I am a Zelda collector. My collection over the years has grown in a nonlinear way and has been generously fed by the likes of friends and family. My favorite place to nab items is from eBay, and more recently a Facebook Zelda Marketplace, where individuals like me sell pieces of their collection. Once in a while, I find myself contacting an overseas seller via Instagram who is elusive, yet giving. One time a few years back, this individual allowed me to purchase an extremely rare item from a company that I’ve only been vaguely aware of for a little while. Fast forward a few years later and I purchased another extremely rare item from this same individual from the same company. The company is Monneret Toys, and they’ve been on my mind for a while.
I’ll start this paragraph off by saying that Monneret Toys, or Monneret Jouets, is a somewhat difficult company to research. My Google searches on them produced limited results, however, I was able to find out that they were founded in 1936 and headquartered in France. I say were, as Monneret was acquired by another French company, Smoby Toys, in the early 2000s which in turn was bought by another conglomerate in 2009.
Now, onto the part of the article that you all came here for, rare Zelda items. I’ll get right to it. I believe that there are four Monneret Jouets Zelda items that exist. These items include a children’s jumpy ball, a velcro foam target game, a small archery set, and a large archery set. All of these items follow a yellow color scheme and are Ocarina of Time themed. I own the jumpy ball and smaller archery set.
According to an old (and seemingly inactive) blog that I stumbled upon, the jumpy ball was a “strange promotional item.” I contacted the blog creator, along with messaging a Tumblr account of someone who they interviewed to find more information about this item, but I have yet to hear anything. Since the blog hasn’t been updated since June 2021 and the interviewee’s Tumblr page is even older, I’m not getting my hopes up.
Another website described this jumpy ball as a “very rare Zelda Ocarina promotional jumping ball Nintendo collection.” I think it’s safe to assume that this was a promotional item. Even though I have the ball, I only own ‘half’ of it, as I was only able to purchase the actual bouncy ball without the box (which in my opinion is a tragedy). At this point, the box for this item is most likely rarer than the actual item. The jumpy ball is also the only Monneret Zelda item to feature Young Link instead of Adult Link.
Next on our list is the smaller archery set. I consider this piece to be one of my holy grails because it’s a super rare item that’s still untouched in it’s original box. I definitely got lucky with this one. Since I never opened this item, I’m going to speculate some things about it. First, it was either meant to be hung up on a wall or if it came with a stand to prop the target up. The set came with “Avec 3 flèches de sécurité,” or three safety arrows. The text on the box was translated in six languages, not including English because it was never sold at retail in the United States (or probably even the UK or Australia).
The next two items I unfortunately don’t own, so my descriptions might be a tad incorrect. The first item is the larger archery set, or Senior Archery set (the larger of the two is described as “senior” while the smaller is simply described as “archery”). Sadly, the only photo I have is blocked behind permissions, so we’ll just have to rely on my description. It’s about two and a half times as tall as the smaller archery sets, but what’s interesting is that both sets state the actual archery board as being “105 cm”, so I’m going to assume that both archery sets came with a stand to prop the target up.
Last, we have the “Cible Mousse”, or foam target. I first found evidence of this item on a very old, very dated French website that appeared to sell Monneret Jouets items, including this foam target. The website dates back to around 2002, and was probably never updated beyond that given them being acquired by Smoby Toys. This item is the only one to not be packaged in a box, and is instead packaged in a plastic bag with a cardboard hanger. It appears to come with a target board and two velcro balls that you use to throw at the target.
The four items mentioned in this article are extremely rare Legend of Zelda items. I’ve never witnessed these items on eBay or out in the wild, and I’ve been collecting for about 15 years. The only reason why I own the jumpy ball and small archery set is due to the generosity of an overseas stranger. Normally, rare Zelda items pop up once in a blood moon on eBay, but Monneret items are rarer still.
Zelda Monneret Jouets items are some of the rarest, and scarcest, Zelda items out there. I’m fascinated by this particular Zelda merchandise mainly because information about it is so few and far between. If you own any of the items mentioned in this article, or if you have any information about the Monneret Jouets Legend of Zelda collaboration, let’s chat!
