Smurfs were first sold in America in 1979. At first there was some difficulties in finding a company that would support foreign characters, because the Americans wanted something that their audience would recognise.
However Wallace Berrie & Co acquired the North American licensing rights to the smurfs. This included using pre existing moulds from Bully and Schleich. Along with this they also started importing their own versions made in Hong Kong.
At the time most PVC toys would sell for roughly 25cents though Wallace Berrie took a gamble and started selling the smurf figurines for $1.50. The gamble paid off as the demand for smurfs was growing at a rapid rate.
Not only smurf figurines were being sold, Wallace Berrie introduced all sorts of smurf merchandise to America. The next big thing after the smurf figurines was the demand for the soft toys (plush dolls). The sale of smurf comics was also taking off.
On 12 September 1981, the smurfs debuted on NBC and made a huge impact capturing 42% of the Saturday morning television audience. The cartoon series in turn would be sold throughout the world and is still something that holds close to a generation that grew up on Saturday morning television viewing.
What is interesting to note that with the cartoon series, that any changes made to the smurf creations would have to be approved by Peyo.
Between 1979 and 1982 smurfs for America were being made in Hong Kong by Schleich. This served Schleich well because they were able to distrubute smurfs to Australia and New Zealand for BP promotions and America for Wallace Berrie.
By 1982 BP Australia no longer had the rights to smurfs in Australia and due to the high demand for smurfs in America, Wallace Berrie started to manufacture their own smurfs in Hong Kong.
With this Wallace Berrie also used their own reference numbers which was different to the existing Schleich reference numbers. This would later cause some head aches amongst collectors when trying to establish their own websites based on reference numbers.
They first started adding W.B.CO to the existing Hong Kong marked smurfs. Though before too long smurfs were being sold with Hong Kong W. Berrie markings.
There was also some smurfs that were only sold in America at this time and were never intended for the European market. Some of these included Baseball Catcher (20146) and Baseball Pitcher (20166)
In 1982 Wallace Berrie had acquired Applause division from Knickerbocker Toys and started adding Applause to the markings. Some have estimated at around this time that smurf merchandise was worth over $600 million.
By 1985 smurf sales were starting to decline. Wallace Berrie were selling their Limited Collector Series by selling two smurfs together. The last of these were Papa Pilot (20223) and Stewardess (20222) in August. It was around here this time that smurfs were no longer being made in Hong Kong.
Come 1990 Applause (formerly known as Wallace Berrie) released their last 11 smurfs. These were all made in China.
For those of you who collect smurfs based on markings, there are potentially up to ten different W. Berrie markings to be found.
The other odd thing Wallace Berrie did briefly in 1982 is that they changed all the year markings to 1980. Though this was later changed back to the original year again. So it is not uncommon to find some smurfs with two different year markings.
When looking back at this extraordinary time, Wallace Berrie sold more than 200 different regular smurfs and 50 different Supersmurfs. The question that begs to be asked is – Will we see smurfs rule the world like they once did?
Keep on Smurfin
Kath B