Plastic Farm and Zoo Animal Toys from the 1980s and 1990s

Domestic and wild animals are a popular theme among children’s toys today, and they definitely were so during the past decades, too. I still have quite a lot of small plastic animal toys in my home that date to the 1980s and 1990s. I can even remember how my family was choosing and buying some of them in the latter half of the 1980s from the toy shelf of the local supermarket – I must have been about three or four years old back then, an exciting moment! The animal toys were sold in a small plastic bag that had a mix of many different species with some matching accessories such as trees and fences.

The farm animal sets of my childhood looked something like this. A small plastic bag contained an assortment of animals and their accessories.

Today, a small and rather dusty plastic box contains the much loved animal figures that have survived from my childhood years to the present. There is a mixed set of stuff in there, but after a while, three different kinds of themes emerge. The biggest group in the box are farm animals with their fences, trees and so on. The other rather big group of animals is wildlife themed. There is also a sort of wild west themed set there with two horses, some plants and six human figures.

These horse and donkey toys could be my oldest plastic animals. I remember the donkeys especially – there used to be two of them. I tried to find some old photos from my toddler years where I play with these horses and donkeys, but sadly I couldn’t find any, so, you’ll just have to take my word on it. Toys state the place of manufacture: Hong Kong.

The manufacturer of these toys remains a mystery to me. There are probably more than one. In most cases, my plastic animal toys don’t have any markings that would show the manufacturer’s name or the date of the making (a couple of them do show the name though). The place of manufacture can be seen more easily, as most if not all of these toys have some kind of a “made in” stamp in them. Almost all of my toy animals are made in Hong Kong.

There are some toys in my animal box that are a bit different from the others. A dog, a camel, a piglet and a giraffe are not made in Hong Kong – they are the only ones not made there – and two of them reveal the manufacturer’s name. A little piglet made of a softer kind of plastic has the text Schleich, Germany, and a rather big giraffe has the text Blue Box Made in China.

It is possible that either Blue Box or Schleich made the other toys, too, but I find it difficult to say for sure. There is not much evidence without the name of the maker. As I searched for images of 1980s plastic farm animal toy bags from Google, I came across some items that looked quite similar to mine and that were produced by a company called Fishel Toys in Hong Kong. So – who knows! My old toys could be Fishel toys, too. Or something else.

According to the markings in these toys, the camel was made in England and the dog was made in China. The dog has also a text “Great Dane” that, I guess, refers to the dog breed not the maker. The little piglet has the text “Schleich, Germany”.

Unlike the majority of my plastic creatures, this giant giraffe tells both the place of its making and the name of the manufacturer: “Blue Box, Made in China”.

An English toy company called Britains produced plastic animal toys as well, and during the time that I’m interested in – the 1980s and 1990s – this company had production in Hong Kong. Judging from the photos that I’ve seen, Britains made animals and their accessories (such as trees, fences and so on) that resemble the ones I have. It does look to me, though, that the Britains animals are more carefully made than my items that are not very neat in most cases. If you happen to recognize my animals and have some better knowledge of their maker, it would be interesting to hear it.

My farm animals and wild animals alike are quite small. Their average height is about 3-4 cm.

Both the farm animals and the wild animals are small. I measured the cows and the horses (I know… don’t I have anything else to do?) and they all were about 4 cm tall measured from their backs. My farm animals make quite a unified group with many items that have similar colours, similar postures and the same height. There are just a couple of toys that are much bigger than the others.

When it comes to the wild animals, they are about the same height as the farm animals but there is a lot more variation in size between the different species. The size differences between the species don’t really follow the laws of nature as the skunk is the same size as the elephant, for example. Such details make this wildlife set a bit weird and comical at times but I guess it didn’t stop me from playing with these toys back in the days.

Almost all of the toys are made of hard plastic. There are only a handful of those that are made of some softer material. My guess is that the different looking and softer ones were bought and added to the group separately, or I might have swapped them with a friend or something like that.

The tiniest pieces of my toy animals set are hardly bigger than a coffee bean.

The smallest creatures among my plastic toys are these miniscule chicks and bunnies. Those little birds are only eight millimeters tall when measured without their base! The base included, their total height is about 10 mm. The bunny is also 10 mm tall measured from its back. A proper example of the “Not suitable for children under 3 years” -kind of toys.

The big horse is probably from another playset than the smaller one.

I remember that when I was a child, I liked creating farmyard scenes on the table with all these different animals and their accessory items. It didn’t matter at all that some of the horses and cows were much bigger than the others and stuck out of the crowd like dinosaurs. There was room for them all on my farm.

Besides having a few giant animals, my toy box also has quite a lot of double and even triple pieces of the same kind of toy that makes me wonder about their origin. The probable explanation is that my toy box has swallowed more than one similar set of these farmyard toys for some reason. We might have got the doubles as a gift, or perhaps we just bought another toy bag that was, by accident, similar to the one we had.

These calves have almost identical postures and their paintings follow about the same pattern. However, each one looks different due to the small variations in colour and shape.

A couple of the calves have managed to avoid the paint brush completely.

These bulls look like they were made with the same kind of mold. The other one is white plastic with painted details. The other one is just plain black.

The animals are mainly painted in some way, though in many instances the colours have faded over the years quite a lot. The quality of the painted details varies. Some animals don’t have any paint at all, intentionally or not. Maybe the details created by the molding process were seen as sufficient in their case.

There are different surface textures as well. Some animals are smooth, others have fine little lines and grooves on their surface that look like fur. Some pieces have dots that can be hardly visible or, in some cases, pretty big. One of the cows has such massive white pimples all over it that they’ve always made me think of goose bumps or skin problems rather than fluffy fur, poor thing.

The cow on the left side has little grooves representing fur on its surface. The other one has big bumps all around it for – I guess – the same reason.

Besides being fun to play with, my animal toys inspired me to sit down by a typewriter and create strange writing projects. The text is in Finnish language.

When I was in primary school (I don’t remember my exact age, but something between 7-12 years old) I got the sudden idea to give names to all these farm and wildlife toys. How can I remember this? Well… I wrote lists of the animals and their names and my writings have survived to this day. As if that wasn’t nerdy enough already, I wrote the lists with a mechanical typewriter.

My animal catalog consists of very detailed descriptions of each of the animals followed by the names that I chose for them, for example in the case of this cow: “Gray hooves, chocolate brown and black spots, eats: Tara”. At times, my descriptions are a bit on the subjective side, such as this line: “The cow is gentle”. How could you see from a cow toy that it is gentle? Perhaps it had a kind smile?

I will enclose here two photos of my typed pages. The one above is titled “The Farm” and it consists of the descriptions and names of each bull, calf and cow. There are three more pages of this farm list in my old writings’ folder but I will save you from the rest and just show the first page. The picture below is a list that I wrote of the wildlife toys and it is titled “A herd of jungle animals”. I have no idea why I called them jungle animals, as there are, for example, a walrus, a polar bear and a black cat in that list, too.

A list of my wildlife toys titled “A herd of jungle animals”. The text is in Finnish language.

You might now wonder if many kids in Finland played with mechanical typewriters in the 1990s. I have to confess, I have no idea, but my guess is that not many at all. I would suspect that the majority of kids and adults who had an access to a writing device of some sort played and wrote with computers at that time, not typewriters. My father used to be a staunch supporter of typewriters, anyway, and I got that bad habit from him. Both my father and I had our own typewriter at some point – so, there were even more than one of these machines in my childhood home!

Compared with each other, the sizes of these wild animals are not very realistic, but it wasn’t much of a problem when playing with them.

This high, green fence did not belong to any of the farmyard sets, as far as I remember. It was bought together with the wild animals and suggests that my wildlife set is, in fact, a zoo.

My memories of these little plastic animals range from toddlerhood to school age. I would say that these were pretty good toys, then, as they kept me more or less interested during almost all of my childhood years. Now thinking, I guess that they were easy to play with both as a toddler and as a school kid because they were simple, they allowed a lot of freedom to my own imagination and interpretation without too many set limits. And I was a big animal lover, too.

My toy box has some extra material, too, such as trees, fences, two haystacks and even a little house. In addition, there are some human figures. One of the human beings belongs together with the farmyard sets quite clearly but the rest of them do not and they make a set of their own.

The only human figures in my plastic animals toy box look like this. The one with the bucket belongs to some of the farm sets. The other human beings jumping around were once equipped with spears, axes and stuff alike – but not anymore, as I have unfortunately managed to misplace all their things.

These two riders attach firmly to their horses but can be removed as well. The guy on the left side is the only one of the group who has his spear and shield intact. For some reason, they were not removable and so they have survived.

These wild west themed figures consist of several detachable parts. They used to have headdresses, necklaces, belts and weapons that were removable. Not so surprisingly, most of these teeny weeny additional elements have been lost over the years. Only the holes (where you could attach the spear, or the headdress) are left. Even the dolls themselves can be divided into three pieces, but most of them have all their body parts intact. There is just one poor guy who has lost the lower section of his body.

To conclude, I will add below some pictures of everything that I have in this particular plastic thingies toy box. If you used to have plastic animal figures in the 1980s or 1990s, too, go check them out. You might find some matching ones.