We spent last weekend in Prague, being tourists. It seems there is some kind of Czech tradition of wooden toys (now being mass-produced for the tourist market, of course). Here are two simple ones that I particularly liked.

With apologies for the quality (and now I know not to take videos in portrait…):1 a ridiculously simple man falling down a ladder:

And a slightly more complicated, but correspondingly much cuter, elephant:

The elephant has only one moving part (the back leg), and as far as I can see that’s just a simple joint. (Presumably there’s some subtlety to the balance and the curve of the feet.)

The falling man is even simpler, as you see in this photo:

So who has some woodworking tools and wants to try making some of these?

Notes:

  1. Yes, the videos and photo are from my fancy-schmancy new phone. I tried to upload this post from it too, but ran into difficulties with the video uploads. [↪]