December 25, 2025 • 49 mins
In this special Christmas Day episode, we get cuddly with one of the all-time great holiday gifts, dolls! Where did they come from? Why are the so cute? Why are they sometimes creepy? Why do they tell us to do things we don’t want to with their minds?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, well I should say Merry Christmas and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Cherry's here too,
and we bid you good tidings. You're decking your halls
and giving you lots of joy on this festive day.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah. Yeah, we're decking your halls if you give us content,
of course to do so. Sure we would never deck halls.
Just willy nilly, No, I mean, oh, we're good guys.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's right. Wow, this got odd very quickly.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
This is our annual sort of toy episode, and we've
covered some specific dolls in the past, notably Cabbage Patch Kids,
and you had the brainstorm like what about just dolls?
What the heck is up with those weird little things.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I sat up in the middle of the night one
night and went dolls, right, and he.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Was like, that's what happened, and she was holding a
chatty Cathy.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
That's right. Oh, I can't wait to get to that part.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, we're talking about dolls themselves, and
it is a pretty broad category. But actually it's a
little more specific than I realized. Chuck and One of
the things that right off the bat that I had
no idea about is that there's almost no specific definition
of dolls. No one can can make an actual set definition.
(01:34):
The reason why is because you're like, well what about this?
Well what about that? Anytime you try to alter the
definition to please everybody, it's the best example of how
you can please some people some of the time, but
not everybody ever.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
That old saying, yeah, that old saying. The definition that
we agreed on was a doll is a toy, and
we all know what a doll looks like. It's like
a model of usually a human type figure.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I saw that it has to be human to be
considered a doll.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Sometimes it's a baby, sometimes it's a grown up. It's
not an action figure. We kind of covered that difference
in our Gi Joe episode. But what a dolls specifically
is beyond just looking like a human is it aids
in kids development. There have been plenty and plenty of
studies over the years that have reinforced the fact that
dolls teach kids a lot of things, a lot of
(02:29):
great things, empathy and patience and recognizing emotions, among many
other things.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yes, so just real quick that excludes. That definition excludes
things like puppets like you said, action figure statuettes, but
it also, I think, very weirdly excludes animal dolls like
stuffed animals. Okay, okay. And then one other thing I
would add to the definition is that they have to
be in some way, shape or form huggable.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Okay. It So, recognizing emotions is a big one for kids,
as long as holding onto dolls like reckon, because a
lot of times the kid will be like the surrogate
for what the kid might be feeling. You know, Chatty
Kathy is feeling bored or angry, and that means the
kid's not comfortable saying that to the parents, so they
(03:19):
talk through the doll, but not in a creepy way.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Is Chatty Kathy your go to doll?
Speaker 1 (03:25):
M so far, I'll move on to Betsy Wetsy soon enough.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Chatty Kathy is pretty fun to say.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Another thing this is also I think a playroom Collective
laid out some good examples and these are some of
the ones that they said. Another one is practicing caregiving,
where it can be anything from changing the doll's diapers
to comforting the doll when it's sad or scared, and
that teaches emotional availability, teaches problem solving, and then it
(03:53):
also requires perspective taking, because just because the doll is
scared or sad doesn't mean the kid feels it way
right right then, so that means that the kid is
learning how to put themselves in other people's shoes and
understand how other people can feel differently than how you
can at the time, and it helps with empathy.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Yeah, they can put themselves in their tiny, little one
inch shiny pat and leather shoe. That's right, that chatty
Kathy has right. If you you know, want to talk
about traditional gender roles, we're going to talk a lot
about that. Because dolls have long been associated with girlhood.
That wasn't always the case. It started by like the
(04:35):
nineteen forties. By the turn of the century, toys were
kind of marketed, you know, to boys and girls equally.
But in the nineteen forties they were like, hey, we
could probably sell a lot more stuff if we really
market one thing to girls and one thing to boys.
And then all of a sudden, we're buying twice as
much stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
In that nuts. That's that's apparently where gender toys came from.
Totally Around that same time, too, pink became the color
for girls and blue for boys. And it didn't come
from nowhere. We've talked about it before, but it used
to be the opposite where pink was for boys and
blue for girls because pink it was a red tone,
and red tones were considered too harsh for girls at
(05:13):
the time.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
That's right. I never thought of pink being a red tone,
but it totally is.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, for sure, you can't deny it, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
There was a study in twenty seventeen that more than
this is interesting, more than three quarters of the people
that were surveyed said it was really good to encourage
girls to play with like boys, toys or do boy things,
and it went up to eighty percent for women and
millennials saying that, but when it came to boys only
sixty four percent. So there are far fewer families saying,
(05:45):
you know, William, you should play with your doll reference
to Free to Be You and Me, the great song
William Wants a Doll, And there are way way more
families telling their girls like, you should go play with
trucks or rough house.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Yeah, go jump off that dirt pile.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So yeah, that clearly means we have a long way
to go still, but there, you know, there are a
lot of dolls that have made headway in empowering girls,
showing that women can take like male of jobs and
male dominated feels like Barbie has a million different careers,
a lot of them like engineering and science and technology.
(06:23):
She's been to space, for God's sake, And I think
American girl dolls, there's one girl at least who has
a backstory where she has lesbian aunts who live in Australia.
Randomly enough, and then of course, Chuck, we couldn't possibly
talk about how Earring magic Kin was in a groundbreaking doll.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yeah, I mean Earring magic Ken came out nineteen ninety three.
You take one look at Earring magic Ken and it's
pretty clear that it's a queer coded doll. He has
his diamond stud earring in one ear. He's wearing a
purple mesh crop top. There was some controversy surrounding the
necklace he wore that I won't even get into because
(07:04):
this is a Christmas episode, but you can look it
up if you wants. Saw that too, and of course
Mittel was like, that's preposterous. This is a kid's story,
but it was very hot in the gay community, selling
out all over the place. Maybe the hottest selling well,
definitely the hottest selling kin doll of all time, maybe
the best selling of all time. Mattel won't say, but
(07:25):
it's sold for six months like any ordinary sort of
special release Barbie, and evidently sold like hotcakes.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Yeah, and one other feature that was often overlooked. He
had a pull cord that made him talk, and the
only thing he said is the boys are out tonight.
So Chuck, I say we move on to the history
of dolls. You want to talk about that, or even
where the word doll came from.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah, this is something I didn't know. It's a doll
was a nickname for Dorothy. I always thought dot was
the only nickname for Dorothy. But apparently dating back to
like at least the sixteenth century, that was a weird
thing happening when people would substitute l's for rs. So
Harold could be how Mary could be moll or Molly
and Dorothy could be doll.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah. It was a bigger tren than slap bracelets is today.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
So the earliest use of the word doll goes back
to the fifteen hundreds, and it was a pet name
for a girlfriend or spouse. Right, You didn't just have
to be named Dorothy and that be your nickname.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
It was extended, give me a doll, yeah, doll face for.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Ye exactly right. So you're like, it's a term of
endearment for a girlfriend or a spouse. A century later
it became an insult for a loose woman. So everybody
got dumped apparently. And then by around seventeen hundred it
was finally used to describe a child's toy, to say,
this is a doll, and people are like, well, wait
a minute, what about stuffed animals? What about marionettes?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Then someone said, you think a puppet is a doll?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yeah? They said, had a psychle? Are you?
Speaker 1 (08:57):
So many people think that they're going to have to
explain that on a one day.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
They're like, you think a hot dog is a sandwich?
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Why is that doll got strings coming out of it? Well?
Speaking of strings, yeah, there's some strings in these dolls.
Ancient dolls Egyptian paddle dolls that date back to the
Middle Kingdom like two thousand to eighteen hundred BCE. They
were a flat piece of wood, so they weren't, you know,
human shaped as far as three dimension three dimensionality goes,
(09:27):
but they were cut like a woman's torso, and they
had tattoo like designs and hair made out of bead strings.
But archaeologists are like, this isn't really a doll doll.
I think it was more like a percussion instrument for
like religious rituals. You could shake that thing.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
They do think in the ancient world that dolls played
dual roles. One was for rituals like you were just describing,
and then also that they were for play in the
same way that dolls can develop children today. They were
used to kind of indoctrinate kids into culture and society.
And they're basing that in part on how there's still
dolls like that around today, like the a Kua Ba
(10:07):
of the Fonte and Acan people of Ghana. They have
ritual dolls that kids also play with at the same time.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah, well, the dolls in ancient Rome were definitely sort
of the early barbies because they were not baby dolls.
They were dolls that looked like grown up Roman women,
and the girls who played with them were like it
was just like having a barbie. It was like here
is what we think. The idealized image of a Roman
woman is a wife and a mother, and here go
(10:35):
play with this thing and try and look like that
one day.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
So even before the Romans, they found dolls in Greek burials,
and the reason why they found them is because girls
would play with dolls. When they got married, they would consecrate,
they would sacrifice essentially the dolls to Artemis in exchange
for fertility in their marriage, and then if they never
got married, they were buried with their dolls. Isn't that bittersweet?
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Mmm? Kind of just bitter? Okay, I'm looking for the sweet.
I guess you're buried with your toy that you loved.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, that's a sweet part, for sure. It's like the
newgat of that situation.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
All right, I'll take it. All right. We promised talk
of Aerosmith, and they're a great, great, great song rag Doll.
I thought the same thing too, coming up and see me.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
That's a new version of an old singing.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Oh, I guess that song's okay. That was late Aerosmith.
They put out a bunch of songs like that for
a while.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Oh, I can't imagine how bad the subtext.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Is though, Oh, sure. I never really thought about that,
but you're right, I think yeah, I don't know if
there is an Aerosmith song where there wasn't a sexual subtext,
you know, I don't.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Think so either they were really into sex.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Oh no, that loving an elevator song that was just
anging about elevators going up and down.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
That's right, sponsored by the Otis Corporation.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
That's right. Oh man, I'm glad you could call that up.
Rag dolls not Aerosmith, but you know, the little floppy
dolls made out of fabric and not you know, hard
dolls that you can bang against the wall. They have
been around for a long long time, since the ancient world.
But because they were made out of things like you know,
(12:21):
cloth and linen and cotton and things like that, they
would disappear before our very eyes over thousands of years.
So there's not a ton of examples of those, but
there are some, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
But it also raises the question like how long have
humans been playing with dolls? We have no idea for
that very reason, because almost certainly dolls would have been
made out of perishable materials very early on. But yeah,
the oldest we found is two thousand years old. Chuck.
It was found in a trash pile in Egypt, and
(12:52):
it was linen stuff with some papyrus. I had some
paint on it at one point, but now all that's left.
There's a single bead that was once attached to its hair.
So but it's two thousand years old, so give it
a break, you.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Know, Yeah, sure of course.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Well what about in North America, there's a doll that
says I'm the oldest, and everyone says, yes, you are.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yes, that's right. There is a rag doll, the oldest
rag doll in North America. It belonged to a little
girl who was blind named clarissas Field from Massachusetts. And
the girl, the actual girl, was born in seventeen sixty five.
And I think this is a great deep cut band name.
She named her doll Bangwell Putt.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, it is a great band name for sure.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Because no one will know what it is except for
the rare stuff. You should know a listener and then
be like, bruh, you named your band Bangwell Butt after
the oldest rag doll.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Or Visitors to the Pacomattock Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield,
mass which is where it's kept now.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, I guess they would know that, but they're the
I guess you could call it creepy looking. I didn't
find it that creepy. But this dog, this dog, this
doll has no facial features. There's just a blank face.
But there are ten individually sewn fingers and thumbs, which
might be a reason that young Clarissa, like I mentioned,
(14:11):
she was blind and it might have sort of indicated
the importance of touch for her.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, I saw that the no face rag doll may
have actually evolved out of the tradition from corn husk dolls,
which didn't have faces, because some of the northeastern North
America tribes had legends about why the corn goddess removed
the face of the corn husk doll because she was
(14:41):
getting too vain. So that's why cornhust dolls don't have
a face, and that's possibly why rag doll dolls don't
have a face either, Like bangwill putt.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Like Bangwell put would to be clear, no facial features.
There's a face, but there's no eyes, nose, or mouth
or you know, eyebrows, all the things that make a face.
What about eyelashes, No eyelashes, no pimples, no freckles, pores,
no frinkles, no wrinkles, no pores. What else is on
the face. I'm looking at my face.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Um nose, hair, beard.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Nose, hair, mustache. All right, I think we covered it.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Okay, I know for a fact we left something like
the mouth out, something super glaring.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Oh, I said mouth, and inside the mouth everything counts
his mouth. So don't come at me with teeth and
tongue exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
I'm glad you said that chuck.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
That should be on the shirt. Don't come at me
with teeth and tongue. It's the stuff you should know. Whey, Yeah,
what about Victorian dolls.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Well, this is where really where doll obsessions I think
kind of starting to take off, because up to this
point rag dolls, like you got to be a pretty
niche collector to be collecting like eighteenth century rag dolls.
Victorian dolls is where people are like, give me all
of these. And one of the reasons why is because
doll making became a real art by the fifteenth century,
(16:04):
and the seat of it originally was Germany. They had
doc and mockers, which are doll makers, and they were
for aristocratic families who were the only ones that could
afford these things because they were works of art.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, works of art that very key Lee looked like them.
They really showed their sort of obsession with their own
selves and their own class. They were made from porcelain,
and not because that was just some superior material. They
were literally made from porcelain because they thought that represented
the ideal skin tone, that porcelain white. They were dressed
(16:41):
very fashionably obviously, they had human hair wigs, apparently from
the hair of working class girls. And they were true
status symbols.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Yeah, like you would be painted with them a portrait.
That's pretty big status symbol at.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
The time, right, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
So one of my favorite things Dave helped us with this.
Think big head tip to Dave and Merry Christmas Day.
And apparently around the time of Prince Albert's death he
was trapped in a can. He died in eighteen sixty one.
It's Queen Victoria's husband. By the way, like funerals in
mourning like became all the rage we often associate like
(17:22):
mourning and death stuff and memento mariy with Victorians and
this is why, and so dolls were not immune to
this trend. And little girls were given death kits to
use with their dolls.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yeah, so like here's your doll, and here's your little
baby coffin and your little outfit that you should wear,
and they would you know, when you play doll, you
play all kinds of facets of life. And that's one
of the things about dolls that you'll see over and
over is you know, whether you're pretending to be a
you know, cooking dinner in your home, or you're doing
(17:57):
other household things, or you're you know, now your mourning
because somebody has died, so you're sort of acting out
and these things that you would do later as adults,
which again is another sort of important facet of dolls.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
But today it's like, if your kid is acting out
a funeral with their doll, it would be eye catching,
attention grabbing, I think.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, I mean, you might sign them up for therapy
or something, when in fact I think it's a pretty
normal thing.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
I think it is too, but it would definitely make
you stop and say, like, hey, what you doing with
your doll right now? Yeah, for sure, Like you wouldn't
just pass the room and see it and just walk
off shaking your head and laughing and be like my kid.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Yeah, you do the darnest things.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
I want to hear though, if anybody has a kid
and they've ever found their kid performing a funeral for
their doll, I want to hear about it.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Yeah, that'd be a good listener mail.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
So, dollhouses also really kind of came around at this
time too, like the dollhouse, as we think about it, Yeah,
and that was thanks to the Victorians. And that's why
dollhouses are always very nice and big, because they were
basically what the Victorian aristocracy thought that houses should look
like at the time. And again, remember you said that
(19:08):
Victorian girls were being trained to how to behave in
society through their dolls. Same thing with the dollhouse too.
It's like, here's the scullery, here's the bathroom with indoor plumbing,
Like these are all the things you need to demand
and expect when you grow up and get married.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, ring this bell if you're hungry.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Hey.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
So, you know, we talked a little bit about the
complicated history of race and facial features when it comes
to race and skin tone and stuff like that with dolls,
and so we have a whole kind of robust section
here on the history of black dolls, because it's a
pretty complex story. Yeah, as far as race and self
(19:47):
image goes. And the first one we're going to talk
about it is called the topsy Turvy doll. It's a
really good example because it was a doll that had
two heads. It had a long skirt to conceal sort
of one side. One head was white, one head was black.
And you know, depending on which way you held the doll,
you were playing with a white doll or a black doll.
(20:07):
And people, you know, there isn't text that says exactly
why this thing was invented, but everyone pretty much agrees,
like scholars that have studied this thing, is that it
originated in the Antebellum South. They were made by enslaved
black women as dolls for their daughters, and the idea is, hey,
(20:28):
we have to take care of the white kids during
the day, and then we have to take care of
our own children at night. And if dolls are to
represent what you are to be doing when you grow
up or maybe you know later on in your life,
then you need a two headed doll to care for
the white doll in the day and the black doll
at night.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, that's not the worst of how the whole thing started.
The Jim Crow South, the Jim Crow era saw the
rise of a lot of very racist dolls that were
available you could buy from catalogs like Montgomery Ward, which
is not surprising. But the thing to understand about that
(21:06):
is that this helped lay the groundwork for reinforcing social
norms about the inferiority of black people in America and
the superiority of white people in America. And it wasn't like, hey, kid,
don't forget black people are inferior, White people superior. It
(21:27):
was much more subtle and much more pervasive than that
through dolls. Like the black dolls were not particularly cute,
they were sometimes ugly. They certainly weren't accurate representations of
black people or black kids. White dolls were. They were
very pretty. There are collector's items. They were gorgeous. In
a lot of cases. They were the doll that you wanted,
(21:49):
and that sent the signal to black kids being raised
in America at the time, like, if you're black, you
should feel pretty much about yourself how you feel about
this doll, and you should feel about white people how
you feel about this doll.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Very pretty huh Yeah, exactly. I mean, it makes it
all the more nefarious, I think, because these are children,
Like the more sublid it is, the more nefarious it is.
And this culminated in the nineteen forties with what was
called the Doll Tests from Maimy and Kenneth Clark. It
was pretty groundbreaking experiments where they traveled all over America
(22:22):
and they would give little black kids two dolls that
were identical to one another except for the skin tone,
and then they would ask him a lot of questions
like give me the doll that's a nice doll, give
me the doll that you think is a nice color.
And overwhelmingly the positive traits from these little black kids
were assigned to white dolls, and the negative traits were
assigned to black dolls. And the saddest part about all
(22:45):
this is when they ask kids, give me the doll
that looks like you, A lot of these little kids
would were ashamed to admit that they look like the
black doll, and they would like start crying and run
from the room because they couldn't even admit it. So
this was brutal.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
It is brutal, But it also was this groundbreaking research
that the Clarks created.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
And it was so groundbreaking and so convincing that the
NAACP came to them and said, hey, can we use
this in these cases. They had five cases going on
that eventually got attached into the Brown versus Board of
Education case that the Supreme Court eventually heard that was
successful with the Nino decision to overturn segregation in public schools.
(23:33):
That's how convincing these doll tests were that they were
cited in some of these cases. And Kenneth Clark testified
at some of the cases as well and wrote up
the social science testimony that the Supreme Court considered in
the case.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yeah, pretty amazing result from that study. Sarah Lee Creech
was a doll maker. I guess who created the Sarah
Lee doll in nineteen fifty one, and that was the
very first realistic black baby doll produced in the US.
But not to be outdone during the Black Power movement,
Baby Nancy came along and that was kind of in
(24:08):
the middle of the sixty five Watts riots. It was
a black owned company called Shindana Toys and it was
the very first doll with realistic afrocentric features. It was
not like, hey, let's run a run of white dolls
and then just change the skin tone and color them brown.
This Baby Nancy was a little black baby doll, and
(24:31):
it was a really hot selling doll in La and beyond.
I think the production couldn't keep up that year because
they were such a hot sellers.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, it was a great success for sure. And the
Sarah Lee doll. Again, this was the first like semi
accurate doll, but there was still a lot of features
that weren't quite what black children look like. The Baby
Nancy was like unmistakably had cute, tight little curls, and
it was like, this is the first like legitimate African
(25:01):
American doll anyone's ever made. Yea, I thought that was
pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Yeah, it's amazing, very cute doll. Actually, So, I mean,
I'm not into dolls because you know, I played with trucks, okay,
but if I played with dolls, Baby Nancy might be
my doll.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
I can't remember. Did you have a cabbage patch?
Speaker 1 (25:19):
I did, sort of. We bought a bunch of them
when they were handmade by the original Xavier Robert.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Sky creepy pantyhose dolls, right.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
And they assigned a couple of them to me as mine.
But they were never like in my room, and it's
not like it's like, oh, don't put that in my room.
I don't know why they did that. It was weird.
They were like, here's Scott's two and your two and
here's Michelle's.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
And don't touch them.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I know, I think they're worth a little bit of money. Oh,
I'm sure I do remember mine as a little boy
and a girl and it's their shirts and I guess
the doll whatever they were my little TV star or
something like that, so that I don't even know what
that means.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Let's say, hey, let's move along to paper dolls or
do you want to take a break. Now, let's take.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
A break, and I'm going to look up and see
how much those Xabier Roberts dolls are worth of mine,
and I'll see if I can list them on eBay
and I'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Okay, we promised talk about paper dolls, and what kind
of grinch scrooges would we be if we just didn't
deliver on that.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
So yeah, paper dolls were this trend from like the
Apex was from eighteen ninety to nineteen twenty. But I
mean you could find them pretty easily into the nineteen
seventies and they're still around today in different forms. But
they were like, think about this, what trend can you
think of? Chuck? That lasted for thirty years? This is
(27:14):
a huge, huge trend.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Grunge, No grunge.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
I will say it was ten years.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Tops pet rocks.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Pet Rocks is maybe two.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
That's it. I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Okay, that's what I'm saying. That's how massive a trend.
Paper dolls were from the late nineteenth century to the
early twentieth hotpants, okay, daisy dukes. They've been huge since
the seventies, definitely.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
So paper doll is a doll that you cut out.
And the fun thing about paper dolls was, and I
guess is if you're still into them, is they would
come with different outfits and things, and you would cut
out the different outfits and put them over the doll.
And that was the fun of it is you could
change the clothes, but it wasn't real clothes because it
(28:06):
was just sort of free because it came in the
magazine or newspaper or whatever.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
But that was the only fun of it. Don't even
try to have any other fun, just put the outfits
on and sit there.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah, that's kind of it.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
But luckily there was a bunch of new outfits and
they were always coming because this whole thing was basically
a way to get people to go buy your newspaper
or your magazine. Yeah, in some cases buy your product,
like Pillsbury products. You would get a set of these
collectible paper dolls and new outfits, and for thirty years
people would go buy Pillsbury everything because they had the
(28:41):
best paper dolls.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, this still continues. I just realized that. At one point,
my friend Meredith, who worked in the fashion industry, got
Ruby for Christmas. A little it's like a little fashion kit,
and it's kind of like paper dolls, except they're already
it's magnetized and they're pre cut. But the whole is
that you can put together all these different outfits and
like kind of learn about fashion. So it's not that
(29:04):
different than paper dolls.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
No, this is plastic.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Yeah, and she sheap enjoyed that for a while.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Oh good, who was that they gave her that present?
Speaker 1 (29:13):
My friend mereth or Anti Meredith. She and Ruby are
big buds. Meredith, Yeah, I think you met Meredith. Maybe
all right, yeah, you have it at New York Live Shows.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Okay, well, great pick Meredith. Yeah, So I say we
move on to famous dolls of the twentieth century, Chuck,
this is the part I've been waiting for. The well
reason we did this episode.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
You got to start, and we're not gonna spend too
much time on QP Doll, except to mention that the
QP doll was kind of the first big doll of
the twentieth century in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Right, yeah, and the Great Mayo two by the way.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Oh yeah, I tried the QP Mayo because he you
what'd you think? It was great? It's not going to
replace Dukes for me, but very good.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Mayo, it shouldn't. You can love both, Yeah, I do.
I think Keupy was huge, so huge that it took
Mickey Mouse to topple them him her it.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
I think Mickey Mouse isn't it no, no, cupie, they're both its, okay,
so yeah, well Mickey Mouse isn't now a mouse. Yeah,
but he's in it. He's living in that gutter with
a clown, okay, in the sewer gutter.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
So along after that, I think KEP Doll was. I mean,
I know Steamboat Willie came out in the twenties. I'm
not sure when it was actually Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse right,
so kep Doll was on top for a while. But
even if Mickey Mouse hadn't to come along, Raggedy Ann
would have eventually come and pulled a little CuPy doll
by her little couple of hairs on the top of
(30:44):
her head down from the top spot and take took
it over.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
That's right. Raggedy Ann and her little brother Raggedy Andy
were big hits. I had Raggedy Ann and Andy when
I was little. It was a children's book from cartoonist
Johnny Gruel. He made it for his daughter. It's very
Sweet Dolls came out a couple of years later, in
nineteen twenty. But they had movie appearances, they had a
TV show, they had a Broadway musical in the eighties.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
What was it about.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
I don't really know. Raggedy Ann, I guess okay, it
was called it was called it might have been called
Raggedy Ann, rag Doll or something rag Doll. I didn't
look too much into it. I don't think it ran
too long.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Aerosmith did the score.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
I'm pretty sure they did the book too.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
So one other thing about Raggedy ann You know Annabelle
from the Conjuring series.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Yeah, I never saw that, but I know what you're
talking about.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
You never saw the Conjuring. Oh oh, you're gonna like it, dude.
It's one of those very few modern, like good ghost movies.
It's all right, good, like like goose pimple stuff. Good.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
I'm going to conjure up some goose pimples for myself then,
I think.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
And the Conjuring too, was okay, but the first one's
very good. I would be very surprised if you don't
like it.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
They'll check it out. Most of my doll scary movies
have been Child's Play and Meghan.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Okay, Child's Place coming up, don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, okay.
Megan was pretty good too.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, Megan was fun. It wasn't so scary.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
No, it's no conjuring for sure.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
So now we're coming to Betsy Wetzy. Just wait for
your chatty, Kathy. Let's talk about Betsy Wetzy first.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Yeah, Betsy Wetsy was well, let's just say this, Betsy
Wetsy could drink, bet you drink you under the table
could peepee herself. Betsy Wetsy could cry, so I'd say
real human tears, but no cry fake tears. Yeah. This
was from a company called Ideal in nineteen thirty seven.
(32:46):
An Ideal got sued a few times because they had
other dolls out there that could cry and that could
pee themselves and drink. But apparently Idea was like, but
can they do all of that?
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Right? Yeah, Betsy West. It was a huge smash hit.
I think she was most popular in the fifties, but
you could find her on the shelves through the eighties
and you would give her a little bottle. She had
a tube running through her, so the bottle of whatever,
hopefully water if you were a parent, and not actual milk,
(33:19):
would go through her little tube and come out the
other end, and then you would get to change your
diaper or maybe give her a bath or something like that.
And what must start all over again?
Speaker 1 (33:29):
That's right, not to be undone. In the early nineties,
Magic Potty Baby came out, and I think I remember
this actually because this was a It didn't peep here itself,
but there was a toilet that came with it, and
it was all about toilet training, of course, but the
toilet would fill up with this you know, fake yellow liquor.
It wouldn't fake. It was a real yellow liquid. I
(33:50):
guess fake urine. I hope it was fake urine. And
every tasted it, and the doll would sit on it
and then you would flesh it and it would disappear
back in too. That it's a temporary holding tank.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Yeah, and you're like, oh, that sounds kind of weird.
Go watch the ad for Magic Potty Baby, and for
some reason, it's just it's even more bizarre when you
see it in person. Yeah, I agreed, Okay, Chuck, I
think now it's time for Chatty Kathy, which I didn't
realize was a follow up a year after Barbie came out.
(34:23):
And this was a Ruth Handler joint too.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
That's right. This was a Mattel product along with Barbie.
And you know Chatty Kathy. It was chatty and talked
so you would pull a string and there were I
think eleven initial phrases, I hurt myself, please brush my hair.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
That was a great Chatty Kathy.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
That was it. That was Chatty Kathy.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Chatty Kathy. Get This was not the first doll to
talk as far back as Thomas Edison and I think
eighteen ninety he tried his hand at one and he
had different dolls that said a few different things. But
we turned up a clip of the doll that read,
(35:07):
I guess the Lord's Prayer, and I chuck, we have
to share it because I haven't laughed out loud in
a really long time.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah, we don't play clips a lot, so I think
we're probably legally okay to play this clip. So Jerry,
can you run that? So? Wow?
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Like, imagine that coming out of a doll you're holding
and it's dark, like there's no light in your room
because it's nighttime, and your doll starts saying that.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, Or imagine as you're just in a dark room
and hear that and you turn on your Edison and
that's the only thing in.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
There, right, it's just sitting in the rocking chair looking
at you, rocking slightly back and forth. Or even worse,
it's sitting in the wicker wheelchair in the for some reason,
staring at you your biggest fear.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, yeah, pretty good stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
I agree, So Chatty Kathy back to her, she was
actually an inspiration for a very famous Twilight Zone episode
Living Doll. Do you remember that one?
Speaker 1 (36:27):
I don't remember that, but I did watch the clip.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
It's good. So this was Talky Tina, and this is
like three years after Chatty Kathy came out, very clearly
Chatty Kathy. Yeah, and she has this kind of protective
feeling around her kid and doesn't like the kid's parents.
And at one point they pull the doll's cord and
she says, my name is Talki Tina, and I'm beginning
(36:52):
to hate you. It's a really good Twilight Zone episode,
which I can't really think of a bad Twilight its
own episode, but this one is particularly good.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Yeah, it was good.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I found two other things about or one other thing
I guess about Chatty Kathy. Did you see the voice
thing I sent?
Speaker 1 (37:10):
I did not, so.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
June Faraday, who was the voice of Rocket Jay Squirrel
on Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Cindy Lee who on The
Grinch Christmas Special. She was the first voice of Chatty Kathy,
all right, and then they re released Chatty Kathy in
nineteen seventy and the voice was Maureen McCormick, who played
Marsha on The Brady bunch Ow. So Marsha Marsha Trivia Masters.
(37:35):
If you're looking for a new question, Yeah, Merry Christmas.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Yeah that no one will know unless they listen to
stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yeah, we should talk about Polly Pocket for a minute,
because that was a miniature doll. It was a British
and winter named Chris Wiggs who built a mini dollhouse
for his daughter out of a makeup compact in the
early eighties, and Mattel was like, this thing's great, and
they licensed Polly Pocket as a doll in the early
nineties and all of a sudden, many toys were a
(38:05):
big craze. And we mentioned this because you may see
a movie coming to a theater screen near you because
Barbie was such a big hit. Obviously, Bye Witherspoon and
her production company has optioned this away. I don't know
about Away from Lena Dunham, but Lena Dunnan was originally
attached a few years ago and is no longer attached,
And so they're trying to make Polly Pocket into a
(38:27):
movie starring Lily Collins, Phil Collins's daughter.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah, what about American girl dolls? Did you know about
the origin of them? They came from an elementary school
teacher in Wisconsin named Pleasant Rowland, which is a great name.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
That's a Jerry's nickname. Yea, yeah, Jerry pleasant Roland.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah. But pleasant Roland wanted to teach kids about history,
I guess, specifically girls. And she started releasing them in
nineteen eighty six, these American girl dolls. And at first
they were just mail order and they were of two
sixty five bucks and nineteen eighty six dollars. It's just
like one hundred thousand dollars today, I'm guessing. But they
(39:07):
were a big seller right off the bat, and eventually
you could find them in stores.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Too, yeah, like their own stores. Uh yeah, you know,
their flagship stores. And I just encourage anyone that has dollophobia,
which we'll get to in a minute, to dare walk
by or through an American girl doll store.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
That is quite a dare.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, that's that's not a dare actually, because that's not
funny if you have a real feel like that.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Rih, I was looking that up. We'll talk about it
in a second, but it is some real deal stuff.
It does not sound pleasant.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Yeah, and you know, American girl dolls look sort of
real but that ain't nothing like what's coming out of
FAO Shorts and companies like Reborn and companies like Ashton Drake,
because they are making these realistic baby dolls. We finally,
on this last trip to New York on fall break,
I'd always wanted to go to Fao Shorts in New
(39:58):
York City, and we'd did. We took a trip through
Fao Schwartz and I recommended, I mean, it's very, very busy,
so don't go in there if you have any sort
of fear of crowds, because that is one of the
most packed places I've ever been in. But eventually we
wandered over to where they had their baby, like real
baby doll display, and I held one of these things, man,
(40:21):
and it is very surreal and weird because it seems
like a real baby.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah, like down to like the little veins in their temples,
the little capillaries, and the smell it did the one
you hold smell of like talcum or anything. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
They smell and look like babies, like full stop.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah. And they even have weight to them too, like heft.
So they're so realistic that these things are. This is
what is often used as like a movie prop for
like a long shot or something like that, not.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
A close up, for close up if you're Bradley Cooper.
And a Clint Eatwood movie.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Oh really, which one?
Speaker 1 (40:55):
The American sniper is very famous scene where he's clearly
holding a fake baby.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I didn't know that it.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Check it out on YouTube. It's hysterical, okay.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
But people collect these things. I mean, they are essentially
like works of art. They're usually made individually, they're not
mass produced. Some of them I've seen referred to as
museum quality pieces, so they can run hundreds of dollars,
probably more than that for some of them. But there's
other things that people do with them too. There's role
playing just for fun, treating them as if they're alive,
(41:29):
because again, they look a lot like a live baby
or infant. Some people use them to fill an emotional void,
and then apparently they're also useful for Alzheimer's patients patients
and dementia patients. And when I first saw this, I
was like, that sounds pretty mean. Actually they don't tell
(41:49):
the patient that this is a real baby. They're like, here,
hold this doll. But the doll is so lifelike that
it can trigger memories. And pleasant emotions in Alzheimer's patients
who now remember raising their own kids. We're taking care
of their own kids. And then also just the feel
of holding a baby can have all sorts of positive
(42:10):
benefits for people with Alzheimer's and dementia too.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, I look that up. I mean, it's sort of
pluses and minuses. It can definitely help reduce dementia, cause
agitation and stuff like that, all in a non pharma
pharmacological way, which can be good. But there are critics
that say, like, you gotta be real careful how you
do this, because it can also reduce dignity and give
the impression and like a reinforced like viewing people with
(42:35):
dementia like their children. So you just gotta do it
the right way, is what I've read.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah, there's I'm sure there's myriad wrong ways to do
it to you.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
So that was a great, great call out, Chuck. Yeah,
do you remember my buddy.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
My buddy and me. Mm hmm bye buddy, keep my buddy,
my buddy, my buddy and me something like that.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
That was close close enough.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
That was the uh what do you call that? But
you got a song?
Speaker 2 (43:08):
An earworm? Earworm no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
The jingle, Yeah, that was the jingle Everyone's screaming jingle.
It was very infectious. I still remember it for the
most part all these years later. That was the inspiration
for Chucky from Child's Play, but that was adult that
came out in nineteen eighty five. That was kind of
during the Cabbage Patch kid craze. They were like, hey,
what about a doll this made specifically for boys and
(43:32):
listen to this. Hasbro Senior vice president of marketing, Steven
Schwartz in nineteen eighty five told the Boston Globe this,
my buddy is positioned as macho like. It's soft macho
but still macho. Like we show them climbing trees, riding
their bikes. We didn't position it like a girl doll,
like soft and sweet. It's macho, but soft macho. Right.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
He was wearing all these medallions with his chest there
poking through.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
So that was thanks to our friends at Mental Flaws
who turned up that quote, which is priceless. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
I should have read it in a Boston accent, but well.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
No, I think you got it.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
It was just an opportunity that was Philly, right. Well,
that was for the Boston Globe. But I don't know. Ah,
you mean my accent. No, no, no, no, that Philly
accent's much different.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Okay, yeah, you didn't say yeans.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Yeah, and he would go out after and have a hagy.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
So, like you said, he was the role for the
model for Chucky from Child's play.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
That's what they say that They did never confirm that.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
It's pretty It's pretty close like Talkie Tina Chucky. Yeah,
these things are close enough to just draw some assumptions here.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
So we talked about fear of dolls, and I'm glad
you already kind of touched on the fact that this
is quite serious. This is a genuine phobia. I know,
to people who don't have it, it can sound like, well,
a fear of dolls. It almost sounds like something you
could make a movie out of. If you have a
fear of dolls, pettiophobia, like, you can get a full
blown panic attack. You may avoid places where you think
(45:02):
there may be dolls. It's not just dolls, it can
be mannequins too. There's all sorts of reasons that you
can have pettiophobia, but one of the causes behind it
are possible causes behind it is having like a traumatic
experience with a doll, or say like with a ventriloquist
dummy or something like that.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Yeah, it just didn't land correctly, and now you're traumatized
for the rest of your life without serious counseling because
you have this fear of dolls.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
Yeah for sure. You know you used to publish when
we were doing like image lists on the old house
stuffworks dot com days, your list of scary looking toys.
That thing is just gone, isn't it not on the
webiny No, oh, that's probably good. But a lot of
these things are creepy looking, and a lot of them
are dolls, and you know they didn't mean to make
(45:56):
them creepy looking. I think this just, you know, some
decision is made, like like little Miss No Name in
nineteen sixty five, Margaret Keane's big eyes was a big deal,
so were like, why don't we make a doll with
those big, giant eyes, and they did and it's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
She is terrifying again unintentionally. I think also part of it,
she has like like shadow under her eyes. She's supposed
to be kind of gaunt because she's a panhandling child
who wears a burlap sack and has a tear running
down her cheek and unintentionally miss name.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Yes, it's awful, it.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Is awful, but this was like a serious like release
of a doll in nineteen sixty five. So yeah, there's
there's and there's plenty you can come up with. I
would I would suggest to go looking up terrifying dolls,
knockoff dolls or knockoff toois is always a little fun
rabbit hole to go down, But they're not inherently creepy,
(46:53):
is the thing. And the reason we know that is
because there's kids out there who will play with what
older people will consider a creepy all, but the kid
doesn't think of it that way. So if you ever
see a kid legitimately playing with a creepy doll, do
not go up to that kid and be like, that
doll's really creepy, because that's how humans start to think
of things as creepy. And if they don't think of
(47:13):
their doll as creepy, it is not your place to
tell that kid that doll is creepy.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
There's an Instagram account of a mom who has been
documenting her daughter Briar with her doll Creepy Chloe, and
Creepy Chloe definitely lives up to her name, but Briar
plays with her like she is any other doll. It's
very cute.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, just resist the urge.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Parents, Yes, if you want to know, if you want
to know, yeah, I can't you see Briar like growing
up and sitting in her dorm smoking pot one day
and be like, no, I understand why my mom always
threw her hand over her mouth and walked out of
the room when I was playing with Creepy Chloe.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Or why didn't she ever tell me? It might be
the other right way of thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Yeah, so just real quick, The thing that usually explains
why we're creeped out by dolls is the on Canny Valley.
We won't get into that because it's pretty deep, but
we did do an episode on the Uncanny Valley. You
can go find it's a good one. Yeah, you can
find it on stuff youshould know dot com. By the way,
that's right, You got anything else on dolls or Christmas or.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Anything like that, buddy, Nothing.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
Well, I'm glad we did this one.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
I too.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Thank you for coming in from home this morning. On
Christmas morning to do this. That's right.
Speaker 1 (48:30):
All my gifts are still waiting. I told them, just
not touching them, okay, and the one that's ticking, and
I'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
Well, hopefully your orange rolls aren't cold or anything like that.
So let's go home. Let's go to our homes, not
our shared home. Yeah that's something else. Yeah, that's for
New Year's and we'll wish everybody a merry Christmas.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Huh. Yeah. I hope everyone has a great holiday, and
I hope you're with ones you love, and if you're
spending Christmas in a lesson ideal way, we are always
thinking about you.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
For very nice Chuck, And I don't think we'll do listener.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Mail huh nah, nuts to that, as you say.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Yeah, Well, if you want to say Merry Christmas or
Happy New Year, or happy Holidays or anything hi, whatever,
you can send it via email to stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, well I should say Merry Christmas and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Cherry's here too,
and we bid you good tidings. You're decking your halls
and giving you lots of joy on this festive day.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah. Yeah, we're decking your halls if you give us content,
of course to do so. Sure we would never deck halls.
Just willy nilly, No, I mean, oh, we're good guys.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's right. Wow, this got odd very quickly.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
This is our annual sort of toy episode, and we've
covered some specific dolls in the past, notably Cabbage Patch Kids,
and you had the brainstorm like what about just dolls?
What the heck is up with those weird little things.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I sat up in the middle of the night one
night and went dolls, right, and he.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Was like, that's what happened, and she was holding a
chatty Cathy.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
That's right. Oh, I can't wait to get to that part.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, we're talking about dolls themselves, and
it is a pretty broad category. But actually it's a
little more specific than I realized. Chuck and One of
the things that right off the bat that I had
no idea about is that there's almost no specific definition
of dolls. No one can can make an actual set definition.
(01:34):
The reason why is because you're like, well what about this?
Well what about that? Anytime you try to alter the
definition to please everybody, it's the best example of how
you can please some people some of the time, but
not everybody ever.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
That old saying, yeah, that old saying. The definition that
we agreed on was a doll is a toy, and
we all know what a doll looks like. It's like
a model of usually a human type figure.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I saw that it has to be human to be
considered a doll.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Sometimes it's a baby, sometimes it's a grown up. It's
not an action figure. We kind of covered that difference
in our Gi Joe episode. But what a dolls specifically
is beyond just looking like a human is it aids
in kids development. There have been plenty and plenty of
studies over the years that have reinforced the fact that
dolls teach kids a lot of things, a lot of
(02:29):
great things, empathy and patience and recognizing emotions, among many
other things.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yes, so just real quick that excludes. That definition excludes
things like puppets like you said, action figure statuettes, but
it also, I think, very weirdly excludes animal dolls like
stuffed animals. Okay, okay. And then one other thing I
would add to the definition is that they have to
be in some way, shape or form huggable.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Okay. It So, recognizing emotions is a big one for kids,
as long as holding onto dolls like reckon, because a
lot of times the kid will be like the surrogate
for what the kid might be feeling. You know, Chatty
Kathy is feeling bored or angry, and that means the
kid's not comfortable saying that to the parents, so they
(03:19):
talk through the doll, but not in a creepy way.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Is Chatty Kathy your go to doll?
Speaker 1 (03:25):
M so far, I'll move on to Betsy Wetsy soon enough.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Chatty Kathy is pretty fun to say.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Another thing this is also I think a playroom Collective
laid out some good examples and these are some of
the ones that they said. Another one is practicing caregiving,
where it can be anything from changing the doll's diapers
to comforting the doll when it's sad or scared, and
that teaches emotional availability, teaches problem solving, and then it
(03:53):
also requires perspective taking, because just because the doll is
scared or sad doesn't mean the kid feels it way
right right then, so that means that the kid is
learning how to put themselves in other people's shoes and
understand how other people can feel differently than how you
can at the time, and it helps with empathy.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Yeah, they can put themselves in their tiny, little one
inch shiny pat and leather shoe. That's right, that chatty
Kathy has right. If you you know, want to talk
about traditional gender roles, we're going to talk a lot
about that. Because dolls have long been associated with girlhood.
That wasn't always the case. It started by like the
(04:35):
nineteen forties. By the turn of the century, toys were
kind of marketed, you know, to boys and girls equally.
But in the nineteen forties they were like, hey, we
could probably sell a lot more stuff if we really
market one thing to girls and one thing to boys.
And then all of a sudden, we're buying twice as
much stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
In that nuts. That's that's apparently where gender toys came from.
Totally Around that same time, too, pink became the color
for girls and blue for boys. And it didn't come
from nowhere. We've talked about it before, but it used
to be the opposite where pink was for boys and
blue for girls because pink it was a red tone,
and red tones were considered too harsh for girls at
(05:13):
the time.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
That's right. I never thought of pink being a red tone,
but it totally is.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, for sure, you can't deny it, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
There was a study in twenty seventeen that more than
this is interesting, more than three quarters of the people
that were surveyed said it was really good to encourage
girls to play with like boys, toys or do boy things,
and it went up to eighty percent for women and
millennials saying that, but when it came to boys only
sixty four percent. So there are far fewer families saying,
(05:45):
you know, William, you should play with your doll reference
to Free to Be You and Me, the great song
William Wants a Doll, And there are way way more
families telling their girls like, you should go play with
trucks or rough house.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Yeah, go jump off that dirt pile.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So yeah, that clearly means we have a long way
to go still, but there, you know, there are a
lot of dolls that have made headway in empowering girls,
showing that women can take like male of jobs and
male dominated feels like Barbie has a million different careers,
a lot of them like engineering and science and technology.
(06:23):
She's been to space, for God's sake, And I think
American girl dolls, there's one girl at least who has
a backstory where she has lesbian aunts who live in Australia.
Randomly enough, and then of course, Chuck, we couldn't possibly
talk about how Earring magic Kin was in a groundbreaking doll.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yeah, I mean Earring magic Ken came out nineteen ninety three.
You take one look at Earring magic Ken and it's
pretty clear that it's a queer coded doll. He has
his diamond stud earring in one ear. He's wearing a
purple mesh crop top. There was some controversy surrounding the
necklace he wore that I won't even get into because
(07:04):
this is a Christmas episode, but you can look it
up if you wants. Saw that too, and of course
Mittel was like, that's preposterous. This is a kid's story,
but it was very hot in the gay community, selling
out all over the place. Maybe the hottest selling well,
definitely the hottest selling kin doll of all time, maybe
the best selling of all time. Mattel won't say, but
(07:25):
it's sold for six months like any ordinary sort of
special release Barbie, and evidently sold like hotcakes.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Yeah, and one other feature that was often overlooked. He
had a pull cord that made him talk, and the
only thing he said is the boys are out tonight.
So Chuck, I say we move on to the history
of dolls. You want to talk about that, or even
where the word doll came from.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah, this is something I didn't know. It's a doll
was a nickname for Dorothy. I always thought dot was
the only nickname for Dorothy. But apparently dating back to
like at least the sixteenth century, that was a weird
thing happening when people would substitute l's for rs. So
Harold could be how Mary could be moll or Molly
and Dorothy could be doll.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah. It was a bigger tren than slap bracelets is today.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
So the earliest use of the word doll goes back
to the fifteen hundreds, and it was a pet name
for a girlfriend or spouse. Right, You didn't just have
to be named Dorothy and that be your nickname.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
It was extended, give me a doll, yeah, doll face for.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Ye exactly right. So you're like, it's a term of
endearment for a girlfriend or a spouse. A century later
it became an insult for a loose woman. So everybody
got dumped apparently. And then by around seventeen hundred it
was finally used to describe a child's toy, to say,
this is a doll, and people are like, well, wait
a minute, what about stuffed animals? What about marionettes?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Then someone said, you think a puppet is a doll?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yeah? They said, had a psychle? Are you?
Speaker 1 (08:57):
So many people think that they're going to have to
explain that on a one day.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
They're like, you think a hot dog is a sandwich?
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Why is that doll got strings coming out of it? Well?
Speaking of strings, yeah, there's some strings in these dolls.
Ancient dolls Egyptian paddle dolls that date back to the
Middle Kingdom like two thousand to eighteen hundred BCE. They
were a flat piece of wood, so they weren't, you know,
human shaped as far as three dimension three dimensionality goes,
(09:27):
but they were cut like a woman's torso, and they
had tattoo like designs and hair made out of bead strings.
But archaeologists are like, this isn't really a doll doll.
I think it was more like a percussion instrument for
like religious rituals. You could shake that thing.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
They do think in the ancient world that dolls played
dual roles. One was for rituals like you were just describing,
and then also that they were for play in the
same way that dolls can develop children today. They were
used to kind of indoctrinate kids into culture and society.
And they're basing that in part on how there's still
dolls like that around today, like the a Kua Ba
(10:07):
of the Fonte and Acan people of Ghana. They have
ritual dolls that kids also play with at the same time.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah, well, the dolls in ancient Rome were definitely sort
of the early barbies because they were not baby dolls.
They were dolls that looked like grown up Roman women,
and the girls who played with them were like it
was just like having a barbie. It was like here
is what we think. The idealized image of a Roman
woman is a wife and a mother, and here go
(10:35):
play with this thing and try and look like that
one day.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
So even before the Romans, they found dolls in Greek burials,
and the reason why they found them is because girls
would play with dolls. When they got married, they would consecrate,
they would sacrifice essentially the dolls to Artemis in exchange
for fertility in their marriage, and then if they never
got married, they were buried with their dolls. Isn't that bittersweet?
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Mmm? Kind of just bitter? Okay, I'm looking for the sweet.
I guess you're buried with your toy that you loved.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, that's a sweet part, for sure. It's like the
newgat of that situation.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
All right, I'll take it. All right. We promised talk
of Aerosmith, and they're a great, great, great song rag Doll.
I thought the same thing too, coming up and see me.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
That's a new version of an old singing.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Oh, I guess that song's okay. That was late Aerosmith.
They put out a bunch of songs like that for
a while.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Oh, I can't imagine how bad the subtext.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Is though, Oh, sure. I never really thought about that,
but you're right, I think yeah, I don't know if
there is an Aerosmith song where there wasn't a sexual subtext,
you know, I don't.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Think so either they were really into sex.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Oh no, that loving an elevator song that was just
anging about elevators going up and down.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
That's right, sponsored by the Otis Corporation.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
That's right. Oh man, I'm glad you could call that up.
Rag dolls not Aerosmith, but you know, the little floppy
dolls made out of fabric and not you know, hard
dolls that you can bang against the wall. They have
been around for a long long time, since the ancient world.
But because they were made out of things like you know,
(12:21):
cloth and linen and cotton and things like that, they
would disappear before our very eyes over thousands of years.
So there's not a ton of examples of those, but
there are some, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
But it also raises the question like how long have
humans been playing with dolls? We have no idea for
that very reason, because almost certainly dolls would have been
made out of perishable materials very early on. But yeah,
the oldest we found is two thousand years old. Chuck.
It was found in a trash pile in Egypt, and
(12:52):
it was linen stuff with some papyrus. I had some
paint on it at one point, but now all that's left.
There's a single bead that was once attached to its hair.
So but it's two thousand years old, so give it
a break, you.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Know, Yeah, sure of course.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Well what about in North America, there's a doll that
says I'm the oldest, and everyone says, yes, you are.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yes, that's right. There is a rag doll, the oldest
rag doll in North America. It belonged to a little
girl who was blind named clarissas Field from Massachusetts. And
the girl, the actual girl, was born in seventeen sixty five.
And I think this is a great deep cut band name.
She named her doll Bangwell Putt.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, it is a great band name for sure.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Because no one will know what it is except for
the rare stuff. You should know a listener and then
be like, bruh, you named your band Bangwell Butt after
the oldest rag doll.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Or Visitors to the Pacomattock Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield,
mass which is where it's kept now.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, I guess they would know that, but they're the
I guess you could call it creepy looking. I didn't
find it that creepy. But this dog, this dog, this
doll has no facial features. There's just a blank face.
But there are ten individually sewn fingers and thumbs, which
might be a reason that young Clarissa, like I mentioned,
(14:11):
she was blind and it might have sort of indicated
the importance of touch for her.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, I saw that the no face rag doll may
have actually evolved out of the tradition from corn husk dolls,
which didn't have faces, because some of the northeastern North
America tribes had legends about why the corn goddess removed
the face of the corn husk doll because she was
(14:41):
getting too vain. So that's why cornhust dolls don't have
a face, and that's possibly why rag doll dolls don't
have a face either, Like bangwill putt.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Like Bangwell put would to be clear, no facial features.
There's a face, but there's no eyes, nose, or mouth
or you know, eyebrows, all the things that make a face.
What about eyelashes, No eyelashes, no pimples, no freckles, pores,
no frinkles, no wrinkles, no pores. What else is on
the face. I'm looking at my face.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Um nose, hair, beard.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Nose, hair, mustache. All right, I think we covered it.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Okay, I know for a fact we left something like
the mouth out, something super glaring.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Oh, I said mouth, and inside the mouth everything counts
his mouth. So don't come at me with teeth and
tongue exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
I'm glad you said that chuck.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
That should be on the shirt. Don't come at me
with teeth and tongue. It's the stuff you should know. Whey, Yeah,
what about Victorian dolls.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Well, this is where really where doll obsessions I think
kind of starting to take off, because up to this
point rag dolls, like you got to be a pretty
niche collector to be collecting like eighteenth century rag dolls.
Victorian dolls is where people are like, give me all
of these. And one of the reasons why is because
doll making became a real art by the fifteenth century,
(16:04):
and the seat of it originally was Germany. They had
doc and mockers, which are doll makers, and they were
for aristocratic families who were the only ones that could
afford these things because they were works of art.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, works of art that very key Lee looked like them.
They really showed their sort of obsession with their own
selves and their own class. They were made from porcelain,
and not because that was just some superior material. They
were literally made from porcelain because they thought that represented
the ideal skin tone, that porcelain white. They were dressed
(16:41):
very fashionably obviously, they had human hair wigs, apparently from
the hair of working class girls. And they were true
status symbols.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Yeah, like you would be painted with them a portrait.
That's pretty big status symbol at.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
The time, right, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
So one of my favorite things Dave helped us with this.
Think big head tip to Dave and Merry Christmas Day.
And apparently around the time of Prince Albert's death he
was trapped in a can. He died in eighteen sixty one.
It's Queen Victoria's husband. By the way, like funerals in
mourning like became all the rage we often associate like
(17:22):
mourning and death stuff and memento mariy with Victorians and
this is why, and so dolls were not immune to
this trend. And little girls were given death kits to
use with their dolls.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yeah, so like here's your doll, and here's your little
baby coffin and your little outfit that you should wear,
and they would you know, when you play doll, you
play all kinds of facets of life. And that's one
of the things about dolls that you'll see over and
over is you know, whether you're pretending to be a
you know, cooking dinner in your home, or you're doing
(17:57):
other household things, or you're you know, now your mourning
because somebody has died, so you're sort of acting out
and these things that you would do later as adults,
which again is another sort of important facet of dolls.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
But today it's like, if your kid is acting out
a funeral with their doll, it would be eye catching,
attention grabbing, I think.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, I mean, you might sign them up for therapy
or something, when in fact I think it's a pretty
normal thing.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
I think it is too, but it would definitely make
you stop and say, like, hey, what you doing with
your doll right now? Yeah, for sure, Like you wouldn't
just pass the room and see it and just walk
off shaking your head and laughing and be like my kid.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Yeah, you do the darnest things.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
I want to hear though, if anybody has a kid
and they've ever found their kid performing a funeral for
their doll, I want to hear about it.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Yeah, that'd be a good listener mail.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
So, dollhouses also really kind of came around at this
time too, like the dollhouse, as we think about it, Yeah,
and that was thanks to the Victorians. And that's why
dollhouses are always very nice and big, because they were
basically what the Victorian aristocracy thought that houses should look
like at the time. And again, remember you said that
(19:08):
Victorian girls were being trained to how to behave in
society through their dolls. Same thing with the dollhouse too.
It's like, here's the scullery, here's the bathroom with indoor plumbing,
Like these are all the things you need to demand
and expect when you grow up and get married.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, ring this bell if you're hungry.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Hey.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
So, you know, we talked a little bit about the
complicated history of race and facial features when it comes
to race and skin tone and stuff like that with dolls,
and so we have a whole kind of robust section
here on the history of black dolls, because it's a
pretty complex story. Yeah, as far as race and self
(19:47):
image goes. And the first one we're going to talk
about it is called the topsy Turvy doll. It's a
really good example because it was a doll that had
two heads. It had a long skirt to conceal sort
of one side. One head was white, one head was black.
And you know, depending on which way you held the doll,
you were playing with a white doll or a black doll.
(20:07):
And people, you know, there isn't text that says exactly
why this thing was invented, but everyone pretty much agrees,
like scholars that have studied this thing, is that it
originated in the Antebellum South. They were made by enslaved
black women as dolls for their daughters, and the idea is, hey,
(20:28):
we have to take care of the white kids during
the day, and then we have to take care of
our own children at night. And if dolls are to
represent what you are to be doing when you grow
up or maybe you know later on in your life,
then you need a two headed doll to care for
the white doll in the day and the black doll
at night.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, that's not the worst of how the whole thing started.
The Jim Crow South, the Jim Crow era saw the
rise of a lot of very racist dolls that were
available you could buy from catalogs like Montgomery Ward, which
is not surprising. But the thing to understand about that
(21:06):
is that this helped lay the groundwork for reinforcing social
norms about the inferiority of black people in America and
the superiority of white people in America. And it wasn't like, hey, kid,
don't forget black people are inferior, White people superior. It
(21:27):
was much more subtle and much more pervasive than that
through dolls. Like the black dolls were not particularly cute,
they were sometimes ugly. They certainly weren't accurate representations of
black people or black kids. White dolls were. They were
very pretty. There are collector's items. They were gorgeous. In
a lot of cases. They were the doll that you wanted,
(21:49):
and that sent the signal to black kids being raised
in America at the time, like, if you're black, you
should feel pretty much about yourself how you feel about
this doll, and you should feel about white people how
you feel about this doll.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Very pretty huh Yeah, exactly. I mean, it makes it
all the more nefarious, I think, because these are children,
Like the more sublid it is, the more nefarious it is.
And this culminated in the nineteen forties with what was
called the Doll Tests from Maimy and Kenneth Clark. It
was pretty groundbreaking experiments where they traveled all over America
(22:22):
and they would give little black kids two dolls that
were identical to one another except for the skin tone,
and then they would ask him a lot of questions
like give me the doll that's a nice doll, give
me the doll that you think is a nice color.
And overwhelmingly the positive traits from these little black kids
were assigned to white dolls, and the negative traits were
assigned to black dolls. And the saddest part about all
(22:45):
this is when they ask kids, give me the doll
that looks like you, A lot of these little kids
would were ashamed to admit that they look like the
black doll, and they would like start crying and run
from the room because they couldn't even admit it. So
this was brutal.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
It is brutal, But it also was this groundbreaking research
that the Clarks created.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
And it was so groundbreaking and so convincing that the
NAACP came to them and said, hey, can we use
this in these cases. They had five cases going on
that eventually got attached into the Brown versus Board of
Education case that the Supreme Court eventually heard that was
successful with the Nino decision to overturn segregation in public schools.
(23:33):
That's how convincing these doll tests were that they were
cited in some of these cases. And Kenneth Clark testified
at some of the cases as well and wrote up
the social science testimony that the Supreme Court considered in
the case.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yeah, pretty amazing result from that study. Sarah Lee Creech
was a doll maker. I guess who created the Sarah
Lee doll in nineteen fifty one, and that was the
very first realistic black baby doll produced in the US.
But not to be outdone during the Black Power movement,
Baby Nancy came along and that was kind of in
(24:08):
the middle of the sixty five Watts riots. It was
a black owned company called Shindana Toys and it was
the very first doll with realistic afrocentric features. It was
not like, hey, let's run a run of white dolls
and then just change the skin tone and color them brown.
This Baby Nancy was a little black baby doll, and
(24:31):
it was a really hot selling doll in La and beyond.
I think the production couldn't keep up that year because
they were such a hot sellers.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, it was a great success for sure. And the
Sarah Lee doll. Again, this was the first like semi
accurate doll, but there was still a lot of features
that weren't quite what black children look like. The Baby
Nancy was like unmistakably had cute, tight little curls, and
it was like, this is the first like legitimate African
(25:01):
American doll anyone's ever made. Yea, I thought that was
pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Yeah, it's amazing, very cute doll. Actually, So, I mean,
I'm not into dolls because you know, I played with trucks, okay,
but if I played with dolls, Baby Nancy might be
my doll.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
I can't remember. Did you have a cabbage patch?
Speaker 1 (25:19):
I did, sort of. We bought a bunch of them
when they were handmade by the original Xavier Robert.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Sky creepy pantyhose dolls, right.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
And they assigned a couple of them to me as mine.
But they were never like in my room, and it's
not like it's like, oh, don't put that in my room.
I don't know why they did that. It was weird.
They were like, here's Scott's two and your two and
here's Michelle's.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
And don't touch them.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I know, I think they're worth a little bit of money. Oh,
I'm sure I do remember mine as a little boy
and a girl and it's their shirts and I guess
the doll whatever they were my little TV star or
something like that, so that I don't even know what
that means.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Let's say, hey, let's move along to paper dolls or
do you want to take a break. Now, let's take.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
A break, and I'm going to look up and see
how much those Xabier Roberts dolls are worth of mine,
and I'll see if I can list them on eBay
and I'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Okay, we promised talk about paper dolls, and what kind
of grinch scrooges would we be if we just didn't
deliver on that.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
So yeah, paper dolls were this trend from like the
Apex was from eighteen ninety to nineteen twenty. But I
mean you could find them pretty easily into the nineteen
seventies and they're still around today in different forms. But
they were like, think about this, what trend can you
think of? Chuck? That lasted for thirty years? This is
(27:14):
a huge, huge trend.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Grunge, No grunge.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
I will say it was ten years.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Tops pet rocks.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Pet Rocks is maybe two.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
That's it. I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Okay, that's what I'm saying. That's how massive a trend.
Paper dolls were from the late nineteenth century to the
early twentieth hotpants, okay, daisy dukes. They've been huge since
the seventies, definitely.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
So paper doll is a doll that you cut out.
And the fun thing about paper dolls was, and I
guess is if you're still into them, is they would
come with different outfits and things, and you would cut
out the different outfits and put them over the doll.
And that was the fun of it is you could
change the clothes, but it wasn't real clothes because it
(28:06):
was just sort of free because it came in the
magazine or newspaper or whatever.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
But that was the only fun of it. Don't even
try to have any other fun, just put the outfits
on and sit there.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah, that's kind of it.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
But luckily there was a bunch of new outfits and
they were always coming because this whole thing was basically
a way to get people to go buy your newspaper
or your magazine. Yeah, in some cases buy your product,
like Pillsbury products. You would get a set of these
collectible paper dolls and new outfits, and for thirty years
people would go buy Pillsbury everything because they had the
(28:41):
best paper dolls.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, this still continues. I just realized that. At one point,
my friend Meredith, who worked in the fashion industry, got
Ruby for Christmas. A little it's like a little fashion kit,
and it's kind of like paper dolls, except they're already
it's magnetized and they're pre cut. But the whole is
that you can put together all these different outfits and
like kind of learn about fashion. So it's not that
(29:04):
different than paper dolls.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
No, this is plastic.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Yeah, and she sheap enjoyed that for a while.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Oh good, who was that they gave her that present?
Speaker 1 (29:13):
My friend mereth or Anti Meredith. She and Ruby are
big buds. Meredith, Yeah, I think you met Meredith. Maybe
all right, yeah, you have it at New York Live Shows.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Okay, well, great pick Meredith. Yeah, So I say we
move on to famous dolls of the twentieth century, Chuck,
this is the part I've been waiting for. The well
reason we did this episode.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
You got to start, and we're not gonna spend too
much time on QP Doll, except to mention that the
QP doll was kind of the first big doll of
the twentieth century in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Right, yeah, and the Great Mayo two by the way.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Oh yeah, I tried the QP Mayo because he you
what'd you think? It was great? It's not going to
replace Dukes for me, but very good.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Mayo, it shouldn't. You can love both, Yeah, I do.
I think Keupy was huge, so huge that it took
Mickey Mouse to topple them him her it.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
I think Mickey Mouse isn't it no, no, cupie, they're both its, okay,
so yeah, well Mickey Mouse isn't now a mouse. Yeah,
but he's in it. He's living in that gutter with
a clown, okay, in the sewer gutter.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
So along after that, I think KEP Doll was. I mean,
I know Steamboat Willie came out in the twenties. I'm
not sure when it was actually Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse right,
so kep Doll was on top for a while. But
even if Mickey Mouse hadn't to come along, Raggedy Ann
would have eventually come and pulled a little CuPy doll
by her little couple of hairs on the top of
(30:44):
her head down from the top spot and take took
it over.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
That's right. Raggedy Ann and her little brother Raggedy Andy
were big hits. I had Raggedy Ann and Andy when
I was little. It was a children's book from cartoonist
Johnny Gruel. He made it for his daughter. It's very
Sweet Dolls came out a couple of years later, in
nineteen twenty. But they had movie appearances, they had a
TV show, they had a Broadway musical in the eighties.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
What was it about.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
I don't really know. Raggedy Ann, I guess okay, it
was called it was called it might have been called
Raggedy Ann, rag Doll or something rag Doll. I didn't
look too much into it. I don't think it ran
too long.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Aerosmith did the score.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
I'm pretty sure they did the book too.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
So one other thing about Raggedy ann You know Annabelle
from the Conjuring series.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Yeah, I never saw that, but I know what you're
talking about.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
You never saw the Conjuring. Oh oh, you're gonna like it, dude.
It's one of those very few modern, like good ghost movies.
It's all right, good, like like goose pimple stuff. Good.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
I'm going to conjure up some goose pimples for myself then,
I think.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
And the Conjuring too, was okay, but the first one's
very good. I would be very surprised if you don't
like it.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
They'll check it out. Most of my doll scary movies
have been Child's Play and Meghan.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Okay, Child's Place coming up, don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, okay.
Megan was pretty good too.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, Megan was fun. It wasn't so scary.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
No, it's no conjuring for sure.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
So now we're coming to Betsy Wetzy. Just wait for
your chatty, Kathy. Let's talk about Betsy Wetzy first.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Yeah, Betsy Wetsy was well, let's just say this, Betsy
Wetsy could drink, bet you drink you under the table
could peepee herself. Betsy Wetsy could cry, so I'd say
real human tears, but no cry fake tears. Yeah. This
was from a company called Ideal in nineteen thirty seven.
(32:46):
An Ideal got sued a few times because they had
other dolls out there that could cry and that could
pee themselves and drink. But apparently Idea was like, but
can they do all of that?
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Right? Yeah, Betsy West. It was a huge smash hit.
I think she was most popular in the fifties, but
you could find her on the shelves through the eighties
and you would give her a little bottle. She had
a tube running through her, so the bottle of whatever,
hopefully water if you were a parent, and not actual milk,
(33:19):
would go through her little tube and come out the
other end, and then you would get to change your
diaper or maybe give her a bath or something like that.
And what must start all over again?
Speaker 1 (33:29):
That's right, not to be undone. In the early nineties,
Magic Potty Baby came out, and I think I remember
this actually because this was a It didn't peep here itself,
but there was a toilet that came with it, and
it was all about toilet training, of course, but the
toilet would fill up with this you know, fake yellow liquor.
It wouldn't fake. It was a real yellow liquid. I
(33:50):
guess fake urine. I hope it was fake urine. And
every tasted it, and the doll would sit on it
and then you would flesh it and it would disappear
back in too. That it's a temporary holding tank.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Yeah, and you're like, oh, that sounds kind of weird.
Go watch the ad for Magic Potty Baby, and for
some reason, it's just it's even more bizarre when you
see it in person. Yeah, I agreed, Okay, Chuck, I
think now it's time for Chatty Kathy, which I didn't
realize was a follow up a year after Barbie came out.
(34:23):
And this was a Ruth Handler joint too.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
That's right. This was a Mattel product along with Barbie.
And you know Chatty Kathy. It was chatty and talked
so you would pull a string and there were I
think eleven initial phrases, I hurt myself, please brush my hair.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
That was a great Chatty Kathy.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
That was it. That was Chatty Kathy.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Chatty Kathy. Get This was not the first doll to
talk as far back as Thomas Edison and I think
eighteen ninety he tried his hand at one and he
had different dolls that said a few different things. But
we turned up a clip of the doll that read,
(35:07):
I guess the Lord's Prayer, and I chuck, we have
to share it because I haven't laughed out loud in
a really long time.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah, we don't play clips a lot, so I think
we're probably legally okay to play this clip. So Jerry,
can you run that? So? Wow?
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Like, imagine that coming out of a doll you're holding
and it's dark, like there's no light in your room
because it's nighttime, and your doll starts saying that.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, Or imagine as you're just in a dark room
and hear that and you turn on your Edison and
that's the only thing in.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
There, right, it's just sitting in the rocking chair looking
at you, rocking slightly back and forth. Or even worse,
it's sitting in the wicker wheelchair in the for some reason,
staring at you your biggest fear.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, yeah, pretty good stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
I agree, So Chatty Kathy back to her, she was
actually an inspiration for a very famous Twilight Zone episode
Living Doll. Do you remember that one?
Speaker 1 (36:27):
I don't remember that, but I did watch the clip.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
It's good. So this was Talky Tina, and this is
like three years after Chatty Kathy came out, very clearly
Chatty Kathy. Yeah, and she has this kind of protective
feeling around her kid and doesn't like the kid's parents.
And at one point they pull the doll's cord and
she says, my name is Talki Tina, and I'm beginning
(36:52):
to hate you. It's a really good Twilight Zone episode,
which I can't really think of a bad Twilight its
own episode, but this one is particularly good.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Yeah, it was good.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I found two other things about or one other thing
I guess about Chatty Kathy. Did you see the voice
thing I sent?
Speaker 1 (37:10):
I did not, so.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
June Faraday, who was the voice of Rocket Jay Squirrel
on Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Cindy Lee who on The
Grinch Christmas Special. She was the first voice of Chatty Kathy,
all right, and then they re released Chatty Kathy in
nineteen seventy and the voice was Maureen McCormick, who played
Marsha on The Brady bunch Ow. So Marsha Marsha Trivia Masters.
(37:35):
If you're looking for a new question, Yeah, Merry Christmas.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Yeah that no one will know unless they listen to
stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yeah, we should talk about Polly Pocket for a minute,
because that was a miniature doll. It was a British
and winter named Chris Wiggs who built a mini dollhouse
for his daughter out of a makeup compact in the
early eighties, and Mattel was like, this thing's great, and
they licensed Polly Pocket as a doll in the early
nineties and all of a sudden, many toys were a
(38:05):
big craze. And we mentioned this because you may see
a movie coming to a theater screen near you because
Barbie was such a big hit. Obviously, Bye Witherspoon and
her production company has optioned this away. I don't know
about Away from Lena Dunham, but Lena Dunnan was originally
attached a few years ago and is no longer attached,
And so they're trying to make Polly Pocket into a
(38:27):
movie starring Lily Collins, Phil Collins's daughter.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah, what about American girl dolls? Did you know about
the origin of them? They came from an elementary school
teacher in Wisconsin named Pleasant Rowland, which is a great name.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
That's a Jerry's nickname. Yea, yeah, Jerry pleasant Roland.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah. But pleasant Roland wanted to teach kids about history,
I guess, specifically girls. And she started releasing them in
nineteen eighty six, these American girl dolls. And at first
they were just mail order and they were of two
sixty five bucks and nineteen eighty six dollars. It's just
like one hundred thousand dollars today, I'm guessing. But they
(39:07):
were a big seller right off the bat, and eventually
you could find them in stores.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Too, yeah, like their own stores. Uh yeah, you know,
their flagship stores. And I just encourage anyone that has dollophobia,
which we'll get to in a minute, to dare walk
by or through an American girl doll store.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
That is quite a dare.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, that's that's not a dare actually, because that's not
funny if you have a real feel like that.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Rih, I was looking that up. We'll talk about it
in a second, but it is some real deal stuff.
It does not sound pleasant.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Yeah, and you know, American girl dolls look sort of
real but that ain't nothing like what's coming out of
FAO Shorts and companies like Reborn and companies like Ashton Drake,
because they are making these realistic baby dolls. We finally,
on this last trip to New York on fall break,
I'd always wanted to go to Fao Shorts in New
(39:58):
York City, and we'd did. We took a trip through
Fao Schwartz and I recommended, I mean, it's very, very busy,
so don't go in there if you have any sort
of fear of crowds, because that is one of the
most packed places I've ever been in. But eventually we
wandered over to where they had their baby, like real
baby doll display, and I held one of these things, man,
(40:21):
and it is very surreal and weird because it seems
like a real baby.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah, like down to like the little veins in their temples,
the little capillaries, and the smell it did the one
you hold smell of like talcum or anything. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
They smell and look like babies, like full stop.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah. And they even have weight to them too, like heft.
So they're so realistic that these things are. This is
what is often used as like a movie prop for
like a long shot or something like that, not.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
A close up, for close up if you're Bradley Cooper.
And a Clint Eatwood movie.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Oh really, which one?
Speaker 1 (40:55):
The American sniper is very famous scene where he's clearly
holding a fake baby.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I didn't know that it.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Check it out on YouTube. It's hysterical, okay.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
But people collect these things. I mean, they are essentially
like works of art. They're usually made individually, they're not
mass produced. Some of them I've seen referred to as
museum quality pieces, so they can run hundreds of dollars,
probably more than that for some of them. But there's
other things that people do with them too. There's role
playing just for fun, treating them as if they're alive,
(41:29):
because again, they look a lot like a live baby
or infant. Some people use them to fill an emotional void,
and then apparently they're also useful for Alzheimer's patients patients
and dementia patients. And when I first saw this, I
was like, that sounds pretty mean. Actually they don't tell
(41:49):
the patient that this is a real baby. They're like, here,
hold this doll. But the doll is so lifelike that
it can trigger memories. And pleasant emotions in Alzheimer's patients
who now remember raising their own kids. We're taking care
of their own kids. And then also just the feel
of holding a baby can have all sorts of positive
(42:10):
benefits for people with Alzheimer's and dementia too.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, I look that up. I mean, it's sort of
pluses and minuses. It can definitely help reduce dementia, cause
agitation and stuff like that, all in a non pharma
pharmacological way, which can be good. But there are critics
that say, like, you gotta be real careful how you
do this, because it can also reduce dignity and give
the impression and like a reinforced like viewing people with
(42:35):
dementia like their children. So you just gotta do it
the right way, is what I've read.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah, there's I'm sure there's myriad wrong ways to do
it to you.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
So that was a great, great call out, Chuck. Yeah,
do you remember my buddy.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
My buddy and me. Mm hmm bye buddy, keep my buddy,
my buddy, my buddy and me something like that.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
That was close close enough.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
That was the uh what do you call that? But
you got a song?
Speaker 2 (43:08):
An earworm? Earworm no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
The jingle, Yeah, that was the jingle Everyone's screaming jingle.
It was very infectious. I still remember it for the
most part all these years later. That was the inspiration
for Chucky from Child's Play, but that was adult that
came out in nineteen eighty five. That was kind of
during the Cabbage Patch kid craze. They were like, hey,
what about a doll this made specifically for boys and
(43:32):
listen to this. Hasbro Senior vice president of marketing, Steven
Schwartz in nineteen eighty five told the Boston Globe this,
my buddy is positioned as macho like. It's soft macho
but still macho. Like we show them climbing trees, riding
their bikes. We didn't position it like a girl doll,
like soft and sweet. It's macho, but soft macho. Right.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
He was wearing all these medallions with his chest there
poking through.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
So that was thanks to our friends at Mental Flaws
who turned up that quote, which is priceless. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
I should have read it in a Boston accent, but well.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
No, I think you got it.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
It was just an opportunity that was Philly, right. Well,
that was for the Boston Globe. But I don't know. Ah,
you mean my accent. No, no, no, no, that Philly
accent's much different.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Okay, yeah, you didn't say yeans.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Yeah, and he would go out after and have a hagy.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
So, like you said, he was the role for the
model for Chucky from Child's play.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
That's what they say that They did never confirm that.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
It's pretty It's pretty close like Talkie Tina Chucky. Yeah,
these things are close enough to just draw some assumptions here.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
So we talked about fear of dolls, and I'm glad
you already kind of touched on the fact that this
is quite serious. This is a genuine phobia. I know,
to people who don't have it, it can sound like, well,
a fear of dolls. It almost sounds like something you
could make a movie out of. If you have a
fear of dolls, pettiophobia, like, you can get a full
blown panic attack. You may avoid places where you think
(45:02):
there may be dolls. It's not just dolls, it can
be mannequins too. There's all sorts of reasons that you
can have pettiophobia, but one of the causes behind it
are possible causes behind it is having like a traumatic
experience with a doll, or say like with a ventriloquist
dummy or something like that.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Yeah, it just didn't land correctly, and now you're traumatized
for the rest of your life without serious counseling because
you have this fear of dolls.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
Yeah for sure. You know you used to publish when
we were doing like image lists on the old house
stuffworks dot com days, your list of scary looking toys.
That thing is just gone, isn't it not on the
webiny No, oh, that's probably good. But a lot of
these things are creepy looking, and a lot of them
are dolls, and you know they didn't mean to make
(45:56):
them creepy looking. I think this just, you know, some
decision is made, like like little Miss No Name in
nineteen sixty five, Margaret Keane's big eyes was a big deal,
so were like, why don't we make a doll with
those big, giant eyes, and they did and it's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
She is terrifying again unintentionally. I think also part of it,
she has like like shadow under her eyes. She's supposed
to be kind of gaunt because she's a panhandling child
who wears a burlap sack and has a tear running
down her cheek and unintentionally miss name.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Yes, it's awful, it.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Is awful, but this was like a serious like release
of a doll in nineteen sixty five. So yeah, there's
there's and there's plenty you can come up with. I
would I would suggest to go looking up terrifying dolls,
knockoff dolls or knockoff toois is always a little fun
rabbit hole to go down, But they're not inherently creepy,
(46:53):
is the thing. And the reason we know that is
because there's kids out there who will play with what
older people will consider a creepy all, but the kid
doesn't think of it that way. So if you ever
see a kid legitimately playing with a creepy doll, do
not go up to that kid and be like, that
doll's really creepy, because that's how humans start to think
of things as creepy. And if they don't think of
(47:13):
their doll as creepy, it is not your place to
tell that kid that doll is creepy.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
There's an Instagram account of a mom who has been
documenting her daughter Briar with her doll Creepy Chloe, and
Creepy Chloe definitely lives up to her name, but Briar
plays with her like she is any other doll. It's
very cute.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, just resist the urge.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Parents, Yes, if you want to know, if you want
to know, yeah, I can't you see Briar like growing
up and sitting in her dorm smoking pot one day
and be like, no, I understand why my mom always
threw her hand over her mouth and walked out of
the room when I was playing with Creepy Chloe.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Or why didn't she ever tell me? It might be
the other right way of thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Yeah, so just real quick, The thing that usually explains
why we're creeped out by dolls is the on Canny Valley.
We won't get into that because it's pretty deep, but
we did do an episode on the Uncanny Valley. You
can go find it's a good one. Yeah, you can
find it on stuff youshould know dot com. By the way,
that's right, You got anything else on dolls or Christmas or.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Anything like that, buddy, Nothing.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
Well, I'm glad we did this one.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
I too.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Thank you for coming in from home this morning. On
Christmas morning to do this. That's right.
Speaker 1 (48:30):
All my gifts are still waiting. I told them, just
not touching them, okay, and the one that's ticking, and
I'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
Well, hopefully your orange rolls aren't cold or anything like that.
So let's go home. Let's go to our homes, not
our shared home. Yeah that's something else. Yeah, that's for
New Year's and we'll wish everybody a merry Christmas.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Huh. Yeah. I hope everyone has a great holiday, and
I hope you're with ones you love, and if you're
spending Christmas in a lesson ideal way, we are always
thinking about you.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
For very nice Chuck, And I don't think we'll do listener.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Mail huh nah, nuts to that, as you say.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Yeah, Well, if you want to say Merry Christmas or
Happy New Year, or happy Holidays or anything hi, whatever,
you can send it via email to stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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