Hats & Mittens

The Republic of Elbonia is a fictional country from Scott Adams' comic strips Dilbert and Plop: The Hairless Elbonian. It is an extremely poor, fourth-world country that has recently abandoned Communism. Its citizens and culture seem to resemble those of Eastern Europe. more...

Home
Boys
Girls
Infants & Toddlers
Accessories
Bags
Hair Accessories
Hats & Mittens
Other Items
Socks, Tights
Boys' Clothing
Custom, Handmade
Girls' Clothing
Other Items
Shoes
Unisex Clothing
Men's Accessories
Men's Clothing
Uniforms
Vintage
Wedding Apparel
Women's Accessories,...
Women's Clothing

Most of the nation is covered with waist-deep mud, which the residents use to build houses. Much of the economy is also mud-based. In a recent cartoon the Elbonians discover that the mud is caused by an abundance of oil and coal near the surface. Scott Adams has said that many people think of the mud as snow, a limitation of the black-and-white daily strips, but that either way is fine with him. He has commented that Elbonia is essentially based on most Americans' stereotypes of a developing country with immense problems.

Elbonian pigs have intelligence and social standing comparable to the humans and are sometimes shown as having a role in the government.

Adams created the country in order to allow for a "foreign" aspect in Dilbert without using any specific location, in order to avoid a backlash by readers who may be from that region. Dilbert's company often uses Elbonia as a source of cheap labor and general outsourcing. However, these cost-savings attempts regularly backfire. For example, the computer code developed in Elbonia was only documented in Elbonian, and the debugging costs alone were more than what it would have cost to develop the entire program in-house.

Most of the Elbonians have beards, even the females, and wear tall grey hats and black mittens. (Plop centers on a hairless, beardless child, a rarity in Elbonia.) Elbonians are commonly portrayed as idiotic and backward, and their technology is very outdated: "phones" are actually cans attached to the ends of strings and the means of "air transportation" (Air Elbonia) is flinging people from a giant slingshot (something Dilbert hates to do because he loses his luggage and gets head-deep into mud). However, the Pointy-Haired Boss seems to approve of outsourcing programming or documentation tasks to them on a regular basis.

For many years the country has been mired in a civil war between the left- and right-handed Elbonians, although the war was mostly bloodless, as the Elbonians did not realize they were allowed to use weapons. Elbonia has also threatened its neighbor, Kneebonia, with nuclear weapons launched by slingshot.

Elbonia was also briefly engaged in a war with France, that erupted when Dilbert's company gave them the bid of launching a French spy satellite, which resulted in the disastrous slingshot launch of the satellite into the French Embassy in Elbonia. After a brief bombing campaign, France ended the war after realizing that there was nothing of value to bomb and the Elbonian GNP tripled when the citizens sold the bomb shrapnel as scrap metal. This temporary rise in wealth caused the Elbonians to try to instigate another war with France by standing in front of the newly rebuilt French Embassy and insulting French wine, which ultimately failed.

Read more at Wikipedia.org