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. One of the most successful and well-recognized toy lines ever created, the current Little People line focuses on various configurations of five characters named Eddie, Sarah Lynn, Maggie, Michael, and Sonya Lee. Aside from the small plastic figurings, the franchise includes plushes, electronic toys, books, and an animated series (with video and DVD releases of the animated series)
History
Original Little People
Little People started in 1950 with the Looky fire truck and three fire men. Later, the toy wagon was introduced with horses and a little driver. The first Little People precursor 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.
The Original Little People went through six major styles of body (base) configurations, and even within each major classification there may be one or more minor style variations. 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, 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.
In 1968, Fisher-Price introduced the first Little People playset, the Play Family Barn. Eventually, the toys 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.
Chunky Little People
Most people believe that these figures were developed as a replacement for the Original Little People due to the increasing concerns and pressures from parents and consumer-advocacy groups for safer toy designs. A popular book of that time that dealt titled Toys That Kill prominently featured a trio of Original Little People figures on the cover. Published in 1986 by Edward Swartz, it most certainly provided the motivation for Fisher Price to re-design their most popular Little People line to something more "acceptable". 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.
Articulated Little People
In 1997, the company revised the shape of the figures, making them much more detailed, smaller in overall size (compared to the Chunky People - they more closely approach the overall dimensions of the Original figures), more colorful, pliable, and with distinct arms and legs, which neither the Originals nor the Chunky versions did.
In 1999, Little People celebrated their 40th birthday with the reintroduction of the first Little People toy ever: Little People school bus and characters. The play sets include the school bus, circus train, construction vehicles and home and other play sets.
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).