Today I'd like to take you on a journey into another of my most intense childhood hyperfixations. (Is it as intense as the one that made my parents believe I'd been molested ? Perhaps not, I don't think anything can top that, but still.)
I was born in 1987, and was therefore pretty much the perfect age for the OG Littlest Pet Shop toys when they debuted in the early 90s. I've always been an animal lover, and there were so many different animals to collect, and so many fun little features. I have a very distinct memory of my very first one being a purple bird with a little cage, with a swing he could balance on, who'd flap his wings when you pressed his head.
(Not my picture, this is from an Etsy listing, but this is the exact one I had, and apparently it was actually a toucan, not a parrot.)
One Christmas I got both what I believe was called the "Kitty Club Treehouse", and some sort of pretty igloo set with a bunch of husky puppies, and I spent all morning playing with them until relatives started arriving.
(Again, not my pictures, but these two sets, particularly the igloo, are things I could actually see myself rebuying one day.)
I was particularly obsessed with a certain line of horses, and my grandfather helped me collect them all from a local shop.
(I distinctly remember this one being the first one I got, and she remained my favorite even after I completed the collection. She's the only one who really sticks out in my mind.)
Another favorite of mine was a shih tzu from some kind of pet show line, which I pronounced "shy tazoo" at first.
There even was a board game that I was absolutely obsessed with playing. Usually my mom would play it with me, and I'd beg her just about every night. You had to collect matching cards to be able to adopt one of the four pet figurines that came with the game, and I was absolutely obsessed with the bunny. If whoever I was playing with managed to adopt the bunny before I did, it broke me, despite the fact that I could very easily simply remove the bunny from the game box and play with her at any time. I don't actually recall having any other LPS bunnies, save for the little one that came with the igloo set, oddly enough.
One day, though, just a few days after my eighth birthday, I came home from school to my mother telling me she had a surprise for me: Littlest Pet Shop had just debuted as a TV series!
I was over the moon. It came on just before I would've been getting home, so my mom actually recorded the episode for me and I couldn't wait to watch. When I finally did, though, I was incredibly thrown off.
The characters looked absolutely nothing like the toys. They were so stylized and strange to me. I was very confused as to how and why they were calling this "Littlest Pet Shop" when it didn't even appear to be taking place in the same universe.
The series centered around five specific pets within the titular "Littlest Pet Shop": Stu, a bumbling blue dog, Chloe, a purple cat who was sort of the voice of reason and would often talk about her previous lives, Viv, a pink bunny with musical talent and a hat that held more than you could ever imagine, Squeaks, a monkey, the most normal looking of the five and the only one that didn't actually speak, and Chet, a yellow and blue horse who was established as being the newest member of the group in an early episode. They went on bizarre adventures, and often would get adopted out only to return to the shop. There's not really one specific episode that sticks out to me, unfortunately, but I'd love to see them all again one day.
As bizarre as the show was to me at first, it only took an episode or two for me to get absolutely hooked. I fell in love with the characters, particularly Chloe and Viv, and Littlest Pet Shop became my favorite show for its entire run. (Which apparently was only one season, but these things always feel longer when you're a child.)
One evening in early spring 1996, my mother and I stopped in Toys R Us after the family had been out to eat at a nearby IHOP. I can't remember if we had a particular objective or what, but I was super surprised to see a very small, carded plushie of Viv available on one of their shelves. I was super excited, and my mother bought her for me. I remember the back of the package showed that Chloe, Stu, and Squeaks were also available. It became my holy mission to find Chloe, which I eventually did, but I never saw Stu or Squeaks on a store shelf. I'm not sure why they didn't bother to make Chet, but I feel like every 90s cartoon series always had that one character that never had a toy made of them.
Anyway, once I had that little Viv plushie, she became my constant companion. I have very vivid memories of sitting with her in the evenings and writing in my diary, telling her about my day, and just taking her along pretty much everywhere I went.
Chloe was probably actually my very favorite character on the show, but I don't remember forming such an attachment to the little plushie of her once I had it. I was happy with it, sure, and we actually had a little secret club of sorts called "Scatland", where we'd sit at the very back of the hallway by my bedroom (right in front of my grandfather's bedroom door, actually) and write down "secrets" about my classmates and family members, AKA random things I learned, or things I suspected about them, such as who I thought might have crushes on each other in school, or the one time on the way to my grandparents' house when my father suddenly pulled over to the side of the road because he had to pee. I also have a very distinct memory of one of the secrets being "I suspect my parents still have sex." Hey, I was eight. "Scatland" also had two entities presiding over it named "Skidoocat" and "Windowcat", though I don't really remember what their functions were. "Skidoocat", I believe was regarded as a god of some kind, while "Windowcat" was his messenger, if I recall correctly. I have no idea how or why I came up with any of this, and these two characters were never represented outside of just images in my mind, though I think I did dream about them once.
My final real memory of collecting anything Littlest Pet Shop related is of a small pink plush cat named Cupcake, who also became part of the "Scatland" roster.
It seems as though Cupcake here came out toward the end of the OG LPS run. I'm not sure exactly how or when I moved on from my love for all things LPS, but I do have a very distinct memory of writing in my childhood diary one day, years later, probably when I was ten or eleven, about realizing how much I missed it and how much simpler life was even then, though I was still a child. I think I very briefly tried to bring back "Scatland" in my tween years, but it was never the same.
Littlest Pet Shop did make a comeback in my adult years, with far more stylized figures and a connection to Blythe dolls, and I did try to collect all of the spiders at one point, but I never got super into it, and it still weirds me out to think that this is the LPS that more people seem to know.
Anyway, my main inspiration for writing this post is the fact that, finally, after all these years, I've managed to find a Viv plushie of my own again. I've been searching on and off for her for years, but I feel like not very many of the cartoon plushies were made, as they seem to be extremely rare. Chloe is the only one I've seen pop up somewhat frequently.
I'm very happy to have this little piece of my childhood back with me, and this has been super fun to relive. If anyone else remembers the 1995 LPS cartoon, please let me know!
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