Gogo's Crazy Bones: Introduction

Time for another personal toy obsession!

I saw a cute little kid's-room figurine wall shelf at IKEA and got it, hoping I could finally give my Playmobil figures a good display. They were too tall to stand between the shelves, though, so I thought I'd give it to my Gogos instead!

What are Gogos? Well, honestly, for the majority of my time aware of them...I had absolutely no idea. I simply just thought they were neat! Then I decided to learn more.

The Gogo's Crazy Bones toy line dates back to the late 1990s, releasing from European company Magic Box. What's always been constant is that the Gogos are little one-inch unarticulated plastic character figurines designed to be the game pieces--the "Crazy Bones" name comes from their intent to be heirs to the ancient game of knucklebones, which has proliferated and survived globally in many forms (jacks would be the most familiar to Anglo countries). As such, the figures can be played with in various little dexterity games like flipping them from one surface to another, tossing them to see which goes farther or closest to a wall without touching, table juggling games in the vein of jacks where you have to keep figures in motion while tossing or picking up others at the same time, etc., etc. I don't know where the "Gogo's" part of the name comes from at all, nor why it's in the possessive. I'm not aware of any relevant character, person, or entity called Gogo that's relevant to the brand , and the characters are called Gogos as a noun, though the brand always mis-apostrophizes the plural as "Gogo's". I won't do that because it's not correct. (The sign says "banana's"? Banana's what? What does the banana have?)

The first Gogos had unpainted cartoon sculpts, starting as goofy grotesque cartoon heads and branching out into other styles with Gogos based on objects and having full-figure sculpts later. The classic Gogos had some novelty color castings, like translucent and metal-finish, but their color variants were unregulated so there was no "complete" collection of Gogos, since they had so many colors and weren't cast in closed groups of variants.

Picture of a lot of classic Gogos. 

It must be noted that there is one racist Gogo in this old lineup-- a cartoon face with dreads and huge lips named "Reggae". There are many cartoon head Gogos in a similar style, but they don't feel like racial caricatures the way Reggae did. Even in its time, that was unacceptable, and I can only speculate it might have been a product of this company being European and less diverse then and less sensitive to racist stereotypes in the way the U.S. was?

The original Gogo's line ran basically up to the point of the 2007 revamp, without a major gap between the two iterations of the franchise. 

Cover of a sticker book based on the branding of the revamp's Series 1.

I met Gogo's Crazy Bones with that revamp, which gave the aesthetic a far artsier, more abstract modernist cartoon style and added simplistic paint jobs and full-figure humanoid characters. 

The 2000s were an oddly strong time for monster collectibles and pop-art aesthetics and indie artist toys, ranging from Uglydolls to the Boogily Heads to any number of artist-based Kidrobot vinyl collectible series. It was a great decade for the weird and expressionist in the collectible toy sphere, and expressive toys of the era got me hooked on a lot of modern art and illustrator sensibilities. I think the 2000s-era Crazy Bones line might be the best exemplar of this kind of broad aesthetic trend, as the style feels "2000s" in that precise artsy kind of way. This incarnation of the Gogos also leans deliberately Japanese in some of its pop-art theming and many of the character names, and while it's a little tacky that this isn't a Japanese company doing so, it doesn't come across as ignorance or stereotyping in most of the practice. It reads pretty much like a Japanese toy company could be making the very same designs a lot of the time. 

In regard to content concerns, there's one disappointing Gogo from Series 4 who's based on an Inuit person. The design has harmless intentions and a cute look, but its name is derived from the E-word and overall is a poor concept. If I end up collecting a set of Series 4, that one will be included in the conversation but I'll repeat these critiques. 

The Gogos I encountered first were right at the point of emergence in 2007. I had an oddly tidy collection before beginning this project--nine unique figures from Series 1, nine unique figures from Series 2, twenty unique figures from Series 3, and twenty unique figures from Series 4! Series 4 was the latest I collected from in that era, and it was actually the last major series to hit North America. I actually added to my Series 4 group late, thanks to getting a few packs in the wild last year. Before 2024, I had the most from Series 3. Series 5 was a "Superstar" rerelease of older characters from each prior series, with a few design tweaks and the gimmick of flocked fuzzy figures, while Series 6 was "Megatrip" or "Edge", with the UK "Edge" release having several differences. I'd love access to the original Megatrip set, but I'll need to wait for U.S. households to no longer be held to shipping tariffs--and that's if I can even find the Megatrip set.

Each pack of the modern Crazy Bones contained three figures and stickers; Series 4 added in trading cards for a card game, with pictures and names of the Series 4 Gogos on them. 

Each regular release of a revamp Gogo character had variants from being cast in a limited set of colors. I'll go into how that worked when I get into Series 1, but while the classic Gogos had unregulated color variants, the modern ones had fixed sets of five colors each could appear in. I believe Series 4 had four variants instead. That needs further investigation and a larger sample pool for me to figure that out. For almost all Gogos, the paint was identical on each color casting of any Gogo, color of the paint included, but there are, again, some exceptions where paint color (not design) changes with the casting color. This "casting color varies, paint doesn't" style of variety continued as the series went on. It's a wrinkle for collecting, to be sure, because the visual design of a Gogo might suit some of their color variants more than others, subjective taste will influence what you believe is the best color variant for a given Gogo, and you might not get that one. It encourages swapping and trading between kid collectors, I suppose, and broadens the appeal of each Gogo if the color varieties can get more people to enjoy one shared character model, but one of each character would make things much simpler! 

While collecting originally, the color variants did not factor in at all somehow! My original collecting was completely random and yet I got no color alts during that time. Every Gogo I got was the only color variant I got of that character, so when I say I had nine unique Gogos in Series 1 and 2 each, I mean I got those nine characters with no alternate colors of any of them, and the same goes for the twenty from Series 3 and 4. (Technically, there was one character duplicate in my group--a rare redesign "Wanted" repaint of a Series 1 character, but it wasn't a color variant of the standard paint job). The only regular color alts I had in that time were from the gold-series collector tin which was a fixed assortment of metallic-gold recolors of Series 1, 2, and 3 Gogos. 

When I started collecting online, it was semi-random--scanning lots of Gogos to see that they had specific ones I wanted, while not committing every Gogo in the lot to memory and thus being surprised by much of each batch I took in. Even with this semi-random collecting and significant amassing of Gogos, getting all of any Gogo was very rare. I have the fewest Gogos in only singular color variants, but plenty with two or three or four. Five out of five is a stark minority of the collection, though. Series 4 would be easier to complete variant sets for, but it's also the one I haven't focused on yet since lots dedicated to Series 4 were harder to find and I wasn't interested in the ones which were weighted toward the metal-finish variants. I'd like as much of Series 4 in the flat color variants as I can get.

Some Gogos were released as unpainted variants, evoking the '90s toyline. I don't know what the logic or distribution of unpainted Gogos was, but it seems any color variant of a Gogo could be unpainted--at least, perhaps, the solid-color castings. I have one unpainted Gogo from my collecting. I'm genuinely not sure if unpainted Gogos were an intentional gimmick or just a spin to cover for any factory lapses. I know the "Urban Toys" exported rerelease of Series 1 and one of the releases of Series 6 had deliberately unpainted versions which were clearly intentional because they were actually alternate molds with relief sculpting employed to match the flat paint detail of the painted versions. My unpainted Gogo is not such a case, and is just blank. The rare Wanted/Most Wanted design variants of select Gogos in Series 1 and 4 are color-locked to one body casting and finish, so there aren't multiple versions of any Wanted Gogo.

I don't know if it was ever possible to get two of one Gogo character in a pack, or if the distribution was controlled to an extent so you wouldn't get copies of one character or exact duplicates within a pack. I have gotten a couple of duplicates, but oddly, during my time collecting them from the mystery packs, I never ended up with two or more color variants of the same character. The duplicate Gogos I got from firsthand buying were duplicate color variants as well. Expanding my collection through online lots gave me many color variants for the same characters, though!

For several years, my Gogos all lived in a cheap plastic shopping bag from a store I don't remember. Then they went to live in a fabric-covered gift box shaped like a wrapped present. Then they finally came out for proper display on the IKEA shelf!

The Gogos are mostly sculpted only to be viewed from the front, since all have a swayed curve on the back that a finger rests in nicely, as well as a circular stud on the back stamped with a logo authenticating the toy. Their bases also extend backward to stand them up easily in a way that's not meant to be read as part of the actual character design, and there's no paint on the back. 

Three Gogo sculpts shown from back and profile view.

The bases also have small holes in the bottom in later series. I know Series 5 packs featured stackable cubes to display Gogos in, but I don't know if those cubes had peg holes that the Gogos fit onto to center and hold them securely. 

Several Gogos are also designed with thin limbs that would be fragile or make them hard to stand, so gaps are filled in by support plastic as part of the mold design.

Two things I think Magic Box ought to have done with these toys were an Advent calendar and a board game. Gogos would be perfect toys to fill 24 or (ideally) 25 little compartments to open one a day in December, and the calendar could have exclusive Gogo characters, colors and sculpts--five new characters at least. As for a board game, it would be easy--use Gogos as the little meeple tokens to advance through spaces on a board, and feature "challenge spaces" that prompt you to draw a card and play a minigame with Gogos (maybe a separate set of Gogos from the player tokens, perhaps four designs with one shared sculpt for perfect fairness) to get a bonus or wager a penalty regarding your game progress. The Gogos in the board game could also be exclusive, while collectors could be encouraged to pick their favorite Gogo from outside the game as their player piece if they so chose. It would have been a good idea.

My first step upon re-engaging with these toys was laying out and ID'ing all of my Gogos. I first took a picture of the ones I had laid out on the shelf, then cross-referenced with the wikis to learn the names and sort the series. I edited the names on to check it off in a digital file.

I then re-ordered the Gogos (and relocated the wall shelf upstairs) in their series order, excepting the first three inaugural members of my collection who are at the start of the top row, out of order.

I also decided to get a huge lot of Gogos to see what the mix would give me, character or variant-wise. I was interested in getting more designs, I liked after diving in to learn more about what was offered, and in seeing if any color variants I got of characters I had became my new favorite version of a Gogo. This second bag consisted primarily of Series 1 Gogos, but also had two from another collector tin line called "Advance". I blindly picked from this bag to determine my acquisition order, and which would be the official first color variant of each Gogo I put on the record, since I knew I would be getting some multiples in different colors. In cases of exact duplicates, I selected the better copy and set the worse ones aside to clear out when this project is done. These are old Gogos and several had paint abrasions that left no really good copies, but that's what I got. I had a second shelf at this point, painted and varnished black to match my room, and laid this new batch out on it, plus the last few who didn't fit. These are all of the unique Gogos from this batch, in the order I blindly picked them.

The abrasion issue is so disappointing since the paint detail is so fun. Playing games with these will scuff and rub off their paint. The original Gogos which were detailed purely with sculpting avoided that issue. I wonder if today, a 3D-printed alternative might be viable to depict some details with blended plastic colors instead, though it wouldn't be as precise and clean as the painted faces. That's why I love that Playmobil figures started out having all dual-molded faces so the level of paint damage would never ruin the figures' smiling expressions. 

I went through the ID process again, though by the time I got this second batch, I was studied enough to name this many Gogos without wiki-checking:

Then I finished up.

Don't worry if this still doesn't make much sense yet. The series reviews will help!

As I hunted further, I got a few more mixed lots of characters I wanted...and by the end, I decided to shift into purchasing full (one-variant-each) sets of the series which were available to tie off the loose ends of color variants I still hadn't gotten and characters I still needed. I decided to make this comprehensive! As of publishing this intro, this project is not at all finished on the acquisitions end of things, but I'm about to have everything I need from Series 1 in order to publish a post on it very soon, so I figured I might as well get this intro out to start the process! Depending on what my December looks like, this project could extend into January as a running feature. We'll see how it goes.