Little People (toys)
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Little People is the name of a toy brand, originally produced by Fisher-Price in the 1960s as the Play Family. Classic Little People figures have no arms or legs, their bodies and head shapes are circular, and they come in black and white skin colors. Little People toys also include dogs. Newer figures are larger and have more detail to their bodies, including defined arms and legs, while retaining an overall cylindrical shape.
History
Fisher-Price produced wooden toy dogs for four decades before deciding to try their new line of toys. The first Little People playset from 1959, the "Safety School Bus", included a school bus together with tall skinny figures made out of cardboard tubes wrapped in a lithograph simulating clothes. The toy gained instant popularity and other sets soon came out. By 1961, the figures were produced with wood; plastic was used for their vehicles and buildings. A few years later, the typical happy face of the traditional Little People debuted in a "straight-body" format. All of the people had a basic cylinder body with the female figures only identifiable by the addition of slanted, oval eyes and eyelashes.
By 1965, the Little People, also called the "Play Family" from the 1960s to the 1980s,[citation needed] consisted of a small cylindrical base and a wider cylinder shape for boys and men and a conical upper shape for the girls. Adult women had a kind of hourglass-shaped upper body.
Fisher-Price Little People sets encompassed a wide range of playsets, furniture packs, accessory packs, all designed to engage a child's imagination. Playsets included familiar things in children's environments, houses, main street ... even Sesame Street made its way to the iconic toys.
In the middle 1970s, Fisher-Price produced the Sesame Street town, with various Sesame Street stores, a bridge with stop lights and Sesame Street characters such as Bert and Ernie. Soon after, the Little People Discovery Airport, a hospital and a school would also be released. Little People characters had by then been also produced with plastic products exclusively.
In the 1986, a book called Toys That Kill showed three Little People on the cover, despite the fact that there had been only about three reported incidences of death by Little People swallowing, which pressured Fisher Price to re-design the popular toy. After Fisher-Price was bought over by Mattel in the 1990s, Little People reappeared on the markets, their figure significantly larger in size from the original Little People characters due to revised toy safety guidelines. These figures are called "chunky" by collectors.
In 1996, the company revised the shape of the figures, making them much more detailed and focusing on various configurations of five characters named Eddie, Sarah Lynn, Maggie, Michael, and Sonya Lee. These figures are simple vinyl "statues" and bear no resemblance to the original toy line. Likewise, the range spread beyond figures as plushes, electronic toys and even books, animated series (and video and DVD releases of the animated series) and music was introduced into the franchise. Fisher-Price, however, remains committed to the core products - the figures.
Likenesses
Some have argued that many of the Little People toys, particularly during the 1970s, resembled super-stars of their era, more famously their Black woman singer (like Donna Summer) and a Black man, whose face resembled that of famous boxer Earnie Shavers.
The only Little People toys that have been modeled after celebrities were the stars of Sesame Street -- Loretta Long (Susan), Roscoe Orman (Gordon) and Will Lee (Mr. Hooper).