The Snorks plush: two $9.97 dolls that beat their own cartoon to the Christmas catalog

The Snorks were built to be the Smurfs with snorkels, and the plush was in the Christmas catalog before the cartoon was on the air. Forty years on, the show is on DVD and the twelve-inch Wallace Berrie dolls have all but vanished.

The cartoon that was designed to be a cartoon

Most licensed plush is a by-product. A show succeeds, a toy company calls, and a year later there is a doll. The Snorks ran the other way. They were conceived, from the beginning, as a property — a character set engineered to do for one Belgian businessman what the Smurfs had done for another.

That businessman was Freddy Monnickendam. He ran SEPP International, the merchandising arm of the Belgian comics publisher Dupuis, and it was Monnickendam who brokered the deal among Dupuis, Peyo, NBC, and Hanna-Barbera that put The Smurfs on Saturday morning in September 1981 and made it the biggest thing on children's television. He was the show's first executive producer. He was also, by the accounts of the people who worked with him, at odds with Peyo over what a cartoon was for — Peyo wanted the show faithful to the comics, Monnickendam wanted it mainstream — and the relationship curdled into lawsuits over rights and money.

So Monnickendam went looking for a Smurfs he could own. He found them in the sketchbook of Nic Broca, a Belgian cartoonist who had been drawing small round characters called Diskies in 1981, and who redrew them as sea creatures with breathing tubes on their heads. The first Snorks comic book was published in January 1982. Monnickendam took the property to Hanna-Barbera outside the Dupuis channel, a move that ended SEPP as a Dupuis company, and NBC put Snorks on the air on September 15, 1984, three years to the week after the Smurfs.

Nobody pretended the resemblance was accidental. The Snorks lived in an undersea town called Snorkland, said "snork" the way Smurfs said "smurf," and had a mute member of the ensemble — Tooter Shellby — who communicated entirely through the sound of his snorkel. The lore held that a shipwrecked captain had discovered the kingdom in 1643. The two protagonists were Allstar Seaworthy, the yellow one, voiced by Michael Bell, and Casey Kelp, the pink one with the ponytails, voiced by B.J. Ward. One period reviewer called the show "non-violent and non-sexist" and "inoffensive," and then, having been fair, added "not brilliant." It ran four seasons, sixty-five episodes in a hundred and eight segments, and was finished by early 1989. Mental Floss, looking back, made the observation that stings: for all Monnickendam's involvement in both properties, the Snorks and the Smurfs never once crossed over.

The company that made them

Wallace Berrie & Co. was a California gift and novelty house that had already made one fortune from a Belgian import. It picked up the North American Smurf license in the late 1970s, sold the first PVC Smurfs in the United States in 1979, and rode the 1981 cartoon into the biggest character-merchandise run of the early decade. Along the way, in 1982, it acquired the Applause division from Knickerbocker Toys and began putting that name on its products alongside its own. For a few years both names appear — sometimes on the same tag, sometimes on different products in the same line. By 1986 the company was simply Applause. It would go on to absorb Dakin in 1995 and become, for a while, the largest plush and gift company in the country.

The Snorks landed in the middle of that transition, which is useful for anyone trying to date one. The catalog calls them "the Snorks of Wallace Berrie," full stop. A first-wave plush should say Wallace Berrie on the tush tag, with or without Applause. A Snork tagged Applause alone belongs to the later run, after the show had aired and the company had finished its rebranding.

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The Ward catalog page is a good snapshot of the 1984 plush aisle: Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy at $9.99, a crawling Baby Smurf at $7.99, Mattel's Poochie at $8.99, the three Chipmunks in their lettered T-shirts at $10.99, a mother panda with a detachable baby at $11.99, and a Gund bear called Smooch at $13.99. The Snorks sit in the lower-middle of that range, and the catalog gives them more description than anything else on the page.

Catalog item	Description	Ward price
J — Casey Snork 48 G 18479	"12 in. high from hook to toe." Ship. wt. 8 oz.	$9.97
K — All-Star Snork 48 G 18481	"Snorkleball is his game." 12 in. tall. Wt. 8 oz.	$9.97

"From hook to toe" is the detail that matters. Look at the photograph: both dolls are seated on the rail, but their snorkels are sewn as stiff curls that rise off the back of the head and hook forward, and the copy measures the doll from the top of that hook. The snorkel is a hanger. These were designed to be hung — from a bedpost, a doorknob, a Christmas tree — and a Snork that has spent forty years on a hook will show it in the crease and fade of the snorkel before anywhere else.

The dolls themselves are simple and, for the era, faithful. Casey is pale pink with a lighter face, floppy pink ears tied with green ribbons, embroidered lashes, green shorts, and a white shirt printed SNORKS in green. All-Star is a saturated yellow with a blue snorkel-nose, round white eyes with black pupils, a white shirt printed SNORKS in blue with blue sleeves, a blue star on a field of red stripes across the belly — the all-star motif, in case the name was too subtle — and blue legs and feet. Both wear the show's logo on the chest, which is how you tell them from the later Applause plush that carry the character name instead.

What survives, and what does not

Not much, and we want to be careful here, because "rare" is the most abused word in this trade. The Snorks were never a Smurfs-scale phenomenon; the show was middling and the line was short. The PVC figures are common because Schleich made them in quantity and children could not destroy them. The plush is a different matter. Fabric fades, shirts go gray, snorkels lose their curl, and dolls that cost $9.97 were not the ones anybody put away in tissue.

The Allstar does appear — we own one, photographed above, and we have seen another yellow Wallace Berrie Allstar, tagged Made in Korea with item number 5177 and the fabric tags intact, offered on eBay for $19.99, and a few larger Applause versions — a fourteen-inch Casey, a twelve-inch posable Casey with a hat — listed under 1983 copyright dates. What we have not found, in any condition, is the catalog pair: the twelve-inch Wallace Berrie Casey in her green-ribboned ears and SNORKS shirt, next to her Allstar, as they were photographed on that rail. If you have one, the tag is what we want to see.

Why a cartoon nobody remembers fondly is worth remembering

The Snorks are a footnote to the Smurfs, and they know it. But the plush tells a story the show does not: a merchandising machine so confident in its own method that it had the dolls in the Christmas catalog and the figures in the toy aisle before a single child had seen the cartoon. It worked once. It did not quite work twice. And the evidence of the attempt — two twelve-inch dolls, $9.97 each, hanging by their snorkels on a Montgomery Ward set in the summer of 1984 — has become harder to find than the show itself, which you can buy on DVD from Warner Archive any afternoon you like.

We keep a saved search running. Casey, twelve inches, green ribbons, Wallace Berrie tag. If she turns up, she will be the first thing we write about.