PLAYMOBIL® PACKAGING THROUGHOUT THE YEARS

Over the past 27 years, the design of PLAYMOBIL® boxes has changed more than a few times. All PLAYMOBIL® boxes carry their own unique set of signs and markings that allow us to determine the age of any given set.
Some Items even have gone through different generations of packaging types and styles. Amidst all the continues changes, there were five clearly recognizable "periods" in the history of PLAYMOBIL®s packaging.
Soon, there will be a sixth period as well.

A. THE VERY FIRST SETS (1974-1975)

When PLAYMOBIL® sets first hit the market in may 1974, there were only three main play worlds: knights, Indians, and construction/traffic. Each of these three themes had it's own color. Boxes containing knights and medieval accessories were green, boxes with Indians and wigwams were red, and construction sets were blue.



The Playmobil®-logo on the oldest boxes was more complicated. It incorporated - under the PLAYMOBIL® brand logo - the circular Brandstätter company logo and the suffix SYSTEM. The word PLAYMOBIL® was set in a Bauhaus typeface, and has not changed all that much since then.



Finally, let's not forget that in the first seven years, the arms and hands of PLAYMOBIL® figures were cast in one continuous mold. Only later on, after the introduction of the child-figures with turn able hands, the arms and hands of the adult figures were also combined into a two material mold.





B. THE KLICKY ERA (1975-1979)

In the latter half of the seventies, PLAYMOBIL® came in a variety of different packaging forms: cart board boxes, blisters and cart board boxes with a Styrofoam  base. Blue became the color of choice for all boxes, regardless of the play worlds they contained.


In the seventies, a PLAYMOBIL® figure was also known as a "Klicky", referring to its typical klicking sound. A "Klicky-Tag" was printed over the cover picture. The tag also shows the number of figures contained in a particular box.



C. THE EARLY EIGHTIES (1980-198x)

During the early eighties, PLAYMOBIL® boxes started to carry a slightly different logo: The Geobra sign was removed from the logo and the word System was also dropped.





E. THE "COLOR-CODED" PERIOD (1993-2001)

The "color-coded" packaging style was introduced through part of the 1993 novelties. A few successful items which came out before that date, have also been redressed with the color-coded look as years went by.

The color-coded packaging standard borrows its name from the use of color-codes that are displayed on these boxes to identify the theme they belong to:




F. THE "HEAD-ICON" PERIOD (2002-20xx)


Since January 2002, all novelties come in the sixth generation packaging, which identifies each playworld with a theme-related head-icon: