The basic design of the klicky changed little for the first 8 years of Playmobil’s history, but although there were 402 sets issued in that time, there are only
111 different klickies in those 402 sets;
1109 instances, an average of 2.76 klickies per set.
87 adult male klickies in 375 sets,
24 adult female klickies in 135 sets. Male 921 instances (2.46 per set), female 188 instances (1.39 per set).
(By ‘instance’ I mean if you opened one copy of every set, this is how many klickies you would have).
Here they are!
(the caption below each picture gives the year of first appearance and a ‘k number’, mostly from PlaymoDB- those k numbers in square brackets are ones I have invented to suggest for inclusion in PlaymoDB (they aren’t in there at the moment))
And here is the data on which sets they can be found in:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s1rflbwvxqvbm6i/Early%20Klickies%2025.06.2017.xlsx?dl=0Here is the basic range of variation for each feature of early adult klickies
- Wrists: 2 types (fixed or free)
- Hair style: 3 types (male standard, male curly, female standard)
- Hair colour: 3 colours (black, brown and yellow; curly hair only appeared in black)
- Torso shape: 2 types (male or female)
- Torso colour: 11 different ones (Male: pale blue, pale green, pale yellow, chrome (silver), red, yellow, blue, green, black, white, orange. Female: red, yellow, blue, green, black, white)
- Arm colour: 10 different ones (Male: same list as for torsos, minus chrome, Female: red, white, yellow, blue)
- Leg colour: 12 different ones (Male: same list as for torsos, minus chrome, plus light grey and grey. Female: white, yellow, blue)
Extra features (all these only found on male klickies, apart from brown face/ hands)
- wooden leg on right,
- hook hand on left,
- clown face,
- brown face [and hands on free-wrist klickies],
- beard (black, brown or yellow),
- arms different colours from one another
There are other features which vary from klicky to klicky (such as printed or molded heads, coloured or white internal skeletons, details of underside of feet, heads shaped to accept beards or plain), but these are beyond the scope of the current descriptions.
Taking just hair style and colour (4 for male, 3 for female) with colour of torso (11 for male, 6 for female), arms (10 for male, 4 for female) and legs (12 for male, 3 for female), there are 5280 (4x11x10x12) possible combinations for male klickies (87 found, 1.6% of possibles) and 216 (3x6x4x3) for females (24 found, 11% of possibles).
A brief history of fixed-wrist klickies1974 Geobra issued Playmobil sets with fixed-wrist klickies. Each arm and hand was molded as one piece, so the scope for a klicky to hold accessories was quite limited. In fact, some accessories were issued with extra handles on them to allow klickies to hold them in a more natural position:
1976 Female klickies were released; they differed from the males only in the shape of their torso (known as ‘flip-hem’ by some) and the hair.
1978 The appearance of male and female klickies with brown-skintone heads. The males with brown heads also had black ‘curly’ hair. Peg-leg klickies also appeared in 1978, as did clown faces.
1980 The first beards (on male klickies only!) in brown, black or yellow to match the hair colour. The first hook-hand also appeared in 1980, the left arm was a single piece with a hook instead of a hand.
1981 The first child klickies were issued, both boys (with standard torsos and short hair) and girls (with flip-hem torsos and a ‘girl’ hairstyle). All children had ‘free’ wrists; the arm and hand were not joined, the hand rotated freely through 360 degrees and was a different colour (pink skintone) from the rest of the arm.
1982 Adult klickies with free wrists appeared in sets from 1982 onwards. It seems that in some sets, klickies with free wrists appeared in production runs after 1982, even though the box art still showed fixed wrists. Some accessories were modified for free-wrist klickies which are much more versatile when holding objects. The advent of free wrists also allowed for hands with brown skintone, which also appeared in 1982 for the first time.
1983 The last set to be issued with fixed wrists was Version 3 of set 3265x, in 1983.
Well, not quite the last….
2014 40th anniversary knights set
2015 PCC birthday special 2015 rainbow klicky
(those last 2 klickies are NOT included in the 111 total, by the way!)
How I arrived at the figure of 111 different types of klickyBy listing all the early Playmobil sets from 1974 to 1983 (using
Collector as my basic source), I created a list of the klickies in every set (over 1100, including Version 2 sets which had different klickies from those in Version 1, as far as I could tell) and then listed the features of each klicky (gender, fixed or free wrists, torso colour, leg colour, arm colour, hair colour and extra features such as child, beard, peg-leg, hook-hand, hair style, skin tone, clown face). I used pictures of set contents whenever I could find them (Datenbank-Setinhalt at
www.klickywelt.de of course, as well as Produkt-Arkiv at
www.playmobil.de and other pictures online). From this, I came up with the statistics and pictures above.
I did all this a few years ago and sent the findings to Heather for inclusion in PlaymoDB. When I recently revisited the data, I found quite a few errors (some of which have found their way into PlaymoDB), so I need to send an update (sorry Heather).
Two problems I found:
1. The contents of sets were not necessarily consistent throughout the timespan of production. Sometimes Collector gives different Version numbers for a set, but information on how set contents differ between versions can be hard to come by. Because these sets are now OLD, in many cases there are few examples shown online, so it’s hard to know if one example of a set is actually representative of all.
2. The contents are known to have differed from the box and promotional pictures in some sets. In particular, hair colour shown on the box may have been completely different on the klickies inside (and if the set has been played with at some point, who can say that some of the hairs haven’t been swapped around?). In fact, some of the klickies are very consistent in the hair colour with which they appeared (47 klickies only had one hair colour) but it is in sets with, for example 5 all-blue klickies (such as some of the Fire sets) that the set contents might in fact include a random selection of black, brown and blond klickies, whatever the box picture shows. It also seems likely that box pictures are sometimes reversed e.g. 3657, 3513, 3390.
I made some guesses about klickies where the pictures were not very clear. For the following 25 klickies in
these sets, I could not be certain of all the colours because available pictures did not show enough detail. All but the first three klickies in this list have uncertainties about hair colour only. (5/7 means the fifth out of seven in the set, usually the 5th one from the left on the box picture).
| Set | Year | Klicky | Gender | Torso | Arms | Legs | Hair |
| 3221 | 1977 | 4/5 | m | blue? | white | white | black |
| 3182x | 1978 | 5/5 | m | blue | blue | light grey? | brown |
| 3137x | 1980 | 1/3 | m | yellow | yellow | yellow? | black |
| 3226x | 1976 | 3/5 | m | blue | blue | white | black? |
| 3409 | 1977 | 5/7 | m | black | red | red | ? |
| 3409 | 1977 | 6/7 | m | black | red | red | ? |
| 3409 | 1977 | 7/7 | m | black | white | white | ? |
| 3441 | 1977 | 2/2 | f | blue | white | white | black? |
| 3444 | 1977 | 3/3 | m | black | red | red | brown? |
| 3445 | 1977 | 3/3 | m | black | red | red | black? |
| 3445 | 1977 | 2/3 | m | black | red | red | blond? |
| 3450 | 1977 | 3/4 | m | black | red | red | black? |
| 3450 | 1977 | 2/4 | m | black | red | red | brown? |
| 3158x | 1978 | 2/2 | m | blue | blue | light grey | ? |
| 3176x | 1978 | 4/5 | m | black | red | red | ? |
| 3641 | 1978 | 3/3 | m | white | white | white | ? |
| 3707 | 1978 | 2/4 | f | white | white | white | ? |
| 3194x | 1979 | 5/5 | m | green | green | black | ? |
| 3133x | 1980 | 2/4 | m | black | red | red | ? |
| 3535 | 1980 | 3/3 | m | white | white | white | ? |
| 3536 | 1980 | 4/5 | m | blue | blue | blue | ? |
| 3536 | 1980 | 5/5 | m | blue | blue | blue | ? |
| 3589 | 1980 | 1/2 | m | blue | blue | blue | ? |
| 3589 | 1980 | 2/2 | m | blue | blue | blue | ? |
| 3590 | 1980 | 2/2 | m | yellow | yellow | yellow | ? |
8 klickies had different hair colour in sealed sets at Klickywelt from the box picture colours
39 had different hair colour from unsealed sets at Kw
7 had different hair colour in other sources
