[Smurfysmurf]

I know we had this subject before, but it's been many many years ago, so I thought why not bring it back up and walk down memory lane with everybody

What got you started collecting smurfs and when did you start?

For me it was a certain Papa Smurf Plush I saw at a booth at the Stuttgarter Volksfest in Germany in around 1974/5. I was just a small kid (4 or 5) but I remember that I wanted this blue creature very very badly. My mother kept buying tickets until she got the right numbers to win this plush...Papa was nearly as tall as I was back then, but I was the proudest little girl that night as we drove home in the street car...people around me laughed and made fun of the huge plush in the arms of the smiling girl but for once I didn't mind. The funny part is that I don't remember much of my childhood but I remember that . I had the plush for the next 20 years, but unfortunately I left it in Germany when I immigrated to the US

I've been collecting ever since then....as a child we visited a lot of fleamarkets..and I would always get a smurf if I found one I liked...I kept them in the big smurf house until they eventually became too many to be kept in there...I never was into the super smurfs back then..except for the skateboarder on the leaf, and I had mainly the old Bully figures.

As I grew older my interest left a bit, although I would get them out from time to time and display them. Then in the late 80s, early 90s, I happened to come across the cartoons on TV and fell in love all over again....and to my surprise I found that smurfs were still sold in toy stores..so I decided to buy one smurf a month..but only the ones I liked. I still did not like the super smurfs. I also refused to buy another smurfette, because there only is one smurfette (the old Schleich one) and since there is only one Papa Smurf, I never bought one besides 20001.

I displayed them again and I soon had enough for a full village which often was a conversation starter for when I had company.

Just before I immigrated for good to the US, I moved out of my apartment and in with my grandmother..it was a crazy time and what I didn't ship to the US, I left at the apartment...and after two months I realized my smurfs were no where to be found...Granny had given them away as she didn't think I'd be interested in toys I was very upset but what can you do.....eventually when I was in US, I went to the World's Longest fleamarket which goes right thru our little town...and I found a bag with about 20 smurfs...and yes, I bought them....and have been buying smurfs ever since..it no longer was a monthly thing but became a daily thing....and I have a ton of smurfettes and Papas

Granny felt so bad about what she had done, that years later we went to a small store that sold used toys in Stuttgart...she took me to the back room to a box of smurfs and told me to pick out any that I remembered I had as a kid...and she would buy them. Still, I don't know how I remembered them..but I did..and in the end it was as if I had my old smurfs from my childhood back...and I still have them

[hfos]

Good story! For me it's less interesting and a lot more straightforward: when I was young in the late '70s (I'm from '76) you could buy a smurf for a Guilder when you bought petrol at a BP station. My parents thought that would be fun for me, so they bought a couple.
Unfortunately (?) I come from a family of collectors so we started with a couple of smurfs, then a bunch of them, then a lot and now I have a huge box upstairs in a spare room waiting to be unpacked (we moved house a few months ago, there's no room for them yet).
So for me it's not something that I started, just something that was always there.

[Ritter_Schlumpfenherz]

Well, I started collecting when I was three years old. I got my first smurf (Gold smurf) from my late Granny Anny who told me what I was just as tiny and cute as this smurf was. I guess it must have been something like "cuteness" that attracted me, because I couldn't stop smiling when I looked at this tiny figurine. (That's why I still call them my cuties. ) I loved its tinyness and its smile and when I got Astro and Papa later on, I was nothing, but "addicted". So guess what I wanted from "St.Nikolaus" and "Christkind"? I also could not resist staring at the displays from our inner city famous toyshop "Lütgenau" (which btw. is going to be closed by the end of June this year. ) and instantly asked my parents to buy me one or two of this cuties.
When I was seven, I started watching the Hanna Barbera series and I loved it as well. Thus my dad had to rent the videos at our local video rental shop one or two times a week. At the same time, I got my first pocket money (5 DM per month) and I spent it almost entirely on smurfs that I had come across on fleamarkets. I felt very much like a detective, when I found out that there were even variants and still this is something that keeps me interesting these days. In fact, I never stopped collecting smurfs, but there were periods when I spent a higher percentage of my pocket money on other things.

Thus I second to what Robin has mentioned before: "So for me it's not something that I started, [it's] just something that was always there.".

[Tintin]

Hi All

My story isn't that excited or different then most others...........
I found a little box of smurfs from the seventies when you could buy them at the BP store.
That was about 1996............ so about 17 years of collecting now.

gr Tintin

[bat2000]

I started collecting them in the early eighties along with my brother and sister. But my collection was bigger than theirs. But I didn't really begin collecting them again until i discovered the Halloween Smurfs on ebay as I didn't think they were still being made.