Heya jammers, Asteralium here! I’ve got some fun news to share for those of you who love AJ merchandise. This is a followup post to one I made back in February 2022 about my discovery of a one-of-a-kind Animal Jam toy. There’s some pretty important context in that one, so please read it by clicking here and then come back to this post.
Where we last left on on our story of unreleased Animal Jam toys, I spoke about two listings from the same person I purchased my prototype from: An octopus figure and a never before seen den playset. Someone bought them, but I had no idea who. Well, after I made the post, I found out that another AJ content creator had them: KuteKoolKitten! I’ll let her tackle telling her own story:
Details from KoolKitten
Hi everyone! It’s Kutekoolkitten, and I wanted to share some information about my AJ prototype toys with you all. The two figures I have are named Enchanted Jellyllama and Dancing Kookydoll. Enchanted Jellyllama is a llama prototype and Dancing Kookydoll is an original octopus prototype! I also have the prototype Gingerbread House Den and Noblesplinter reindeer adopt a pet.
How did I get these toys? Great question! I am a HUGE Animal Jam merchandise collector and am constantly searching for new AJ toys. In the fall of 2021, my mom and I stumbled across a listing we have never seen before. A purple octopus AJ toy figure! I was freaking out and at first, I thought it was fanmade. We quickly bought it and searched the sellers' page for more information. It turns out there was also a prototype den! We just had to get that. I opened the toys up on Christmas Day and was extremely excited!
When scratching off the codes, I noticed that one of the codes said “Sample” and the other was blank. I came to the conclusion that these toys were official Animal Jam prototypes and came from toylines that didn’t make it to stores. I also realized that these may have been the only versions of these toys in the world. While there is a gem squad octopus, the accessories, pet, and color are entirely different. However, my llama may have just been the only AJ llama figure ever produced as well as the Gingerbread House den.
All about my prototypes! The Gingerbread House den is a unique AJ den with sparkly gumdrops on the top, the iconic gingerbread wallpaper and window from Animal Jam Classic, a small graham cracker balcony, and red flooring. The back resembles the other AJ den toys with the wooden arch at the door and vining flowers. White icing is dripping down the side and back of the house giving the snow illusion. This toy is perfect for the Jamaalidays in Animal Jam! I also got a pet when unboxing the other prototype (octopus) The pet reindeer named Noblesplinter is light blue/teal in color. His eyes are closed and his antlers are a slightly different shape compared to the other reindeer adopt a pets. I found this very interesting!
Moving on to the figures themselves, the octopus prototype has a purple base color and pink tentacles. He has a blue pirate hat and lime-green fairy wings. A small yellow skull wristlet also came with the accessories. The llama has a very bright color scheme and is wearing purple gingerbread wings and a light pink gingerbread top hat. Her hooves are bright pink, she has a light blue undercoat, cream-colored wool coat, and yellow eyes. I love both of these figures and I am so happy that they are part of my collection! The items that came with my Gingerbread Den include a light purple gingerbread chair, a table with a Jamaaliday-themed cake with a present on top, and a peppermint ottoman. These items are all very unique and make the den look beautiful!
I am so grateful to own these AMAZING prototypes and to be able to share them with you guys and help properly document them. There are some photos below, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram @Kutekoolkitten_aj if you would like to see any more photos!
New Discoveries
Thank you KoolKitten! Now, onto some of the big news. KoolKitten and I recently connected with someone else who recently found more AJ prototype toys. She’s @orangepeelsalad on Instagram, and she was able to acquire these two figures:
Introducing Leaping FrozenDaisy (and Ubercoat) as well as Darling Chillyatom (and Frostyhorse)! These two figures seem to be part of the planned and canceled second wave of full size animal figures, which is the set that KoolKitten’s octopus is from. If you’ve followed along with the previous post, FrozenDaisy the goat may look somewhat familiar.
Orange’s goat figure is seemingly a different iteration of my prototype goat figure. This figure looks basically the same as what we saw in promotional material for the line, while my version sports a different color scheme, a pattern, and lacks a pet. It’s very interesting to see that this figure went through quite a bit of change, and it makes me wonder what the development process for the other figures was like. What made them change the color and name, but keep the accessories the same? We may never know…
Then next up we have Orange’s owl figure. It features a blue tricorn hat, perhaps a representation of a sun necklace, and… wings? Wings on an animal that already has wings? Okay, Jazwares, that’s a little strange. But every other figure has wings, so it makes a little sense in that regard. Both of these figures capture the characters from AJ extremely well. It really feels like they’ve been pulled out of the game and artwork.
And now for a few other odd details. The figures included a Series 2 Adopt a Pet Checklist in the boxes, which somewhat indicates when these might’ve been packaged. Either around the time the second series was being developed, or soon after its release. There’s also no words under the code scratch-offs, unlike my figure which said “Sample” Finally, on the back of the box for one of the figures there’s a torn off label. Labels like these are fairly standard for prototypes. It was probably information about when, where, and how this prototype was made.
Now, this is the part where I would show you the unreleased items I think would go with these toys. I’ve already personally concluded the Tiny Sombrero was supposed to go with the goat. But the owl… I’m not sure. There’s not an unreleased hat that we know of that looks like the tricorn hat. And there’s not an unreleased sun item that we know of either. So I guess my best guess would be the Sparkly Scarf because it’s a neck item that’s yellow, like the sun the toy wears.
Well that’s about it for my analysis. At some point I’d love to do a full deep dive into everything that was canceled that was part of this toyline. But that’ll have to wait for another time. Before we move on to our next piece of news though, I wanted to give OrangePeelSalad a chance to speak about who they are and their connection to Animal Jam:
Thanks Aster! I go by Orange for now, I’m 21 years old, and I began playing Animal Jam when it first came out around 2010/11. I found out about it in a National Geographic Kids magazine, which I was always reading as a kid. Every day when I came home from school, Animal Jam game time was reserved for at least 2 hours, LOL. The game became my ultimate comfort in life, but I slowly grew out of it when I reached high school, around 2015, because it wasn't deemed “cool” anymore. In 2021, I underwent a hardship in life and came back to Animal Jam for comfort. I think my favorite thing to do in the game is play gem breaker. I've been playing on and off since then, but I really got into collecting the toyline once I found out it was a thing. I collect other toys, but Animal Jam's toyline really became the biggest part of my toy collection. It became such a healing activity for my inner child to switch around the outfits on the figurines, and rearrange the setup of the dens.
The Future of Animal Jam Merch
Now for the final bit of exciting news. Recently, Jambassador and Archiver Delocate got the chance to interview the CEO of Wildworks, the “benevolent overlord” of Animal Jam, Clark Stacey! I highly encourage you to watch the full interview, because there’s tons of interesting answers he gives to her questions. The question that’s relevant to today’s topic was “Will we ever get any more AJ merchandise?” I’m just going to quote him directly:
“Yes, there definitely will. And I know that a few people have asked about that. I would love to hear more from the community just on what would be most valuable or exciting to them.
I’ll tell you something that happened with the original run of Animal Jam toys: We worked with a company called Jazwares,as our master toy licensee, and I think they did really awesome stuff. But at the same time, they were targeting I think a younger demographic than Animal Jam’s playerbase really was. They were wanting to compete with Shopkins and LOL Surprise and that’s the reason why we had the Adopt-a-Pet blind box things, that you find out what you get when you open it up. Which are cool, but I think most of our players are a little too old for Shopkins and LOLSuprise. It’s not the kind of collectible that they’re really into or the kind of toys that they really buy. I think that they’re still into toys and collectibles but probably more stuff that they can collect and show off to friends, or to their followers or something, and not make little playsets out of. Or maybe they do, I don’t know. But anyway. We went through three refreshes of those adopt a pet animals, and decided jointly with Jazwares that, even though we told a ton of them, it was a top ten toy the first year that it came out, but it tapered off pretty sharply after that, I think because it wasn’t the right toy for that demographic. At the time it felt like probably something more like POP Vinyls or more limited edition collectible Animal Jam figures would be more suitable, and I still feel that way, but I would still love to hear feedback from the community on what they want to see.
I think one of our priorities right now is to… we’re talking to some potential apparel licensees And we would do some new AJ apparel. I think there’s also in the works probably with the same licensee some things like posters and other collectibles like that. But as far as toys go, I would really love to do toys, I would really love to do more plush, particularly if it was like, collectible small plush. But, I need to hear from you guys. You guys will ultimately determine what it is that we want to make, and you’d have a very direct influence on that. Because what you send to us, to AJHQ, to Lisha, or whatever you would like to see as far as Animal Jam toys, that’s something that we put together and we take that to the licensees that we’re talking to, and we say “Look, our community is calling for this kind of toy. And that makes it very easy for them to say “Ok, you’re right. Let’s do it.”. So yeah, it’s coming. It hasn’t been a high priority while we get our feet under us following the acquisition. Becoming assimilated into a publicly traded company, there’s a lot of complexity to that just on the financial and business end. But now we have found our feet there and that relationship is going really well. So I think there is going to be the opportunity to focus on some of those things.”
We’re pretty hyped for what might come in the future from AJ, and I appreciate having some insight into the Jazwares line as well. If you have any suggestions or thoughts for what the future of Animal Jam merch should be, in terms of shirts, posters, toys, anything, please message Delocate on Instagram! You can watch the full interview there, including a bit about what happened to AJ boxes, and a second part about AJ Classic.
Whew, this was a long one! Thank you for reading. It’s been really fun to have this mystery slowly unravel and I’m glad I get to share it with you all. I hope that I’m able to continue bringing you updates on cool unreleased AJ stuff. Until next time, this is Aster, signing off!
Oh but uhh… one more thing. I just wanted to let you dedicated readers know that something big is coming from me and some fellow archivers. Stay tuned. ;)