Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Stuffed Animals, Here & There: Orange Crate Creature

EBay is showing me endless stuffed animals designed to be as sweet and boring as marshmallows. But once in a while comes one that perks up your ears––sometimes simply because it's from another country.

Russian toys, for instance.
I just discovered Cheburashka---an animal of no known species. His name means tumbled or toppled, because he got into a crate of oranges in his unnamed home country, ate a bunch, fell asleep, and when a workman opened the crate up in Moscow, the little animal was so startled he tumbled to the floor.

This is a drawing of Cheburashka [Wikipeida] from the original book (1966):



There are many, many toy and media versions of Cheburashka, and he is often depicted with oranges:

I finally realized I did know this character---Russia used a  marshmallow-ified bear-like version as an Olympic mascot.

2 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

What an appealing creature! Much better than finding a mouse or rat in your food. :)

Fresca said...

Of course I thought of Orange Crate Art... :)