Zoonicorns are Coming for Christmas

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Submitted by RJ Carter on Sun, 11/15/2015 - 13:11

By this point, your house and emails have already been bombarded with Super Spectacular Toy Catalogs, Door-Buster Sales Schedules, Black Friday Secret Deals and Cyber Monday Email Tips for you to get the most out of your holiday shopping. And you've probably already noticed that the toy market has already been defined as to which toys are the ones you have to go get.

Lost in the miasma of metamorphing robots and not-quite-for-real pets is one of the simplest yet most enduring type of toy: the stuffed animal. But for a market that's been super-saturated with everything from the zoological to the crytpozoological to even the microbial, it takes something unique if a plush is going pique a child's interest.

Enter the Zoonicorns. The tale of the Zoonicorns is told in the children's book, BUFFY MEETS THE ZOONICORNS. Buffy is a restless buffalo calf at the city zoo, who just wants to run and run, and has trouble settling down. At bedtime, her mother sings her a lullaby and soon she is running through a wide open pasture all by herself -- until she's joined by the four Zoonicorns -- Valeo, Promithea, Ene and Aliel.

The Zoonicorns are a sort of hybrid of a unicorn and the gum-selling zebra. They're striped, and each comes in a different color -- blue, purple, green and pink. I had the opportunity to review not only the book, but also two of the Zoonicorns. That is, I had the second opportunity -- upon arrival, my 8 year old immediately absconded to his room with the whole kit, and read the book so he could tell me all about the Zoonicorns when I came home. So kid-testing had already been taken care of by the time I got around to getting my own look at the Zoonicorns.

The children's story is interesting. The choice of a buffalo as the main character was against type, when the rest of the cast were fantasy creatures. The illustrations were beautifully painted, and the visible texture of the medium adds a quality of depth to the pages.

As to the toys themselves, they seem to be quite sturdily manufactured. The eyes are embroidered, not plastic, and the stitching is very tight. This isn't something that's going to come apart. The brightly colored manes are soft faux fur, and rooted solidly into the toy's head. In short, this is a quality stuffed animal that will outlast many of the other toys you'll be assembling this season. (Plus, they take no batteries!)