.
Of course your options may be a bit limited if all you have is a set with only one figure and a few accessories, but at least it means that they can be combined very flexibly. As @akputney said, in practice children are likely to have more than one set and mix them freely.
That’s also something to keep in mind when some of the sets seem a little odd at first glance. Of course not that many children play a lone figure ironing imaginary shirts all day, but a figure like that can absolutely make their personal Playmobil world a more interesting, complex and well-rounded place.
Yeah, both your example in that link and the third pic in your post directly above that include a deer blind, which are for hunting.
1 Like
I defy the author of this article to find a child who insists on putting everything back. 
But seriously: my kids found Playmobil to be interchangeable with LEGO, Calico Critters, and homemade sets made from scrap wood and/or construction paper and tape. Now that’s diversity!
2 Likes
Ah, man, I fuckin’ love Playmobil.
1 Like
That’s a recent change, though. The original policy was no weapons whatsoever–the founders lived through WWII and had no interest at all in war toys. When the space sets came out, there were lots of dudes running around with “loudspeakers” and “TV cameras,” but nothing that was recognizably a gun. It got softened to “no modern firearms” so the castle and pirate sets could have swords and muskets, and later the Wild West got old-style revolvers, but it was a long, long time before it went any further than that. Even the Star Wars sets used loudspeaker pieces for blasters for years.
Even now, Lego refuses to do semi-realistic military-focused lines. It’s why the Halo license went to Mega Bloks, and why all the tanks and jet fighters and attack choppers in the brick aisle are third-party crapware. It’s not the choice I would have made, but it’s one I can respect.
3 Likes
Those were definitely guns when I was playing with them.
Oh, of course. Me too. But they were all repurposed from something else. There were no pieces that were unequivocally designed to be guns.
Deer blind? [Nonsense.][1]
Perched high in the Playmobil Ranger’s Post, the park ranger keeps a watchful eye on the wildlife below. Twice daily he makes sure they have enough hay, carrots and food before the long harsh winter approaches.
Or the Amazon UK description if there’s still any doubt left:
The Playmobil Ranger’s Post features a seasoned ranger, his tree stand, an animal feeder, 4 deer, 2 wild boar, 2 squirrels, trees and more. Also includes a tree-shaded feeding hut with hay, carrots and more for the animals to eat, and a weapon for the ranger to use if he needs to fend off danger!
See? Practically Captain Planet. He may dress huntery as heck and use a deer-blind-like thing, but he clearly only hunts evil poachers. The most dangerous game of all.
(Is it me, or is some political correctness already starting to creep in? This ‘nope, not a hunter’ party line sounds suspiciously like a step in this direction.)
[1]: Amazon.com
To me that’s the main place were their ‘political incorrectness’ is not a charming asset. Apart from the fabulous Caribbean tan of the lady pirates I posted, Clearly white as default is the rule. Almost as bad as Hollywood.
I checked the site and you can order replacement parts directly from Playmobil (a few vendors online are also selling used). So, if you just want heads to represent your child’s family, you can get them right from the source.
“To order spare parts please contact the Parts Department at 1-800-752-9662, option 1. Please let the Parts Department know the part number as indicated on the building instructions. If you no longer have the building instructions, you can download them here.”
(I do agree they’re as bad as Hollywood when it comes to default character assignments.)
2 Likes
It should be more diverse now that it is an international brand, but you can see how “white as default” started in this case - Germany and Denmark were very white when Lego and Playmobil were developed, and are still much whiter than the US. If you include the Turkish population, Germany is about 95 % European and 0.7 % African descent (including white African) even now, and Denmark is even less diverse. When you are depicting everyday German or Danish scenes, they aren’t going to look like the Coca Cola advert.
Now that it’s an international brand?
Considering the toy had its German debut in 1974 and began being sold worldwide in 1975, you could argue that they’ve had plenty of time to design a few more skin-tone plastics. They don’t even have to change the shape of the molds, and that’s the expensive part.
Sure, their unabashedly German character can be said to be an important part of the brand. I remember growing up (in 80s Brazil) and particularly loving the spaceship set, and it took many years for me to realize there was anything funny about my toy police car being white and green with ‘Polizei’ on the side.
Having lived for a bit in a large German city (Cologne, 2005) I’m pretty sure actual contemporary Germany includes quite a bit more ‘Coca-Cola advert’ ethnic diversity and sensibility towards this subject than it did in the seventies.
1 Like
I did basically say that at the start of my comment, and they have made some changes (at least to allow you to choose other figures if you want). At the end of the day they are a global brand and should seek to reflect their market, but the fact that they are often specifically depicting German society rather than the USA or a nondescript city is worth noting at least. As to the statistics vs. your experiences in Cologne, I can imagine official statistics underestimating the population of foreign residents, if only because they would include people who are more mobile and less easy to record in a census. Large city centers are going to be much more diverse than the rest of the country though, so it may not be so far off either.
It may just be that this is how I grew up, but I liked the standard yellow Lego minifigs - they were specifically not a normal skin color in order to avoid depicting race, although yellow is close enough that it doesn’t distract you from the fact that they’re supposed to be people. There was no difference in gender either, so you could put different hairstyles on a minifig to change its gender. I get why people read neutral and yellow to mean male and white (and they definitely have a point, especially once you start getting different colors in some sets and more facial features), but I also admire the attempt to make Lego about people rather than specific groups of people (mine didn’t have names or characters, they were mainly there to populate my constructions). Maybe they should have realized that there was no neutral color and gone with light brown, or perhaps chosen orange in order to be less easily identifiable as white.
Gotcha.
I have no knowledge of the actual population mix in Germany regarding ethnic backgrounds or exactly how caucasian a typical ‘realistic’ German play-scene might be, but my feeling is that the circa 2014 Euro zeitgeist is not clueless or insensitive about representation of ethnicity as being a thing.
Do the people behind Playmobil as a brand care about that? I’d guess yes, and that there have been improvements despite the general conservative strategy of not deviating too much from the original 1970s concepts. Because those were already pretty good toys, and apart from the dated fashions in the ‘contemporary’ playsets there’s not really much that needs to be updated for every new generation.
TL;DR: more asian protagonist dolls, why not? The rest is mostly fine guys, keep on trucking your alleged ‘political incorrectness’ and ‘bold stereotyping’ because boys and girls alike love that stuff. And it’s not going to start rotting their brains now after four decades, no matter how hard some adults worry about it.
1 Like
May I just finish my enjoyable participation in this fine thread by saying I just realized what, exactly, irked me about the tone of this article in the first place.
A couple of quotes, emphasis mine:
But it was when my preschooler expressed his excitement over the massacre of the Native Americans, that I really realized that Playmobil actually provides the perfect opportunity to teach social justice – through its absolute and utter failure at it.
(…)
But putting out a set with pioneers and Indians killing each other without any context for the 5-year-old that will be playing with it is reckless. I’m sure not every kid who opens that fort is getting a lecture about Native Americans.
Dear author, I don’t know what kind of toys San Francisco kids are playing with nowadays, but it has never been the job of any toy to teach your kid social justice. That’s ‘parents’ you’re thinking of.
Is your kid’s excitement about pretend violence lacking the proper historical perspective and context you’d like him to learn? Is that the toy’s fault? Really? You’re right there watching him play.
Playmobil seeks to teach about history with realistic sets from different time periods, which is great.
No. Playmobil seeks to sell toys by offering props for play for a variety of scenarios kids enjoy, be it inspired by pirates or dinosaurs or fairy princes or space marines. Or office workers. Is the main priority of those toys realism or historical accuracy? No. Heck no. They’re fantasy playthings, designed specifically to become whatever the kids imagine them to be.
You are clearly the one who ‘seeks to teach history’, not the damn dolls. As the article indicates, you can very well use them as props for any educational or character-building scenario if that’s what rocks your boat, but a bunch of plastic figures are never going to do it all by themselves and it’s absurd to complain about that.
Rant over. On the bright side, I enjoyed the opportunity to nerd out on such a fun subject. Thanks, Boing Boing.
9 Likes
