ELC Happyland The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Set

As the majority of you out there must have noticed, this year was the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and so the shops were quite literally flooded with tacky merchandise for the gullible general public to spend their hard-earned cash on as manufacturers put Union Jacks on everything that moved or could be bought in a bid to make some kind of profit out of these worst of times!

Early Learning Centre of course were no exception, releasing this notoriously hard to get hold of limited edition set of Happyland characters to coincide with the big event. Priced at just £5, or upwards to £20-£25 if you tried to get it on Ebay as stocks rapidly diminished, the set consisted of three playable figures ~ the Queen, a Corgi and of course a Celebration cake!

Of course, my favourite part of the Jubilee Celebrations, and in paticular the Diamond Jubilee concert, was when Will.I.Am (runner-up for the prize of most stupid name ever) confused the Queen's Jubilee with her birthday but let's just forget about that shal we? Ahem, anyway.....

I love Happyland characters and so does my daughter because they fit right in with her Little People characters and can be played with alongside. I don't see why you have to have one or the other and cannot mix the two and so she has some Little People stuff and some Happyland stuff that she plays with together! My daughter was obsessed with the Jubilee, even if she did not quite understand what it was about, simply because there were Union Jacks everywhere! In fact, even after the Jubilee was long over she still thought it was Jubilee becaudse the flags wre still up for the Euros!

Anyway, I digress....

With this in kind, I made sure I got a set of these early before stocks ran low as we did not have anything like this yet. I had refused to buy the Royal Wedding set because I thought it was a bit of a cash-in but thought it might be nice for my daughter to have this set so that we could explain to her just who the Queen is and to have her visit all her Little People and Happyland characters, thus ensuring that bthey could have their own little Jubilee street party in our back garden!

The set is small, only consisting of the three pieces, but real attention has been paid to detail. The Corgi is cute even though I would have preferred him standing up to sitting down so that you could take him for a walk but te Queen is spot-on! She is that realistic that for a minute I thought The vMaster from Doctor Who might have shrunk down the real Queen into a little doll like he used to do in the original television series! And the cake looks very yummy scrummy.

Unfortunately the cake does not come loose from the table which might have been nice but I suppose this is probably for Health And Safety reasons as the manufacturers didn't want too many small choking pieces! This set, like all Happyland toys, is aimed at age ranges from 18 months-4 years which is quite a big gap and I am not sure I would've let Emilie have them to play with at 18 months!

Some people have commented that the Queen is exactly the same as the one in the Royal Wedding set. I cannot comment as we did not buy that but I do think thast is a bit naughty as they probably just recyled the Queen figurines from any Wedding sets that didn't sell, thus eliminating the need to make any more!

But apart from that, this set is great value for £5 and a lot of fun! The Queen now spends more time at our homes Happyland and Little People set than she probably does at Windsor castle so it was well worth the money. I might have liked a Prince Phillip character though as it might have been fun to have him come along and insult the ethnic and disabled Happyland/ Little People characters we have in our posession. Still, maybe next time eh?