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manyplushtoys · 1 year ago

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Firffels: the Wuzzles Competitor That Disappeared

Recently, I found this toy at my local thrift store. I thought it was an oddly cute nativity toy, but upon closer inspection the tush tag read "FIRFFELS. I'm glad to be a SHAMEL." I did a quick search online and the first result was this page on Ghost of the Doll, a toy collecting site that archives information about 80s/90s toys and includes a forum where anyone can seek help with identifying toys (note: the ads on this site are intrusive and annoying, so use adblock if you follow any links to it). This lead me down a rabbit hole of figuring out just what Firffels were: a failed line of toys promised to be the next hot phenomenon, with minimal documentation online and a handful of toys left floating around in thrift stores.

Other than Ghost of the Doll, I found info about Firffels in this 2010 blog post by Trish Babbles (written in an edgy, mean-to-be-funny style that I think is too uncharitable, but it was a different time to be online lol) and this blog post by AF Blog. My other info comes from Othello Bach's website dedicated to the book itself (her personal site is no longer functional) and from a handful of youtube videos I found of a Firffels commercial. Many thanks to these sources, without them there'd be like, nothing online about these toys.

Firffels are based on the children's book Who ever Heard of a Fird? by Othello Bach, first edition published in 1984 by Caedmon Childrens Books (upon Googling, it appears that Caedmon is owned by HarperCollins now and focuses on audiobooks). The story follows Fird, a fish-bird hybrid, on his travels to find other firds. Along the way he encounters a goofy, lovable cast of other hybrid animals who have all never heard of a fird. The story ends with Fird learning to love his uniqueness and find peace with being who he is. As is apparent in the Amazon link above (not sponsored, just showing my work), a used copy is $86 dollars at the time of writing. An audiobook narrated by Joel Grey (an actor that I'm unfamiliar with who is apparently known for his role in Cabaret) was also released on cassette, listed on Ebay for $75+. Luckily, there is a youtube video of someone doing a complete read through of the book, but the camera angle is poor. This is the only visual record I could find online of the interior illustrations by Michelle Dorman, other than a brief look at a few in a low quality VHS promo rip I'll get to in a minute, and the image below from an Ebay listing. There may be a few more photos in some Etsy listings that I missed.

In Trish's blog post they complain that Shamel is an ugly monstrosity and there were a few comments on Ghost of the Doll's forum of the same nature about Shamel, but I think Shamel is the cutest one! It just looks like a new breed of camel, meanwhile Fird in the background here is...so cartoonishly goofy. Idk how else to describe him. He's so fuckin' goofy. He'd make squeaky Spongebob-esque sound effects when he walks, I imagine.

The book was allegedly a hit and Remco bought the merchandising rights. With a cast of 6 main characters, plush toys and posable action figures hit the market with a promise that Hanna Barbera would develop an animated tv show starring Firffels, housewares would be made, there'd be a clothing line, and Design-a-Firffel contests would be held. A lunchbox and flask seem to be the only housewares that are known to have been produced. In addition, plush toy sewing patterns by Simplicity were released, as well as several activity/coloring books and read along books for kids of varying age groups.

They went all in, as is detailed in the 5 minute promotional video below.

youtube

Absolutely fucking insane fact: according to this video, Caedmon Publishing was owned by Raytheon at the time. Thanks Raytheon for these cuddly children's toys and also, uh, horrific weapons of war?

After I bought Shamel, I went back to the store to see if there were more. There were! I found Bertle and Elephonkey, who still had the original tags. I swear the day earlier I had seen a frog toy with butterfly wings but it wasn't there anymore. I remember passing over it and thinking "eh, butterfly wings on a frog aren't cute," and did not bother even looking at the tags. My mistake. Turns out that toy was worth a decent amount of money and was part of this whole story.

My Bertle's pink belly super bright in real life, like neon. There is a sunbleached spot on it's front.

My Elephonkey is the only one with original tags. I also included an image of the tush tag. For each toy the tush tag is the same but displays the character's name.

Below are photos, archived by Ghost of the Doll, of the other plush toys. From left to right is Butterfrog (butterfly frog), Dicken (dog chicken), and Fird (fish bird).

Hybrid animals are not a unique concept. Wuzzles, a line of toys that were hybrids with wings and likely made to compete with Care Bears, are brought up in most posts and forums where Firffels are mentioned--usually to disparage Firffels as being knock off, less successful Wuzzles. Wuzzles weren't exactly successful either, though they definitely lasted longer and had more reach, likely due to the backing of a Disney/Hasbro budget. AF Blog in 2015 makes a good point that I agree with: it's unlikely that Wuzzles and Firffels were ripping each other off due to production timelines. Toy lines can be in development for years before any information is made public. It takes a long time to design toys, then get them to a manufacturer, then go through the revisions process. Then there's the time it takes to ship things out, negotiate dealings at every step of the way, etc. And, as AF Blog notes, Whoever Heard of a Fird? was released in 1984, a year before the first Wuzzles tv episode aired, and Firffels hit the market a year later.

People draw hybrid animals quite commonly. For example, animal and furry adoptable artists draw hybrids all the time (take a shot every time you find a closed species that is a feline with a fish tail or deer feet or some other animal's defining trait), the Lego movie had Unikitty, and I went to Walmart today and in the toy section there was a miniature rabbit-like rainbow animal with wings and a unicorn horn. The thing that makes these toys potentially appealing, in my opinion, is that they choose safe and popular traits: sparkly horns and feathery wings, for the most part. They are traits that are easily marketable and will grab a child's attention.

The thing with Firffels is that they combined animals with traits that are less immediately appealing. Image below from Ghost of the Doll.

Some of them are cute but the others miss the mark. Personally I like Shamel and Bertle (but only because they look good in plush toy form).

Worth pointing out is that the character illustrations do not match the toy designs. If you go back and watch the commercials included in the 5 minute promo video, you can see that the Bertle plush and action figure are brown and green rather than pink and blue, and that Shamel's hair is brown instead of purple. I saw varied photos of the Butterfrog plush: some were lighter green while others were darker. Could be an issue with differing cameras, but I don't know for certain. And then there's Elephonkey, who is the most inconsistent of the bunch:

The first image is a poseable toy (probably a prototype) as it appears in the commercial. It is grey and flesh colored, with odd looking plastic hair. The second image is from Ghost of the Doll, of how the Elephonkey action figure actually appeared in stores. Third is a photo of my Elephonkey plush. Compare it with the official character art...well, he's not my favorite design in any incarnation.

I think the toys in the commercials were prototypes that were changed to brighter colors so as to appeal more towards girls. In the 30 second plush commercial there are 4 girl actors and 1 boy actor, with the camera shots getting closer to and focusing more on the girls' faces. In contrast, the action figure commercial features 1 girl and 2 boys, and most of the camera shots are of the kids' hands playing with the toys, giving off a more boyish, gender-neutral vibe. Classics of gendered marketing, am I right? lol. But I think the change was a good one. I wouldn't have picked up Shamel if I hadn't seen the purple hair, and I definitely would not like Bertle if he wasn't pink. It gives the toys more of a cohesive style, a unified identity, and they fit in more alongside the Wuzzles/Care Bears visuals with the vibrant, happy colors. There's more of a toy-like appeal to them, which increases the cuddle-ability and inspires more of an urge to play.

Discovering and logging all this inconsistency has been pretty fun. But it makes me think that these toys were probably doomed by a chaotic, unorganized development process behind the scenes. And given that the book was published in '84 and toys hit the market in '85...the signs seem to point to production being rushed. Perhaps executives saw the success of Care Bears, which first appeared on greeting cards in 1981 and became a toy line in 1983, and were scrambling to get a piece of the pie?

To be fair to Firffels, it was probably harder in the 80s to hit it big with kids. You had to be lucky, you had to have connections for wide distribution, you had to anticipate what would be widely appealing to children, and you had to pay to air your commercials during prime child TV viewing hours. It added up to an expensive risk. This is all still true about commerce, but we have the internet now and the easy advertising power of the internet is not to be underestimated. In the 21st century, there's whole subcultures about nostalgia for 80s toys, so perhaps the rose-tinted memories make it easy to forget that things in the 80s were still quite analogue compared to what our lives are like today. Going viral on TikTok has the potential to skibidi someone's toilet career. iPad babies have grown up into grade school kids who throw birthday parties every year and the toys they want as gifts are influenced tremendously by things like Youtube Shorts, Tiktok, etc. We are living in an era where mass-producing cheap little polyester plushies and plastic figures is easier than ever and companies have massive budgets to pump ads into kids' eyeballs through every online avenue they possibly can. They don't even need to come up with the toy designs anymore, they can just partner with whatever Roblox game is popular right now and capitalize on that. Maybe Othello Bach should get on Roblox.

Actually, it appears that Bach was given the short end of the stick by the time Firffels were pulled. Though her personal website is no longer up at the time of writing, her other website dedicated entirely to Whoever Heard of a Fird? has some info:

At the height of Fird's success, with over 100 licensees cramming the store shelves with children’s merchandise and an animation contract with Hanna-Barbera, the book and all the merchandise suddenly vanished from the shelves.�� Although she lost the rights to several other published children’s books at the same time, Othello has never received a reasonable explanation for what happened.

So this passage actually clears something up for me. This whole time something that hasn't really lined up is that I had assumed that Othello Bach published the book first and then was approached for merchandising rights after Whoever Heard of a Fird? sold well. I actually think now it's possible that from the get-go the book was made with the intention for it to become a worldwide sensation. Not so much Bach's intent, maybe. I have some professional familiarity with licensing and other such creative publishing contracts, particularly with books. Based on what I know, I believe it's more likely that Bach pitched her manuscript to Caedmon Publishing and Caedmon, seeking to create popular IP, was like, "This has potential and we are going to sign you on not only for the book, but for more." This might be why the character designs are so strange: they were trying too hard to get famous quick and had instructed Michelle Dorman, the illustrator (it is regular practice for publishers to pair authors with an illustrator, and given how much was on the line for this IP Bach might not've had much input here), to design characters that could also become toys. The Firffels, in my opinion, look as if they are riffing off of design choices that had already been done better by other toys, resulting in characters that blend into the background while kids reach for Care Bear instead. It's unlikely that Michelle Dorman, a kids book illustrator, had the product design skills needed to make standout, awesome toy designs. Not a knock on Dorman, illustrators just have niches within their field that they're best at it. It's why you see so many illustrators complain about how often they get approached to design logos--that's not what we do, thank you.

What's sad is that clearly Bach signed a bad contract that gave away most of her rights as the writer to the publisher. She openly says so in the above passage. Bach is just the writer so while the words are hers, Caedmon would have matched her with Dorman and thus own the illustrations, and also taken charge of all the licensing and merchandising, and thus own all of that as well.

This is, of course, speculation. We don't know exactly how much Bach signed away. My guess is that Caedmon told her they needed more rights than usual to be able to conduct business (like dealings with Remco, much easier to do when you don't have a third party also involved in negotiation). If Firffels had become as popular as Caedmon hoped, they don't want to not own the IP. They would have poured all those resources into it and not be able to reap all the rewards because that pesky author would get in their way. It's almost as if publishing contracts are often predatory and only serve the interests of the publisher. Almost like publishers are companies existing in a capitalistic system and therefore only serve profit, not people. Almost like companies will never truly have artists' best interests at heart, and if you are ever to sign a contract with a big publisher you need to have a good lawyer by your side reading that thing through with you. Maybe Bach didn't consult a lawyer before she signed and didn't know the full scope of what she was signing.

It makes me sad to read that they didn't even give her a reasonable explanation as to why everything was cancelled. She does not even appear to have any of the merchandise on hand, as all the photos on her website are from Ghost of the Doll. In hindsight we can guess, logically, why the cancellation happened but in the moment it was probably upsetting for her. It seems to still be upsetting, given that she has included this on her website for the...revamped book!

However, like Fird, Othello refused to give up. For the next 20 years, she tried to regain the rights to her work. Entertainment attorneys assured her it would never happen. They said, "It can't be done!" But... it could be done and Othello did it, regaining the rights back to all her work.

Yeah, so, I actually think this is the saddest part about the whole thing. She managed to get some of the rights back and republished the book with...new art...that looks so BAD. Image from her website:

Sorry to this illustrator, but gotdamn. There is no sauce to this art whatsoever. It is unseasoned, not even salt and pepper. This looks like ass and would never fucking fly with any editor worth your time. It took me ages to figure out that the long yellow curved line is Fird's tail. Like, this is so unbelievably sad to me. I don't even really like the original art a whole lot, but compared to this...

My educated guess as to what happened is that Bach lawyered up and fought. As we know, Caedmon is now owned by HarperCollins. I can't say for certain but there was perhaps some case to be made that Caedmon being sold breached the contract, or nullified parts of it, or perhaps the contract expired. It could even just be that HarperCollins didn't care about an old, unprofitable IP and granted Bach her rights back. The original book has been out of print for a long time so maybe they were happy to relinquish it, if only to get Bach to stop contacting them. There is also Remco to consider: they must also hold some of the rights, but probably just for the merchandise? Given how prominently their logo is displayed on the toy tags, they might actually own a significant share. Perhaps they were happy not to have anything to do with the book so long as the merch rights weren't touched. I don't know! There's no info about it on the site and this stuff is usually under NDA.

So Bach got her rights back, but she's just the writer. She doesn't own any of the art and when the manuscript was returned to her there was likely a stipulation not to infringe, so to republish the book she had to hire a new illustrator. She likely did not have a huge budget for it, maybe even paying for it out of pocket because the Choice Books logo she has in several spots on the Fird website appears to be for a distribute on demand service, in place of a traditional publisher.

She also would not have been given the rights to use the original audiobook, so she had one re-recorded. It also appears like she does not have the rights to the name "Firffels" either, as the only places it appears on the site are in photographs of merchandise and in titles specifically referring to the work that is still owned by Caedmon. She carefully refers to her own work as "Fird" for short or the book's full title, probably because she cannot legally imply that she owns or made anything else.

I dug into this thinking it would be a quick look at some strange, forgotten toys from a bygone era. Instead I found a story about how an artist can so easily be shafted by publishers. Everything always loops back around to workers' rights, it seems. Stories like this about shitty publishing contracts (see: Webtoon if you want to get into something current) still appear so often, man. It's depressing, and indicative that the publishing industry needs some reform ASAP. Like, illustrators, when are we getting a proper union?

But I'm glad Bach got her rights back and got her book republished within her lifetime. I'm sad she didn't have the budget for a better illustrator. Sorry to bring that up again, I work as an illustrator irl and I have opinions about the craft, lol. Also I just think that given how long Bach had to fight, she deserved to have better art made. That being said, here's another link to her current website. There's not much there but what is there is a monument to a battle she fought and won, and is proud of.

The lack of detailed, clear, centralized documentation of these toys frustrates me. One of the most frustrating things about the internet for me is that there are few easily accessible, publicly available archives of toys--even for modern toys. I've had to use Amazon reviews and Ebay listings and broken online stores to decipher copyright/publication years. With this in mind I decided to do a write up and provide clearer pictures of the toys that I have. Documentation is important to me and the internet kinda sucks for it, I say as someone who started this blog for that purpose. If Tumblr goes down, so does everything I've posted here. As an artist who works primarily digitally, one of the scariest things is knowing that I'm laboring over an ephemeral body of work. It's just not going to exist for very long unless I print it out on archival materials. Data is not the same as a physical object. My Firffels have survived for 39 years but the digital art I draw every day is unlikely to last past 10 years because websites die and files get deleted. Books go out of print and rot in a publisher's dead IP collection.

I bought the Firffels from the thrift store thinking I'd resell them. I'm low income so I sell many of the things I thrift. I prefer to buy the older toys or the ones that need cleaning because it makes me feel better about being a reseller (I don't want to take away options from low income kids in my area, ya know?). But I'm putting in the labor to freshen them up and I'm putting in the effort to make unavailable toys available again, at least for one person. And I don't have a whole lot of shelf space to display the toys in my collection...but for now I think I'll keep them.

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