In the early days of Playmobil, several (18 at least) companies outside Germany (14 different territories) marketed and distributed Playmobil figures under licence from geobra. Many of the sets from these Licensees are very similar to German sets from the same era (with differences mainly in packaging), but there are some very different creations, often with different colour schemes from the German versions. Here’s one of my favourites, 13.08.01 from Estrela in Brazil.
In the 1980s (not until 1999 for Estrela), many of the licensee companies disappeared or ceased marketing Playmobil and some were replaced by subsidiary companies such as Playmobil (UK) and Playmobil (Spain). This mostly marked the end of the exclusive sets offered in countries outside Germany.
There is no doubt a great deal of information about the Licensees and their products is held by collectors around the world, but very little is available online. Two useful sources of information are the book Collector, 3rd Edition pages 359 to 493 (of course) and Klickypedia.com. Both list and picture many of the sets released by Licensees.
My own attempts to learn more about the UK Licensee (Marx Toys based in Swansea, Wales and active from 1975 to 1980) have drawn a blank. I suspect (with no real evidence to back it up) that Marx toys packaged and marketed Playpeople (their brand name for Playmobil) but did little or none of the manufacture, with parts coming from moulding machines in Germany or Malta.
I do not have sufficient numbers of klickies from Licensees to be confident that they are always distinguishable from German/Maltese counterparts, but some if not all Trol, Famobil and Lyra fixed-wrist klickies had unique foot-stamps as in the three examples below:
Here is a summary of the data in Collector on the Licensees.
Licencees table (opens in a new tab)
Some set numbers resemble Playmobil 4-digit numbers, but there are 3-, 5- and 6-digit numbers from some Licensees. The total number of sets is 873, between 1 (Epoch) and 330 (Antex) from each licensee. Klickypedia includes 600 further sets or set versions not shown in Collector, from 6 Licensees .
Over two thirds of the klickies marketed by Licensee companies had fixed wrists. 15 of the18 companies produced fixed-wrist klickies and six Licensees produced nothing but fixed-wrist klickies. Based on box pictures, 1836 klickies in 513 sets had fixed wrists and 826 klickies in 233 sets had free wrists. 12 sets from two Licensees seem to have had a mixture of fixed- and free-wrist klickies in the same set, according to the pictures on the box. The exact contents of sets is sometimes very hard to judge from box pictures, especially the ‘tubs’ from Lyra (Collector pages 394-5 and 407).
Page created 01 May 2020