In my last post, I mentioned that as it's election season it seemed to be a good time to write about Wagner donkeys and elephants. I wrote about the donkeys in that post, so as promised, here are the pachyderms.
The Wagner workshop didn't produce as endless a variety of elephants as they did donkeys, but the elephant took pride of place as one of the six animals featured in the basic wild-animal gift box (what I think of as the starter kit!). They must have produced elephants in huge numbers, because you can still find elephants frequently offered on eBay, Etsy, and the like.
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| The basic elephant in the standard size is this guy, who comes in shades of gray from a very pale dove gray to a very dark charcoal gray. This fellow is one of the darker ones. He has a plastic body covered with flocking, plastic tusks, and a fur- tipped tail. I assume his ears are made of tabs of plastic--they don't feel like leather. He has painted-on toenails and a red felt tongue. |
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| This elephant is lighter in color and sports all the same features as the darker version above. Except, as you'll note, the tusks. He DID have tusks originally. They are now inside his plastic body. I can hear them rattling around in there. Poor fellow! This particular one is my own childhood toy and came in the six-pack of animals mentioned above. I don't know why, when the glue deterioriated, his tusks fell into him instead of simply off. Mystery abounds. Sadly, no tooth fairy rewards for him. |
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| These petite pachyderms are early M.C. Original versions. They are slightly shorter and stubbier than the later Wagner ones, with shorter trunks and smaller ears. Their eyes are orange instead of black. They're also made of composition instead of plastic and feel heavy for their size. (Unlike a real elephant, which is heavy at any size.) |
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| Wagner also made jumbo-sized elephants. They're about 5 or 6 inches from trunk tip to tail and taller as well. Their faces have more detail because the crafters simply had more room to work with. They feel as if they are made of composition, not plastic. This example is solid gray all over, with some painted-on details (trunk tip, mouth, toenails.). He's got the most recent Wagner label, so he's pretty young as these animals go. |
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| There's no way of knowing when differences in a species are due to a crafter's artistry, a change in design, or the need to speed up the work, but this older elephant has more detail than his younger sibling. His toenails are edged in black, and muscles and ear details are sketched out, too. The trunk, interestingly, has much more of a bend to it. |
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| Wagner also created mastodons (or mammoths, hard to tell!), the extinct prehistoric cousins of elephants. Awfully cute. Like the standard elephant, they appear to have a plastic body. |
Alas, my inch-tall tiny Wagner elephant appears to have wandered off, so I'll have to add him later. Wagner also produced a donkey and an elephant, each standing on its hind legs and wearing a big grin--ads for these state that they were produced for conventions, but it's hard to know if they were, or if they were retrofitted for this purpose. At any rate, I don't have those, so can't provide photos, but I'm sure you can find them online somewhere.
However, other companies produced pint-sized pachyderms. Somewhere, I have an exact duplicate of the standard Wagner elephant, but covered in fur (apparently he's sneaked off with the mini elephant as he cannot be found either). In the meantime, how about a fur-covered Original Fur Toys elephant?
Finally, there's this absolutely manic, happy-go-lucky elephant with a pink label that simply says "Made in Western Germany," with floppy felt ears. He certainly makes the other ones appear pretty lowkey!
