Four small creatures

 My (two separate) Etsy orders both came today, and in them, a couple of nostalgic items. I seem to keep buying Smurfs, but as I said, these are a thing that reminds me of that just-cusp-of-tweenhood time when life was a little simpler, I still had a couple good friends, and I knew better how to negotiate the world than I did as a teen - or frankly, than I do now.

The first one - I never had a figure of this guy, but I wanted one. (I mentioned my seeing the plush version in a store, and not having the money to buy it, and then never seeing one for sale again)

The Camel with the Wrinkled Knees! In the form (blue) that he took on in the 1980 or thereabouts movie. (In the books, apparently, he was cream colored). This one is marked "1988" which is a good bit later than the movie so I don't know....could there have been a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon featuring the characters? Or am I misremembering that? In 1988 I would have been starting college....

He's fairly big for one of these types of toys (he's taller than the Smurfs, and pleasingly chunky). Nicely detailed paintwork, too. 

And then a Smurf that I'm quite sure my brother had a version of:

Little guy with a lantern - probably out after dark, and from his expression, in a place he's not entirely comfortable walking. 

And I remember this one, though neither my brother nor I had him: 

Also I'm old enough to remember corded phones with dials (and handsets, though desk phones still have those, and at least until a few years ago, you could actually buy a handset to plug into your iPhone)

And here is one I NEVER saw as a kid, I suspect it was maybe European-market only, because even in the 1980s "alpha moms" who complained about things and wanted to protect all children (not just their own) from what they considered "corrupting" influenced.

But I laughed when I saw it. And bought it, even though the silver "fin" paint is pretty worn:

Smurfette mermaid! And yes, she is topless, but has an arm across her chest. I like that the way her face paint is she looks slightly amused, like she's getting away with something.

Quite a while back I speculated whether Smurfs were mammals, or some other kind of creature (after all - we don't know how they reproduce, I can guess with only one female in town it's gotta be some kind of binary fission, perhaps, or maybe they are timeless and ageless and always have been). But this proves that they are mammals - at least, there is the implication that the young could be fed milk.

Heh. "Smiddies." (There is a joke, among animation fans, of the tendency for some animators to female-code female non-mammals by giving them bustlines - so snakes have "sniddies" and birds have "biddies" and the likes...and yes, it is weird and jarring to a biologist to see it, just as it's a bit odd to contemplate a My Little Pony character wearing a bikini top (because horses, like other hooved mammals, have an udder, and it would be in the region a bikini BOTTOM would cover, so no top would be necessary. And of course if something like a cat or a dog wore a bikini, she would need four tops to cover all the mammaries....)

this might show her a little better:

These are surprisingly hard to photograph well; I suspect it's the high contrast between the white hat and the dark blue skin