Vintage Sesame Street toy puppets!

Roosevelt Franklin and the Count vintage Sesame Street puppets from the 1970s.

I've revised the pages about the original Sesame Street puppets. As there is alot of new info and photos, I devided it into two pages. The first blog page "Sesame Street Toy Hand Puppets, 1971-1984" shows the complete production run of these puppets. The second blog page "Sesame Street Toy Hand Puppets: Manufacuturing Variations" shows more details about the puppets for die-hard Muppet collectors!

Mikey's Muppet Moments: THE MUPPET STUFF STORE!!!

Do you remember the chain of Muppet Stuff stores that sold only Muppet related toys and collectables? Jim Henson founded the first store in New York during the 1970s and other locations soon opened across North America. Below is a photo of my visit to the Toronto Muppet Stuff store in 1988. I must have been 15 or 16 years old! I live in Ottawa and was on a family trip to Toronto when we stumbled across this store by chance, so I was quite surprised to see it. My mom snapped the photo. The store was located at 2588 Yonge Street at the corner of Albertus Ave. I was so excited about finding this store that I almost got hit by a car crossing the street to get there! :) Silly Me!

Here is a better look at the Muppet Stuff sign...

And here is a closer look at the Sesame Street items in the window display...

There are lunch boxes (with a small Snuffleupagus plush toy on top of one), place mats, two large plush Big Birds, a large plush cookie monster wearing a light blue shirt, some Snuffleupagus plush toys and Elmo from the Applause toy line, and a small Hasbro cookie monster plush toy wearing a red T-shirt. I can't make out much else, other than it looks like Big Bird is sitting on a children's slide.Later on in 1989 or 1990 a Muppet Stuff store opened at Bayshore Shopping Centre in Ottawa. I bought a good portion of my collection there!

It's hard to see the faded print, but this is my receipt from the Yonge Street Muppet Stuff store, dated 08/04/88. It confirms the address was 2588 Yonge St. The total shown is for $2.15 for an embroidered Muppet patch, shown below. I also kept the plastic Muppet Stuff store bags! I'll post them here eventually too. :)

I also bought this small Animal pin at the Toronto store, but it was a separate transaction than the one shown on the above receipt. In the very first photo above, you can see a white T-shirt above Big Bird that has this same graphic of Animal.

The Fisher-Price Animal puppet!!!

My all-time favourite Muppet collectable is the Fisher-Price Animal Muppet made between 1976 -1979. Although I had watched Sesame Street, The Muppet Show and owned several toy Muppet puppets (Big Bird, Kermit, Miss Piggy) it was the Animal puppet that got me hooked on collecting Muppet memorabilia! I wanted one of these soooooo badly when I was a kid, but by the time I had convinced my parents of its importance to my well being (and that it was worth the cost - this was an expensive toy in the late 70's!), Fisher-Price had stopped producing their Muppet show series of toys. Thus, the hunt began, and over many years I searched flea-markets and garage sales to no avail, (there was no e-bay back then, or an Internet...or computers!) until one day when I was 16 I got one as a gift from a high school friend who knew how obsessed I was about the Muppets. At last! Ironically, it was the last character I needed to complete the Fisher-Price series of plush puppets and dolls, as in my search for the Animal puppet I had collected all the others in the set!

I've added a few items to "Other Henson Worlds" and the "Muppets" pages...take a look! :)

To this is going take a while!

I've searched through my photos and have found all the images that I had used on the old website. Now I just have to re-crop them and post them here on the right pages. There's a lot of Muppet stuff to go through so it will take a while before this blog starts to look full, but keep checking back as I'll be adding pictures daily.

Also, I just bought one of the new Fraggle Rock bobble head dolls by Manhattan Toys! Very cool. They had Gobo and Wembley at the store. It was a hard choice but I went with Gobo. I had to get at least one, I couldn't help myself!!! :)

Better late than never!

I know it's strange but this is actually my first blog ever! Soon, I'll be posting all of the info about collecting Muppet Memorabilia and other nifty stuff that I once had on my webpage, which is now offline. That's right, in a few days "Mikey's Muppet Memorabilia Museum" will be returning to the web, right here at my new blog! So check back for updates, bye for now.