Fugglers - Mrs. McGettrick / Spin Master

Around 2010/2011,  I noticed a very cute and very strange style of handmade cuddly toys being sold on Etsy by a very talented woman called Mrs. McGettrick ...

The thing that made these "teddies" stand out and gave them their appeal to myself and many others was the fact they had teefs... proper human - bite you in the bum when you're not looking teefs!

So of course I fell in love...

I kept an eye on them for the next couple of years but for some reason never got around to buying one to love up and after a while I not really but kind of forgot about them, then remembered and so recently I went looking for them and found them gone!?!

By then it was 2017/2018 time, and I had procrastinated so long that I had apparently missed my chance...

Mrs. McGettrick's shop was now closed and all that was left to let me know I hadn't hallucinated their cuteness was a few pages of reviews from lucky customers who didn't stupidly wait until it was too late to bring home a Fuggler to love...

Now I know this will surprise you all but this made me want one all the more, so armed with the name Fuggler I went searching to see if someone had had enough of their one and wanted to sell him to me, instead I found something even better; and also the reason why Mrs. McGettrick had to close down her Etsy store...

As you can see from this thread I found on her facebook page ... Spin Master have taken over Mrs. McGettrick's Breeding Programme and began releasing them, so on the plus side, there are more chances for me to find and adopt the Fugglers of my dreams but on the con side, they are of course mass produced and not handmade limited and slightly different quirky hand sewn little buggers like the original ones were... Swings and Roundabouts I guess.

Another thing I discovered was an interview with Mrs. McGettrick about the inspiration for her Fugglers and subsequent handing over the breeding programme to Spin Master Toys, you can read it here if you're interested.

 I'm pretty sure you know what comes next right?!

I checked out Fuggler.com and discovered a cute little page called Home, Horrible Home it was so adorable that after I'd had a good look all around the site I just had to take the opportunity to get myself one this time.

So now the problem was which one?

The graphics at the top of the page rotates to show several adorable little Fugglers that I'd be happy to give a home to, but out of all of them 2 really appealed to me... 

The Sketchy Squirrel - brown bushy tailed Fuggler and the Suspicious Red Fox Fuggler, perhaps because I see and hear their mammalian counterparts on a daily/nightly basis...

 Anyway for a start they would do, closely followed by the adorable Mr.Buttons a furry orange haired little bugger, Annoyed Alien , Grey Burlap Nightmare Bear and Grey Sickening Sloth!

The problem is, I always tend to want the more obscure or harder / more expensive versions of everything and of course Fugglers are no exception!

The other 2 I'm after are even more obscure; one is a cute little fluffy bunny, in brown or green and the other was called Sexy Beast but as that one is a semi-naked humanoid male with a 5 o'clock shadow and dirty grundies, it's very unlikely that Spin Master will release that one for children to snuggle up with any time soon!

So I'm going to give making my own one a go at some point soon.

The Home page of the website, has a lot of quirky little notes, such as a link entitled: What the heck is a Fuggler? When you click on it, this pops up...

All the info links on the page are animated to give the impression these little critters are not only alive but a bit mental too!

 Well that was me sold, so I decided on going looking, my first port of call was clicking on their "Adopt a Fuggler" section at the top of the page... unfortunately the places listed on the home page are all U.S. based shops.

So seeing as I'm in the U.K I had to get "creative", by that I mean check out Ebay and Amazon to see if there were any U.K based sellers of these adorable critters and if so, if they have one of the eight I'd happily give house room to...

I found quite a few on both sites so that was cool, only The red Fox which was my first choice seems to be permanently out of stock or being sold for stupid amounts on Amazon, so he was out...

 I decided I'd go for my second choice of Sketchy Squirrel.... And here he is!

I'll be doing a box opening and longer post on him soon, but for now you'll have to make do with the above picture!

Another thing that will really (not) surprise you, is while I was writing this post I couldn't stop myself from seeing who else was on offer and ended up buying Mr.Buttons as well, so you can expect a post on him soon too!

By the way, while purchasing him, I discovered an interesting little titbit of information...

It turns out that there is such a thing as a rare Mr. Buttons who comes with a golden button for his "BUTThole" instead of the standard brown? (don't quote me) button...

Another thing, you may not know is that the original - Mrs. McGettrick Fugglers didn't have BUTTholes, which may explain why they were so grumpy - constipation can do that to ya!

Another and exclusive to Spin Master's Fuggler incarnations is the addition of a range of Vinyl figures, so even if you can't get hold of your favourite soft bodied version, you can always buy a mini companion to stick in your pocket and take on your travels with you!

Something else I really like about Spin Master's range of Fugglers is they kept the original creature designs Mrs. McGettrick came up with so even though they are second generation and come with a BUTThole now, they are true to the original creations and the fun and quirkiness of the originals and Mrs. McGettrick's Fuggler Emporium.

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