Popple! They pop! They look like colourful felt balls, and then can pop out of that shell and suddenly they are a teddy bear! Pretty cool.
Popples were cute and cuddly, but they also appealed to the side of me that liked things to change into other things. It was around the same time as Transformers, gobots and battle of the planets, and I just loved it when something became something else!
Popples also had a tie-in to a tv cartoon, that were on a lot. It was a little like Gummie bears, Rainbow Brite or Care Bears which were also around that time. But of course popples popped! Which made them much better!
It was originally a series of fantasy characters created by the brilliantly titled “Those Characters From Cleveland” (TCFC), and basically Popples were colored teddy bears with long tails with pom-poms on the tip of the tails. They had marsupial-like pouches on their backs that they could disappear into thus resembling brightly colored balls. A lot like rolling up socks!
From 1986 to 1987, two seasons of Popple cartoons was released in the United States and the UK, and there was also a comic book series.
The Popples toys themselves were originally made by Mattel in the 1980s. There were lots of different types of Popple – basically for the Tv programme to help with plot no doubt! There was PC (Pretty Cool) Popple, Party Popple, Pancake Popple, Puzzle Popple as you can see alliteration was a big thing for them! All the popples were differently coloured. For example Puzzle popple was a medium-sized male of the “species” with orange fur, green hair, and blue and red ears
I also remember there were a few different lines of Popples – like a rock star popples were released. And then there were the “Pufflings”, who looked like Popple pets but were a ball of fluff with a face and tiny paws and tail coming out and they had riddles and jokes inside them.
Do You Remember Popples?
Do You Remember Popples?