Recently, my wife and I were cleaning out the garage, trying to get to the point where we can install one of those racks for those black and yellow storage bins that are so popular nowadays. During that process, we opened a lot of mismatched bins that held everything from LIFE Magazines from the JFK assassination, to mix CDs we made for each other when we first started dating, to a bin that I’ve been looking for for years filled with my vintage Play-Doh toys. I have a couple of other posts that will be going up one of these days about these old toys, but, it being spooky season and all, I wanted to make sure I posted about the Fuzzy Pumper Monster Shop first.
The Fuzzy Pumper Barber and Beauty Shop
The Fuzzy Pumper Barber and Beauty Shop playset was first released in 1977 from Kenner as part of the Play-Doh line of toys. Each playset came with four characters – Mom, Dad, Boy, and Girl – which were small, plastic figures that resembled an elongated sewing thimble with a face and clothing painted on the surface. Along the top and much of the back of the figures were small holes; the Dad figure also had holes underneath his face, too.
Kids would fill the hollow figure with Play-Doh and then slide it into a barber chair with a crank on one side. By turning the crank, a cylinder inside the chair would raise up into the hollow figure and extrude the dough out through the holes, making it look like the figure had long, crazy-colored hair (and a beard for Dad).
Once the hair had “grown”, kids could use small, plastic accessories, like scissors, a straight razor, a safety razor, and clippers, to give the figure a haircut. If kids wanted something a bit more stylized, they could clamp a mold over the figure to give them a more compressed look.. To complete the illusion of a barber shop, a sandwich board-style cardboard backdrop, as well as a small broom and dustpan to clean up the clippings, were included.
The Fuzzy Pumper Monster Shop
Around the same time, Play-Doh released the Fuzzy Pumper Monster Shop, which saw the “normal” human characters swapped out for Frankenstein’s monster, a vampire, a wolfman, and a skeleton.
The two-sided sandwich board backdrop was redesigned to give the whole thing a bit of a mad scientist’s lab appearance, but otherwise it was essentially the same playset with all the barbershop tools and accessories.
Fuzzy Pumper’s for the 1980s
In 1980, the Fuzzy Pumper line got a bit of a makeover. First, was the addition of the Fuzzy Pumper Pet Shop. Now kids could “grow” and trim the hair on cats, dogs, and even a monkey. The barber shop chair was slightly redesigned and the cardboard backdrop was now an L-shape with a floor.
The Monster Shop also got a redesign in 1980, including an L-shaped backdrop and new characters – a wolfman, Frankenstein’s monster, a vampire, and a mad scientist. Even the barbershop tools got a makeover, with a snake-shaped broom, a spinal column and skull hairbrush, and an executioner’s axe.
The barber chair was the biggest change from the original design, though. With the first Monster Shop, the chair was essentially the same as the “normal people” shop chair, albeit with a few different stickers that gave it a spookier vibe. However, with the 1980 release, the chair was now housed inside a bright pink coffin whose lid would split and burst open as kids started working the crank. The chair would rise up from the coffin and the “hair” would begin to grow out of the monster figure like some kind of creature that was coming alive in the lab. As a fun added touch, the coffin’s doors could be chained closed for a dramatic snap as the chair began to rise.
Hairy Scary Monsters
With the success of Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper line, LJN released its own monsters with extruded dough hair playset in 1978, called Dr. Mad Makes Hairy Scary Monsters.
The concept was similar, except the monster figures were completely covered in holes and didn’t feature any painted-on faces or clothes. Instead, kids would extrude the “Monster Moosh” dough hair and then stick plastic faces over the figure and place the whole thing on top of a base that looked like legs. The set was designed more with the idea of creating monsters, rather than giving them haircuts, so it only came with a small, plastic “knife” to give them a trim.
Keep On Fuzzy Pumping!
Unfortunately, the 1980 release was the last spooky monster Fuzzy Pumper playset. But Play-Doh has kept the Fuzzy Pumper concept going ever since with a new redesign every few years to keep things fresh. The new releases, now called the more Google Search SFW-friendly “Buzz ‘n Cut” line, usually feature new faces on the characters, revamped chairs, new tools, and accessories. There was even a special Sesame Street Fuzzy Pumper released in 1992 that came with molds for Elmo, Big Bird, Oscar, and Cookie Monster.
My Monsters
I would have been a really little kid when the Fuzzy Pumper Monster Shop was released in 1977 or ‘78, so I have zero recollection of getting it. However, I do remember playing with it quite a bit in my younger days, so I was really happy to have found it in a bin inside a bin inside my cluttered garage. Surprisingly, the chair still works exactly as-designed, the paint on the monster figures looks untouched, and I still have most of the accessories. Somewhere along the line I lost the woman vampire, but I’ll keep an eye on eBay for her just to complete the set. Unfortunately, it would seem that the original release is a bit less common than the 1980 version, so I might be looking for a while.
