Most likely, replacing scapegoat Plumpy with a matriarchal character was the result of recent developments in child psychology. Even the wikipedia text that had come up when I searched for him the first time had vanished from all but the cached version of the entry.Īll we know for sure is that Plumpy was replaced by Mama Gingertree. Normally I would seek a response from Plumpy’s people, but his contact information and board game profile have been scrubbed. After about six encounters with him, most parents are ready to ring his fuzzy little neck. As soon as you approach the final curve of the path, Plumpy will rise from the depths of the card pile and send you packing your bags back to the sugarplum trees. With Plumpy in action, a game of Candyland can last as long as the Dark Ages. Seriously, I really do think that Plumpy is responsible for a good deal of the rising Prozac trade. That said, the main trouble with Candyland, in my opinion, is not the win-lose scenario. For children, much of their lives are involve things over which they have no control: where they live, who their teachers are, whether their parents get divorced, or stay together, etc.Īnother article, this one written by the mother of a young girl, seemed to take it personally every time her daughter was dealt the unfortunate “plump” card (a sort-of reverse trump card), which sent the girl into a state of despair. So, when a Candyland player is going along, and is suddenly swept up to the Queen Frostine card, or cast down to the little plum, Plumpy, then that is a lesson in things we cannot control. No one likes Plumpy, but I think of the game as a highly evolved, spiritual game, in that it lets us know what we can control (taking turns, not cheating) but is like life, in that there is much we cannot control, like love, or birth or death. The winner is the first one who gets to the castle at the end.ĭaniel was very intense as he played, and kept getting flustered by “Plumpy” Plumpy is the card in the deck that sends you back almost to the beginning. The more I looked, however, the more clear it became that Plumpy had over the decades become the personfication of bad luck for thousands of highly sensitive and impressionable young children.įor example, I found an article by a psychologist describing one student’s reaction to playing Candy Land for the first time:įor those of you who forget (or never played) the game is played by choosing cards and advancing to that place on the board. I also learned that Plumpy the Plumpa Troll was replaced by Mama Gingertree, reportedly for unknown reasons. Hasbro (which bought Milton Bradley) had to sue in order to retrieve the domain name from the operators of an adult Web site. It also made me realize that Candy Land serves as a spiritual homeland for many more people than just me, as this image I found on flickr demonstrates.Ī web search revealed that Candy Land was invented in 1940 in San Diego by Elanor Abbott, a woman recovering from Polio. The dedication this artist put into the project was as astounding as the end result. But I also wondered why the picture was so quilted-looking before I read the caption and saw some lady had meticulously constructed it out of 100,000 tiny beads. I looked at each landmark and remembered my childhood. I thought of the Wizard of Oz movies or Willy Wonka as I let my mind wander back through the Lollipop Woods, the Ice Cream Sea, the Mollases Swamp.
The google image result for Candy Land brought up a large map of the Candylandscape circa the 1978 edition. This morning, while proofreading one of the the funnier comics in the newspapers, I had to look up the spellings of old-school board games such as Mousetrap, Chutes & Ladders, and of course, Candy Land.