Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
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.
That's right. Wow, this got odd very quickly.
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.
I sat up in the middle of the night one night and went dolls, right, and he.
Was like, that's what happened, and she was holding a chatty Cathy.
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. 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.
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.
I saw that it has to be human to be considered a doll.
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 great things, empathy and patience and recognizing emotions, among many other things.
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.
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 talk through the doll, but not in a creepy way.
Is Chatty Kathy your go to doll?
M so far, I'll move on to Betsy Wetsy soon enough.
Chatty Kathy is pretty fun to say.
Yeah.
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 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.
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 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.
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 the time.
That's right. I never thought of pink being a red tone, but it totally is.
Yeah, for sure, you can't deny it, Chuck.
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, 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.
Yeah, go jump off that dirt pile.
Yeah.
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. 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.
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 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 it's sold for six months like any ordinary sort of special release Barbie, and evidently sold like hotcakes.
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.
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.
Yeah. It was a bigger tren than slap bracelets is today.
Oh wow.
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.
It was extended, give me a doll, yeah, doll face for.
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?
Then someone said, you think a puppet is a doll?
Yeah? They said, had a psychle? Are you?
So many people think that they're going to have to explain that on a one day.
They're like, you think a hot dog is a sandwich?
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, 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.
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 of the Fonte and Acan people of Ghana. They have ritual dolls that kids also play with at the same time.
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 play with this thing and try and look like that one day.
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?
Mmm? Kind of just bitter? Okay, I'm looking for the sweet. I guess you're buried with your toy that you loved.
Yeah, that's a sweet part, for sure. It's like the newgat of that situation.
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.
That's a new version of an old singing.
Oh, I guess that song's okay. That was late Aerosmith. They put out a bunch of songs like that for a while.
Oh, I can't imagine how bad the subtext.
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.
Think so either they were really into sex.
Oh no, that loving an elevator song that was just anging about elevators going up and down.
That's right, sponsored by the Otis Corporation.
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, 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.
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 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.
Know, Yeah, sure of course.
Well what about in North America, there's a doll that says I'm the oldest, and everyone says, yes, you are.
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.
Yeah, it is a great band name for sure.
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.
Or Visitors to the Pacomattock Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, mass which is where it's kept now.
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, she was blind and it might have sort of indicated the importance of touch for her.
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 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.
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.
Um nose, hair, beard.
Nose, hair, mustache. All right, I think we covered it.
Okay, I know for a fact we left something like the mouth out, something super glaring.
Oh, I said mouth, and inside the mouth everything counts his mouth. So don't come at me with teeth and tongue exactly.
I'm glad you said that chuck.
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.
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,
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.
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 very fashionably obviously, they had human hair wigs, apparently from
the hair of working class girls. And they were true status symbols.
Yeah, like you would be painted with them a portrait. That's pretty big status symbol at.
The time, right, Yeah, for sure.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Yeah, I mean, you might sign them up for therapy or something, when in fact I think it's a pretty normal thing.
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.
Yeah, you do the darnest things.
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.
Yeah, that'd be a good listener mail.
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 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.
Yeah, ring this bell if you're hungry.
Hey.
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 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. 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, 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.
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 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 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, 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.
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 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 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.
It is brutal, But it also was this groundbreaking research that the Clarks created.
Yeah, for sure.
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. 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.
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 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 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.
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 American doll anyone's ever made. Yea, I thought that was pretty cool.
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.
I can't remember. Did you have a cabbage patch?
I did, sort of. We bought a bunch of them when they were handmade by the original Xavier Robert.
Sky creepy pantyhose dolls, right.
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.
And don't touch them.
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.
Let's say, hey, let's move along to paper dolls or do you want to take a break. Now, let's take.
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.
Okay, we promised talk about paper dolls, and what kind of grinch scrooges would we be if we just didn't deliver on that.
That's right?
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 a huge, huge trend.
Grunge, No grunge.
I will say it was ten years.
Tops pet rocks.
Pet Rocks is maybe two.
That's it. I got nothing else.
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.
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 was just sort of free because it came in the magazine or newspaper or whatever.
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.
Yeah, that's kind of it.
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 best paper dolls.
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 different than paper dolls.
No, this is plastic.
Yeah, and she sheap enjoyed that for a while.
Oh good, who was that they gave her that present?
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.
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.
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.
Right, yeah, and the Great Mayo two by the way.
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.
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.
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.
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 her head down from the top spot and take took it over.
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.
What was it about.
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.
Aerosmith did the score.
I'm pretty sure they did the book too.
So one other thing about Raggedy ann You know Annabelle from the Conjuring series.
Yeah, I never saw that, but I know what you're talking about.
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.
I'm going to conjure up some goose pimples for myself then, I think.
And the Conjuring too, was okay, but the first one's very good. I would be very surprised if you don't like it.
They'll check it out. Most of my doll scary movies have been Child's Play and Meghan.
Okay, Child's Place coming up, don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, okay. Megan was pretty good too.
Yeah, Megan was fun. It wasn't so scary.
No, it's no conjuring for sure.
Yeah.
So now we're coming to Betsy Wetzy. Just wait for your chatty, Kathy. Let's talk about Betsy Wetzy first.
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. 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?
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, 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?
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
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.
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. And this was a Ruth Handler joint too.
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.
That was a great Chatty Kathy.
That was it. That was Chatty Kathy.
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, 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, yeah, pretty good stuff.
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?
I don't remember that, but I did watch the clip.
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 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.
Yeah, it was good.
I found two other things about or one other thing I guess about Chatty Kathy. Did you see the voice thing I sent?
I did not, so.
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. If you're looking for a new question, Yeah, Merry Christmas.
Yeah that no one will know unless they listen to stuff you should know.
Yes, that's right.
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 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 movie starring Lily Collins, Phil Collins's daughter.
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.
That's a Jerry's nickname. Yea, yeah, Jerry pleasant Roland.
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 were a big seller right off the bat, and eventually you could find them in stores.
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.
That is quite a dare.
Yeah, that's that's not a dare actually, because that's not funny if you have a real feel like that.
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.
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
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, and it is very surreal and weird because it seems like a real baby.
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.
They smell and look like babies, like full stop.
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.
A close up, for close up if you're Bradley Cooper. And a Clint Eatwood movie.
Oh really, which one?
The American sniper is very famous scene where he's clearly holding a fake baby.
I didn't know that it.
Check it out on YouTube. It's hysterical, okay.
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, 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 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 benefits for people with Alzheimer's and dementia too.
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 dementia like their children. So you just gotta do it the right way, is what I've read.
Yeah, there's I'm sure there's myriad wrong ways to do it to you.
Sure.
So that was a great, great call out, Chuck. Yeah, do you remember my buddy.
My buddy and me. Mm hmm bye buddy, keep my buddy, my buddy, my buddy and me something like that.
That was close close enough.
That was the uh what do you call that? But you got a song?
An earworm? Earworm no, no, no, no.
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
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.
He was wearing all these medallions with his chest there poking through.
Yeah.
So that was thanks to our friends at Mental Flaws who turned up that quote, which is priceless. Yeah.
I should have read it in a Boston accent, but well.
No, I think you got it.
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.
Okay, yeah, you didn't say yeans.
Yeah, and he would go out after and have a hagy.
So, like you said, he was the role for the model for Chucky from Child's play.
That's what they say that They did never confirm that.
It's pretty It's pretty close like Talkie Tina Chucky. Yeah, these things are close enough to just draw some assumptions here.
Yeah, agreed.
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 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.
Yeah.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yes, it's awful, it.
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, 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 their doll as creepy, it is not your place to tell that kid that doll is creepy.
Yeah, for sure.
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.
Yeah, just resist the urge.
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.
Or why didn't she ever tell me? It might be the other right way of thinking about it.
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.
Anything like that, buddy, Nothing.
Well, I'm glad we did this one.
I too.
Thank you for coming in from home this morning. On Christmas morning to do this. That's right.
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.
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.
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.
For very nice Chuck, And I don't think we'll do listener.
Mail huh nah, nuts to that, as you say.
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.
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