barbapapa can you hear me?

Sunday, dec. 17, 2006   |   0 comments

When I was five, my mom and I moved to Sweden for a year, and one of my most distinct memories of the Scandinavian experience — other than the manly nun who yanked out one of my loose tooths with a pair of pliers, and other than the swan that bit my tender girl bottom — is of the small collection of Barbapapa books that I acquired while I was there. As I hazily remember it, the Barbapapas were a friendly family of multi-colored amoebic alien things who could blob their bodies into shapes of letters…and tents? I actually thought I’d made them up until I met this little kid on the plane to Seattle in September. He and his mother started talking about his Barbapapa books and I interrupted, all excited, to ask if they were talking about the hippie blob things? Who used their own bodies as a mold for their concrete pod home? The mother, looking more than a little startled, nodded. Yes, yes, that’s exactly right. How did I know about these things? Clearly not many people they knew had heard of this race of problem-solving environmentalist amoeba things.

But we’re not alone, it turns out! I just looked up the Barbapapas on the internet, and they’re totally real (if French, not Swedish as I’d rememberagined):

Oh Barbapapas, how I’ve missed you! There’s red Barbabravo (“He usually likes to be the leader! And he is overly fond of eating! With his tools of Sherlock Holms [sic] (the hat and the magnifying glass) and with the help of his faithful hound Lolita, he tries to act like a great detective”) and yellow Barbazoo (“He knows all about the various animals and plants, the climate and the bad effects of pollution. In one word, he is a distinguished ecologist”) and furry Barbabeau (“He is an artist. Still within the torments of his creativeness, he has not yet found his way through cubism, hyperrealism, surrealism, expressionism or conceptualism!”), and many more. Yes, “thanks to a few adequate shape changes and their brilliant imagination, they can bring to an end even the most difficult of problems, and always in the gentlest manner!”

The Barbapapas are even available on eBay; I’m now the happy re-owner of both Barbapapa and Barbapapa’s Ark. And really, isn’t that just the internet at its finest: helping me prove my freakiest childhood memories to be absolutely true?

Edited to add: Reader Nancy writes in to report that “barbapapa” is French for “cotton candy,” which strikes me as ultra-good news. And according to reader Jennifer, Barbapapas are huge in Canada?!