This week sees the launch of Playmobil’s latest range of toys, ‘Dino Rise’, supported by a new CGI animated series on YouTube. The premise is that the good guys and their dinosaur allies are fighting the technologically-armed baddies to protect energy crystals. It sounds like good fun, and the moral dichotomy is probably to be welcomed given the age group it’s aimed at (in reality life is more ambiguous) but it does tell us something about the direction in which geobra Brandstätter are going.
Anything with dinosaurs is going to capture the imaginations of children. Yet in creating another heavily defined world, these toys build walls around creativity. In this, Dino Rise follows in the footsteps of Novelmore, which has replaced the long-standing theme of Knights in the Playmobil corpus. It’s always going to be Arwynn battling the unimaginatively named Burnham (“burn them”) Raiders, and it’s always going to be Ian on his T-Rex fighting the evil robots.
Traditional Playmobil sets left the context up to the child. What is this figure’s name, purpose, character? It set few boundaries around the story. Even your burglars could be Robin Hood figures. Our pirates are (like many real life eighteenth-century pirates) anti-colonial and anti-slavery. This enables A. and I to discuss some of those ambiguities I mentioned earlier: is burglary an identity or a behaviour; she’s learning not to throw a klicky into gaol because he’s a ‘burglar’, but because he burgles.
This shift in emphasis is best seen in Playmobil ships. The knights theme never got a ship when it was clearly crying out for Brandstätter to take one of those fantastic pirate brigs and add fore- and aftcastles. Check out, for example, this mod by Emma J. Instead they produced the Dragon Battleship (#5481, #6497), the forerunner of the Burnham Raiders’ Fireship (#70641). It’s a move from reality to fantasy.
A more subtle shift is apparent in the Pirates theme if you compare boat #4444 with its most recent counterpart #70151. The former, released in 2007, had two flags on a winchable rope: the pirates could show a false flag until they got in close, then raise the Jolly Roger at the last moment. The latter, from 2019, has a massive skull and cross bones on the sail yet retains the winchable flag – what’s the point? The crew of #70151 can never be anything more than pirates. The creative possibilities of the toy have been narrowed.
Head of marketing, Jamie Dickinson, has said:
“Children are consuming digital content in a very different way nowadays, living so much of their lives online, so it’s becoming more and more important to deliver a fully fleshed out backstory, with themes, content, characters and plots for them to enjoy, which ties into our physical product.”
Quoted in Toyworld Magazine (March 2021)
I couldn’t disagree more. While the one off movies they did for the Pirate, Western and Roman/Egyptian themes, and even stuff like Playmo High, showed the creative potential of the sets in use, they did not unequivocally tie the klickies to those characters. What is happening with Dino Rise is a marketing ploy with only short-term potential. It’s basically Tyco’s Dino-Riders from the ’80s, and where are they now? So, while there might have been room in our Playmobil world for a dinosaur island, it isn’t going to be one where the dinos carry rocket-launchers on their backs.
EMPM
EarlyModernPlaymobil 