Blue Cavern

I recently picked up an extra Classic Brainy 2.0536 and noticed that on his butt right next to his tail was a circular stamp. I looked at it under a loupe and it looks like a factory timestamp. We all know that some items have this code stamped into the plastic at the time it was made for quality control. You can tell which shift or time the item was made at the factory if there are any batch issues.

The question is "When did Smurfs start getting these?" My Brainy from a few years back (same mold) does not have this. I checked my old Classic Jokey and found it only on the newest one with the warning tag. This leads me to think this is a more recent marking.

I tried to snap a photo through my loupe to show the marking.


The next question is that will this make variation collectors go crazy?

We are already going after this variation ...I think there was only a very short time between this marking showing up and Schleich adding the full address to the smurfs so this might become fairly rare.

It seems to have first shown up towards the end of 2009...here is the thread when Andre discovered it which might be helpful..I think we also have a list of known smurfs with this marking somewhere (might be on this thread)

http://www.forum.bluecavern.com/viewtop ... ight=clock

Here is the thread where we try to compile a list of the full address, so as you can see the little clock marking by itself wasn't done for that long really (maybe a year or even less than a year)

http://www.forum.bluecavern.com/viewtop ... ight=clock

I don't know if the clock marking has different time stamps as I don't really look at them that carefully, but I do collect it as a variation on it's own which is really inexpensive fun (since most of the smurfs are still in production)

Excellent and thanks for the link! Nothing gets by you guys and I knew someone would have the answer!

The only reason I noticed it was that it was a little out of place for a stamp. The feet and backs of the hats already are like small novels. O_o