Fisher-Price Little People Were Criminally Underrated Transportation Toys That We Should Celebrate With An Autopian Playset

Lego is one of those phenomena with a greatness that tends to throw shadows onto equally worthy, deserving subjects. Don’t get me wrong; you won’t find a bigger Lego fan than myself. I can still see six-year-old me opening those color-coded, word-free instructions, following along and watching some little Shell gas tanker come to life.

Many more sets followed, and all these toys sets eventually ended up disassembled in a big plastic tub where you could make whatever you wanted. As a pre-teen I remember building a scale Boss Hogg 1970 Cadillac Coupe DeVille convertible with a beam axle on rubber bands in back and an attempt at an independent setup in front with springs from a busted Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robots or something.

As awesome as the Lego toy system is, as a pre-schooler it didn’t have much influence on me. Lego did have those chunky Duplo blocks but even as a four-year-old those weren’t much fun to build and pretty useless at making toys that were amusing to play with. No, there is another modular toy system by Fisher-Price which was much more fun for us at that age that plays an Oates to Lego’s Hall, a Garfunkel to their Paul Simon, and it needs to be praised.

If These Wobbled, They Realistically Fell Down 

One year after Lego appeared in 1949, American toy manufacturer Fisher-Price released the Looky Fire Truck. The round-headed firemen were not removable from the truck, but the very simplified, modernist figurine faces set the stage for the line (and pre-date the Lego Minifigures that didn’t appear until much later in 1978).

With later toys like the original 1959 Safety School Bus and 1960 Nifty Station Wagon you could remove the little peg-like people from the toy. Original figures were actually made of wood.

I liked how not only were the figurines realistically multi-cultural by then, but they also had individuals with faces that were perpetually pissed-looking, which was great preparation for dealing with things like disgruntled coworkers or DMV employees later in life:

However, what really fired us GenXers up were the plastic playsets that appeared in 1968 that we got new or as hand-me-downs. The sets started with the Play Family Barn (you know, the one that went MOOO when you opened the barn doors), but the transportation-related sets were the ones that got most of us young Autopians going. When you were dumped into a church playroom in your itchy Sunday best, if you saw some of this shit sitting in the toy area you knew that it was on and fun was going down.

The Parking Ramp Service Center from around 1970 was the one that hit us between the eyes with what seemed to be a painfully realistic interpretation of a downtown multi-story parking structure complete with an elevator and ramp. A bell would ding as you ran the elevator through the floors, and a hand-cranked turntable pivoted your car at the top. There’s also a crank-operated lift just like the ones you saw at gas stations back in the day. The mechanisms were bulletproof on these toys and you didn’t need to ask Mom for new “D” cells every ten minutes.

Everything about these playsets was perfect modernist design. Durable injection molded plastic that was easy to assemble at the factory. The minimalist forms were cute without being “cutesy”, but the best part was the uniformity of the bottoms of the figurines that were standardized to fit essentially everything in “Little People World”.

Little People cars had the expected aperture for people, but all the vehicles had a prominent socket labeled GAS to work with the pumps included in things like the Parking Ramp.

Even with other Little People sets and other vehicles you had standardized sockets, like the 1979 House (that was the name, just House), a Tudor almost identical to the full-size 1979 Tudor house I currently own. I don’t have blue doors, but like the Fisher-Price model, my Tudor is “fake” because the visible beams are not actually structural (though thankfully they are actually there and not merely printed on). Note that the later, larger car fits in the garage and still has the same size and style GAS aperture. Things like chairs are distilled down to their basic shape and form (plus they fit the butts of any and all Little People, including the enormous dog that could in fact drive the cars).

In this way, the toys created an ecosystem of objects that let preschoolers understand at an early age:

• The overlap of different transportation modes
• Be aware of the standardization of things in the world
• Question things that were not standardized (you hear me EV manufacturers with different chargers?)

Lego did a lot for us later in childhood, but establishing these fundamentals were Fisher Price accomplishments, at least for me.

The Holy Grail of Little People sets must be the Airport complete with FunJet airliner, like this one below where a pilot appears to have backed over a bald male passenger.

Everything with these playsets was brilliantly designed to fit the most fun in the least amount of space, again with hard-to-break components. Notice how the whole thing folds up nicely for easy storage in the playroom (though our imaginary runway system rivaled O’hare and took up the entire family room floor). The jetway even lined up with open door of the jet.

You’ve got a luggage carousel where you feed in the bags from the aircraft side and they appear on the ARRIVALS side of the terminal. The little helicopter can fit onto that socket on the roof to make the prop blade spin.

Even though the age limit for these things was usually kindergarten, we always played with them well past that when we could reenact some of the things we’d witnessed, like screaming WHERE’S MY BAG GODDAMMIT or YOU SCRATCHED MY CAR I’M NEVER PARKING AT THIS RAMP AGAIN. Your parents always scolded you and asked where you learned that. You’re kidding, dad, right?

So many Little People transportation toys existed from campers to houseboats, all of which were instrumental in getting kids like me into different kinds of vehicles and eventually becoming a true Autopian that loves anything that drives, flies, or floats and not like, you know, just enjoys Mopars or Mitsubishi Evo VIIIs or VIIs or whatever.

Unlike Lego, these sets were built and ready to go; they offered far more interactivity than completed Lego sets of the day and truly inspired our imaginations. It’s only recently that I’ve noticed how outstanding the designs are, and I want to honor them with an Autopian play set to help inspire young minds to be interested in transportation the way that we were by Little People toys.

Of course, using Autopian editors as figurines might teach kids, well, differently.

Maybe Even Toy Oil Stains

Little People playsets were based on hubs of activity, and there isn’t a busier such hub than the collective of talent that is The Autopian. While other playsets might teach kids how an airport or a parking garage works, we need something for preschoolers to learn such skills as:

• How to hoard car three cars’ worth of parts in a two-bedroom space
• Spend hundreds of hours without bathing, disassembling a car that will never be rebuilt, and it would be worth less than five thousand dollars when reassembled in concours shape anyway
• Writing dick and fart jokes, passing it off as “automotive journalism,” and getting paid for it

I don’t know about you, but that sounds awesome. I dreamed of creating a playset of my own as a kid, and it only took forty or so to see that dream realized. Here it is.

The ability for Little People playsets to start as compact, easy-to-store structures that open up into something impressively large always impressed me, and The Autopian Headquarters Playset will be no different. I’m seeing a four-level structure that pivots open to form a cross-shaped floorplan with a central crank-operated elevator to raise the figurines and their vehicles to their respective floors. The end result looks a bit like the Paw Patrol headquarters if it were manned by a motley crew of journalists and not a bunch of talking Canadian dogs (where the girl pup with the helicopter could solve 98 percent of the missions but they don’t let her).

You can see I’ve provided a hand-cranked lift plus a gas pump that might also be an electric charging station (but each room could have a charger on the wall). Naturally, each floor reflects the personality of the writer; and my guess is that you could even add more floors later for more staffers. I won’t tell you which floor is for which writer since it should be pretty damn obvious.

Vehicles? Of course we’ve got custom Little People cars for the figurines. In the overall view above you already saw the four-passenger RTS bus, and there’s a white four-passenger square-headlamped YJ Jeep Wrangler for the David Tracy figurine to take out some other staffers to the best Taco Bell in town:

We need a Little People raccoon to live in David’s non-functional cars.

Smaller single-passenger toys like a little Changli, a Smart car, and even an i3 can ride the elevator up to each floor.

Think of the hours of fun you could have as a kid with this. You could place the Jason figurine staring at monitors trying to figure out a post, the David toy staring at a wheel cylinder on that white Jeep, or maybe at a monitor. Mercedes’s little avatar figure would be, well, staring at a monitor writing posts, and … maybe this wouldn’t be a much fun as I first thought.

A lid to seal off the top floor becomes an entrance platform on the ground, and a convenient go-handle on top lets you carry it away and throw it in the corner with Little People Meat Packing Fun Center or the Little People Law Offices and other playthings that the kids get bored with.

Your parents might have said that grown adults won’t do this shit in real life, but the Autopian playset would have awakened your senses to the truth, a molded plastic middle finger to their dreams of you becoming a CPA or a systems analyst. Hell, yeah.

Little People, Big World

Little People still exist today, and over two billion figurines have been sold in over 60 countries. Oddly enough, they weren’t even officially called “Little People” until 1985 when Fisher-Price officially trademarked the name that everyone called them anyway,

Of course, as any old person yelling at clouds does, I need to express the usual “they aren’t what they used to be” sentiment. In 1991 the figurines gained more detailed, cutesy faces and much chunkier forms in response to a 1987 lawsuit where a family sued Fisher-Price after their child reportedly choked on one of the earlier figurines. Tragic as that situation was and as much as I understand the change, I still naturally miss the minimalist, compact forms and design of the originals.

Thankfully, Fisher-Price knows how to capitalize on the GenX connection by making celebrity playsets for us former Little People players. The most famous of which might be the KISS band set, featuring a tongue-extended Gene Simmons partially smiling since he’s yet again taken more of your money. Figurines from The Office and other popular media are apparently also a thing.

Seventy-five years later, Little People are still appealing to the same people that made them popular long ago. I only hope they’re also still influencing today’s kids to be transportation heads like they did with us Autopians.

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