UNLICENSED SMURFS
Psssst....wanna buy a counterfeit Smurf? They're more common than you think! Learn about the hush-hush secret world of fake Smurfs. No longer relegated to the underground, mainstream collectors love these Smurf phonies!
1) Knock-offs are an attempt to make a figurine that looks like it came from a real, licensed Smurf factory. There are two types of Knock-offs: clones and uniques.
a] Clones are simply copies of an existing figurine mold. The clones attempt to be an exact duplicate of a standard figurine.
b] Uniques are Smurfs that don't exist as legitimate licensed figurines. Ie, there is no Schleich or Bully mold that looks the same as a Unique Knock-off.
It can be very difficult. The issues surrounding licensing can be murky, as well. For example, the Argentina Minimodels were produced under license for a time (the figures with the MiniModel stamp), and then they were made as unlicensed pirated figurines. Aside from the missing Minimodels stamp on the base, these unlicensed Smurfs look physically identical to the licensed Minimodels figures, and were made in the same factory. In addition, more and more unlicensed figurines are being produced from what appear to be authentic molds - making it very hard to tell the difference between the licensed and unlicensed, even when side-by-side.
There are differences and tell-tale signs, however - many figurines are obviously unlicensed. Sometimes, the sizing of the Clone Knock-offs will be different from the original, and sometimes the painting can be different as well. The seams (where the Smurf is pieced together from two halves) are often poorly joined and trimmed on counterfeits. Unique or strange painting variations are another way to identify counterfeits - if the paint color choices are really "out there", there is a good chance the figurine is unlicensed. Another thing to check for is text clarity - the markings, such as the word "Peyo", should be very clear on a legit figurine - the text is sometimes blurry on the clones. Finally, if the price is incredibly low, and the figurines look too good to be true, they sometimes are! Getting ultra-rare figurines for a low-price should make you wary. Many figurines are valuable because they are truly rare. If you're thinking about buying something hard-to-find, ask yourself - how did the buyer get this rare figurine? Does he or she have more than one for sale? Consider provenance - thanks to a new generation of professionally counterfeited figurines, it is getting *harder and harder* to tell what is truly a "real Smurf" now that the Chinese fake Smurfs are flooding the marketplace.
Case study: After Minimodels Industria Argentina went out of business, their molds were sold off and rough clones were made by amateurs. You can clearly see that those Argentinean Smurfs are counterfeit because their seams - the edges of the figurine - are prominent and rough, the material they're made from is substandard, and the painting quality is quite low. In addition to these unlicensed Argentina Smurf figurines, counterfeit Mexican Smurfs,
Polish Smurfs and
Spanish Smurfs are often notable because of their poor seams/edges and painting.
Esoterica: One of the problems facing the collector when asking "Is my figurine real?" is the fact that different production runs from different manufacturers can make Smurfs using different methodologies. The operative word here is "can". Sometimes every issue of a particular figurine is constructed the same way. Sometimes, there are multiple manufacturing methods applied. For example, 2.0180 Pizza Papa Smurf, which is hard-to-find but not a truly expensive or rare figurine, has at least three different methods of manufacturing. If you forcibly remove the pizza server platter from Papa, you'll notice the tray is either "cut" with a tiny notch to fit around Papa's tummy (made in Portugal), or there is a little "peg" sticking out of the platter that fits into a hole inside Papa's stomach (made in Germany). As well, some models have Papa's hands holding the pizza tightly, some have a wide gap around the pie. This legitimate and licensed 2.0180 figurine is made in at least two completely different ways - and there may be other methods used, too! It is very hard then to say "Figurine X is fake because it was manufactured differently from a known sample". Quite simply, you could just have a legitimate version no one has seen before. As well, sometimes different manufacturers made different molds entirely, such as Schleich versus Bully - but despite their differences they are still 100% licensed products. On the other hand, some manufacturing techniques immediately tell the tale of a Smurf being unlicensed. For example, a run of quality counterfeit Easter Smurfs are all discernable from the real thing due to the multi-part molds they are made from. The real figurines appear to be made "solid", whereas you can see the different "parts" of the clone molds. If the Easter Smurf you have is made of two identifiable parts, then it is a counterfeit.
Tags: Schelich tags, which are the sticker tags that look similar to the ID you get when you enter a hospital, are found on both real figurines and counterfeits. There are sometimes small differences between the real and counterfeit tags, but by-and-by they look the same. One interesting thing to note is that some clones come with Schelich tags that never appeared on the legitimate figurine!
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