The Shop Display

background | the display | components | the glue

A little background

Let me tell you a story ... not so long ago my wife and I were out at a local toystore (Toys Galore in Edinburgh) to buy her the Fairytale castle for her birthday. The set is very large and the shop was keeping it on a sort of shelf made from the bottom of half of an I-beam holding the roof up. This shelf had lots of boxes. When the set was taken down I saw to my surprise one end of a Playmobil shop display which I had never seen before! I asked about it, jokingly saying that if they ever got rid of it they should call me. They told me that they usually gave such things to charity, so I left my number so that they could tell me when they gave it away and we could go look for it. Fastforward a few weeks and we get a call from the store owner to say that the display was ours if we wanted it! I spluttered a lot and said yes ... only after she hung up did I think of questions like 'where', 'how' and 'how much'!

Fastforward another week or so and another phone call, to tell us they were taking it down right there and then and we could come and get it if we wanted! When I explained that I didn't have a car and would have to borrow one they said never mind and that they would drive it across town themselves! A few hours later and me and Victoria were standing on the street with expressions of shock as they handed us huge piles of Playmobil! Off they drove and we were the possessors of a whole display ... and all free!

The Display

Police StationHouse and TreeTrain and fire EngineSkate Rink and Cafe

click on a segment of the image to enlarge

The display consists of a main board showing a skateboarding arena, with an injured child being taken off to an ambulance. Across the road from the playground a two story building is on fire and many firemen, as well as two engines, gather to put it out. As well as this long board there are two System X buildings, a cafe and a police station. The Police station comes with a helicopter and a Police car, while the cafe is full of Klickys. Along the front of the display (on its own boards) is a train line complete with engine and carriage to run on it. A sports car seems to have been left on the road as well.

Here is a detail of the central section of the display.

Components

These are the sets that make up the display, as far as I have managed to work out so far. A number of the pieces are very much display only and don't exist as actual sets. The vehicles (escape truck, fire engine) that have lights do not have internal batteries, rather they have cables that go through the base board. Both the cafe building and the burning house were marked with 'Playmobil display department, not for resale' stickers. The internal floor of the house is the grid marked floor from the large castle, but has been roughly cut to fit the internal floor of the building. There are certain pieces missing, like the window frames from two of the dormer windows on the burning building, taken out to leave room for the 'smoke' (see below).

Identified components

  • 3182 - Fire Escape Truck
  • 3880 - Rescue Unit 26 (fire truck) missing one door
  • 3904 - Police Car (blue)
  • 3908 - Police Helicopter
  • 4000 - Train Engine, Car & Track missing one car
  • 3883 - Firemen with flaming barrel

Other components

  • Ambulance
  • Sports Jeep
  • Large System X Police Station (with copter pad)
  • System X Town House (small)
  • Steck System 2-story medieval House
  • Police motorbike
  • First-aid team with stretcher (from helicopter?)
  • Rollerskaters and ramps
  • Variety of modern figures

The Glue & other indignities

There was only one problem with this wonderful display, everything was glued together! Everything! Hats are glued to hair, hair to heads, feet to boards, cars to the ground and so on. The axles of the cars are even swamped in glue preventing them from turning. The glue used is the sort of rubber cement that comes from a hot glue gun, very springy and very hard to remove. Worst affected was the burning building, where every single part was glued together. Here is a picture of the glue removed from the building and a couple of cars.

As can be seen in the picture above the burning building also had a lot of smoke, in the form of cotton wool glued too the walls and rooftop. The building was also attacked with a variety of spray paints, red, yellow and black. The System X buildings are just as firmly glued together.