On a late summer trip to Amsterdam, I visited the newly renovated Rijksmuseum. After a few hours spent looking at paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, I wandered down to the gift shop, wanting to buy something for my two sons back at home. There, underneath a huge plastic Playmobil figure with a familiar shiny smile and clip-on hair, I saw shelves stacked with exclusive, co-branded Playmobil souvenirs—one set depicting Rembrandt’s 1642 oil painting “The Night Watch,” and another Vermeer’s 1657–1658 painting “The Milkmaid.”
In the “Night Watch” package, the seventeenth-century burgemeester Frans Banninck Cocq and his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburch, are rendered in three-inch plastic form. Cocq wears a black hat that may have been borrowed from Playmobil’s cowboy set, while van Ruytenburch wears one that might have been swiped from the swashbuckling pirate set.
I found the Vermeer “Milkmaid” package even more striking, in part because the kitchenware and bread on the table seem repurposed from the bakery set that I’d bought my children almost a decade ago. I’ve always loved the tiny, specific details of that bakery scenario: Not just bread, but several specific varieties, including miniature rye, wheat, sourdough, and baguettes; Not just pastries, but a bundt cake, croissants, cinnamon buns, and a sheet of berry tarts; Not just a bakery, but a primary-colored, minimalist Bäckerei, with big sunny windows and workers with white coats and little white “paper” hats—a bakery that a Europhile American like myself might believe actually exists in Stuttgart or Linz or Utrecht.
As I examined the Playmobil version of Vermeer’s “Milkmaid,” I realized how Vermeer’s popularity as a painter rests on the same sort of generic, domestic scenarios as Playmobil, with all those charming, joyful, bourgeois little details, the depiction of the everyday things of our lives. That’s why I love Vermeer. I’ve always found myself equally charmed by the sweet details of the Playmobil worlds: A-frame vacation homes with “wood” beams, tiny vehicles that resemble Smart Cars, jungle adventurers with five-o’clock shadows, skateboarders with baggy cargo pants, polar explorers with puffy winter coats and furry hoods, beach lifeguards with orange Snooki-style tans, flight attendants serving blue coffee mugs, Euro camper vans with sunroofs, a construction crew that comes complete with a case of beer and a porta-potty, a timber Alpine lodge with a lederhosen-clad innkeeper playing an accordion and pulling draft beers from the tap.
I bought both the “Night Watch” and the “Milkmaid” sets, and when I returned home I excitedly gave them to my boys, aged thirteen and ten. Both sons enjoy the occasional art museum, and we had a chuckle about the sets, but a few days later, they remained unopened.
I asked my younger son if he was planning to open them. He scoffed. “I haven’t played with Playmobil in like four years.” It was true. He hadn’t even asked to set up our Playmobil remote-control train set—along with our Neustadt station where trains leave from Gleis 1 and Gleis 2—for the holidays last year.
I asked him to tell me why. “I play with Lego more. With Playmobil, you can’t do what you want and put two different sets together,” he said.
“That’s not true,” I said. “You could take a Playmobil pirate and put him in an airplane.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But you can’t take off an airplane’s wings and stick them on a boat.”
And with that, he went off to play the video game Destiny, in which he shoots aliens along with his friends, all of whom are sitting at home alone in front of their own televisions.
In June, Playmobil’s inventor and longtime C.E.O., Horst Brandstätter, passed away. Brandstätter, whose family plastics company introduced the hula hoop to Europe in the nineteen-fifties, struck gold with Playmobil figures in 1974, when, during the oil crisis, he decided to create a toy that had “the maximum amount of play value for the minimum amount of plastic.” Fast-forward forty years, and the Brandstätter Group does around six hundred million euros in sales and employs about four thousand people. Reading about Brandstätter’s death caused me to think a great deal about Playmobil. I am of the first generation that played with the little plastic figures. My parents brought back a Wild West fort from a trip abroad in 1975, a year after Playmobil was launched and before it was available in the U.S.
But the kind of parents who buy their children Playmobil also buy them Playmobil’s archrival, Lego. For all of Playmobil’s success, it is almost always overshadowed by Lego. As the A.V. Club blog once wrote: “Despite actually predating the creation of the famous Lego minifigure by a few years, Playmobil has always been, in America, at least, an also-ran in the ‘weird European toys’ market.”
Playmobil’s fate is to be compared with Lego. Sadly, next to Lego—with its Star Wars/SpongeBob/Harry Potter/superhero licensing deals, its video games, its nerdy-cool status among tech-industry types, and its recent blockbuster film—Playmobil can seem downright dowdy and boring. When you get Playmobil, you simply get generic scenarios: Vacation, Pirates, Knights, Airport, Supermarket. One of the best-selling sets is a Christmas manger scene. The fastest-selling Playmobil figure of all time was launched this past winter: Martin Luther, complete with quill and German Bible!
While Lego is selling millions of video games with shooting lasers, lightsaber battles, and explosions, Playmobil was taken to task by critics last year for offering a bank-robbery kit, even as it got feminist props because the robber was a woman. When news broke that a big-budget Playmobil film would soon go into production, film critics and bloggers snarked that it was a copycat to Lego’s massive success with “The Lego Movie.”
Typical of a certain snarky attitude toward Playmobil is a 2002 rant in Frieze Magazine, by Tom Morton. “The secret of Brandstätter’s success,” Morton writes, “was to make its new toy range terribly, terminally boring. Playmobil isn’t about . . . the limitless possibilities of Lego; it’s about the plastic preservation of the status quo.” Morton claims Playmobil, with its play sets focussing on everyday shops and homes and service workers, is “crashingly dull to play with,” and that it’s “a perfect primer in bourgeois citizenship.” In the end, Morton asserts that Playmobil is a toy that appeals to adults—especially grownups who love clean European design—who then buy it for their children.
He may have a point. What child, after all, would want to play with a Playmobil Hazardous Materials Team set (with respirators and hazmat suits), a Playmobil Airport Security Checkpoint (with metal detector and luggage X-ray machine), or a Playmobil Woodshop Class (with a bearded teacher overseeing two children with saws and a drill press)?
After my younger son went to the basement to play video games, my older son came downstairs. He loved Playmobil when he was little, and we’d spent hours building the Viking Fortress and the Airport and the Roman Coliseum and then playing with them. It was a letdown for me when he left them behind, probably around age eight or nine. I asked him why. “Well, I started playing with Legos more because they had Star Wars and Harry Potter and stuff like that,” he said. “With Playmobil, you get a policeman, a criminal, and a jail cell. Then you have to make up your own story.”
This, in my opinion, is where Playmobil’s virtue lies. No one would argue that Lego does not inspire creative, constructive play. But more and more Lego relies on its associations with pop culture in order to catch a child’s attention. The child may build and create, but the narrative is simply copied from the movie. It’s easy to snark, but Playmobil has quietly walked a different path over the past decade—slower, less flashy, more generic scenarios, much fewer licensing deals. This type of unscripted play is very good, for children and the culture. Playmobil may hold tighter to ideals of independent, imaginative narrative play, and it represents a less crass, less marketed, less ironic or knowing type of play.
My older son and I opened and clicked together the Rembrandt and Vermeer sets while we talked. I wondered aloud if Playmobil might enter into more licensing deals with art museums. Perhaps Playmobil is slyly positioning itself as highbrow, versus Lego’s more middlebrow offerings. If that’s part of the strategy, then the company must recognize the sad irony that people tend to love Playmobil more once they don’t actively play with the toy anymore. “I don’t think Playmobil is boring,” my son said. “Playmobil is great.” Then he became wistful. “I like to think about Playmobil,” he said. “They were a big part of my childhood.”
