Starting Tuesday, I’m kicking off a look at a new toyline here on FigureFan, and by new I mean it’s something I haven’t featured here before, as the line itself is certainly not new. Playmobil and I go way back to when I was a wee lad and my father had to move to Northern France for a few months for business and took the family with him. Naturally, there was plenty of exciting stuff to see, but it also meant being cooped up in a hotel room some of the time and so my parents took me to the store to buy me some toys to keep me busy while he was working. Playmobil was HUGE over there at the time and I came home with a couple of sets, which included some of the toys from the Pirates and Space themes. Back then, the space series was called PlaymoSpace, and it was an amazingly fun collection of toys.

I knew Playmobil was still around, but it wasn’t until I was in a Toy R Us one day perusing the Legos that I really stopped to take a look at these new sets and my Nostalgia Meter went off the charts. They had a ton of these toys, ranging from tiny figure packs to huge elaborate boxed sets. I probably spent a good half hour just picking all of them up and checking them out. I didn’t buy any, but I was thinking about them the whole ride home, and before I knew it, that night I was online ordering a bunch of them. When the box arrived it was like Christmas morning around here.

If you aren’t familiar with Playmobil, it’s a toy line that is often tossed in with Lego, which is odd because it isn’t a line of construction toys in any sense of the word. They do have similar themes, like pirates, knights, and even a line of everyday people and places like Lego’s City line. I think they tend to get compared a lot because, like the Lego Minifigs, the Playmobil figures are more or less all the same base figure, but with different parts and accessories clipped on and some different facial illustrations to make them unique. In many cases, with the right accessories you can turn a versatile Playmobil figure from a businessman to a pirate to an astronaut. Playmobil figures are smaller than most figures, but still about twice as big as Lego’s Minifigs. The sets are also all about accessories, so like Lego, the sets are often ranked by the number of pieces included. Also like Lego, Playmobil sets are usually most often identified by their number.

Everything I picked up fits into the Pirates and Soldiers theme, as that was one of my favorites as a kid. I really wish they had a current version of the PlaymoSpace line out, but all I could find were the vintage sets on Ebay and they are way too expensive for me to collect, so we’ll have to settle for Pirates and Soldiers for now. Next week isn’t going to be exclusively Playmobil, so if this isn’t your thing, I’ll try to get some features on more traditional figures and stuff, but I will be spending a lot of time on this stuff next week.