Dolls and Dolls, Guys!

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 Hey, and well, I should say Merry Christmas and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.
And we bid you good tidings.

Speaker 1 We're decking your halls and giving you lots of joy on this festive day.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. We're decking your halls if you give us consent, of course, to do so.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 2 We would never deck halls just willy-nilly.

Speaker 1 No, I mean, oh.

Speaker 1 We're good guys.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 This got odd very quickly.

Speaker 2 This is our annual sort of

Speaker 2 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 1 I sat up in the middle of the night one night and went, dolls, right? And you were like,

Speaker 1 what happened?

Speaker 2 And she was holding a chatty cathy.

Speaker 1 That's right. Oh, I can't wait to get to that part.
Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 make an actual set definition.

Speaker 1 The reason why is because you're like, well, what about this? Well, what about that?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 but not everybody ever. That old saying.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that old saying.

Speaker 2 The definition that we agreed on was that a doll is a toy.

Speaker 2 And we all know what a doll looks like. It's like a model of usually a human type figure.

Speaker 1 I saw that it has to be human to be considered a doll.

Speaker 2 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 G.I.
Joe episode.

Speaker 2 But what a doll 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yes. So just real quick, that excludes, that definition excludes things like puppets,

Speaker 1 like you said, action figures, statuettes, but it also, I think very weirdly, excludes animal dolls, like stuffed animals. Okay.

Speaker 1 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 Okay.

Speaker 1 And that's it.

Speaker 2 So recognizing emotions is a big one for kids as long as holding onto dolls.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 bored or angry. And that means the kid's not comfortable saying that to the parent.
So they talk through the doll, but not in a creepy way.

Speaker 1 Is Chatty Kathy your go-to doll?

Speaker 2 So far, I'll move on to Betsy Wetsy soon enough.

Speaker 1 Chatty Kathy is is pretty fun to say. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Another thing, this is also, I think, Playroom Collective laid out some good examples, and these are some of the ones that they said.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that teaches emotional availability, teaches problem solving.

Speaker 1 And then it also requires perspective taking, because just because the doll is scared or sad doesn't mean the kid feels that way right then.

Speaker 1 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 2 Yeah. They can put themselves in their tiny little one-inch shiny patent leather shoe.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 That Chatty Kathy has. Right.

Speaker 2 talk about traditional gender roles. We're going to talk a lot about that because dolls have long been associated with girlhood.

Speaker 2 That wasn't always the case. It started by like the 1940s.
By the turn of the century, toys were kind of marketed, you know, to boys and girls equally.

Speaker 2 But in the 1940s, 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 1 Isn't that nuts? That's apparently where gendered 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.

Speaker 1 We've talked about it before, but it used to be the opposite, where pink was for boys and blue for girls because pink was a red tone, and red tones were considered too harsh for girls at the time.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 I never thought of pink being a red tone, but it totally is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 You can't deny it, Chuck.

Speaker 2 There was a study in 2017 that more than, and 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.

Speaker 2 But, and it went up to 80%

Speaker 2 for women and millennials saying that. But when it came to boys, only 64%.
So there are far fewer families saying, you know, William, you should play with your doll.

Speaker 2 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 roughhouse.

Speaker 1 Yeah, go jump off that dirt pile. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, that clearly means we have a long way to go still.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 there are a lot of dolls that have made headway

Speaker 1 in empowering girls, showing that women can take

Speaker 1 male jobs in male-dominated fields. 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, Chuck, we couldn't possibly talk about how Earring Magic Ken wasn't a groundbreaking doll.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, Earring Magic Ken came out in 1993.

Speaker 2 You take one look at Earring Magic Ken, and it's pretty clear that it's a queer-coated doll.

Speaker 2 He has his diamond stud earring in one ear. He's wearing a purple mesh crop top.

Speaker 2 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 want. I saw that too.

Speaker 2 And of course, Mattel was like, that's preposterous. This is a kid's toy.

Speaker 2 But it was very hot in the gay community, selling out all over the place.

Speaker 2 Maybe the hottest selling, well, definitely the hottest selling Ken doll of all time. Maybe the best selling of all time.
Mattel won't say.

Speaker 2 But it sold for six months like any ordinary sort of special release Barbie. And evidently evidently sold like hotcakes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And one other feature that is often overlooked, he had a pull cord that made him talk, and the only thing he said is, the boys are out tonight.

Speaker 1 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 2 Yeah, this is something I didn't know.

Speaker 2 Doll was a nickname for Dorothy. I always thought dot was the only nickname for Dorothy.

Speaker 2 But apparently, dating back to like at least the 16th century, there was a weird thing happening where people would substitute L's for R's. So Harold could be Hal,

Speaker 2 Mary could be Moll or Molly, and Dorothy could be doll.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a bigger trend than slap bracelets is today. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 So the earliest use of the word doll goes back to the 1500s. 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 It was extended. Could be a doll.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Doll face.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly, right? So you're like you're, 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.

Speaker 1 And then by around 1700, 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 2 And someone said, you think a puppet is a doll?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What kind of psycho are you?

Speaker 2 So many people think that they're going to have to explain that on a podcast one day right They're like you think a hot dog is a sandwich why has that doll got strings coming out of it

Speaker 2 Well speaking of strings

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's some strings in these dolls ancient dolls Egyptian paddle dolls that date back to the Middle Kingdom like 2000 to 1800 BCE They were a flat piece of wood so they weren't you know

Speaker 2 human shaped as far as three-dimensional three-dimensionality goes, but they were cut like a woman's torso and they had tattoo-like designs and hair made up out of bead strings uh but archaeologists are like this isn't really a doll doll i think it was more like a a percussion instrument for like religious rituals you could shake that thing They do think in the ancient world that dolls played dual roles.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They were used to kind of indoctrinate kids into culture and society.

Speaker 1 And they're basing that in part on how there's still dolls like that around today, like the Akua Ba of the Fante and Akan people of Ghana.

Speaker 1 They have ritual dolls that kids also play with at the same time.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the girls who played with them were like, it was, 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.

Speaker 2 And here, go play with this thing and try and look like that one day.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 even before the Romans, they found dolls in Greek burials. And the reason why they found them is because girls would play with dolls.

Speaker 1 When they got married, they would consecrate, they would sacrifice essentially the dolls to Artemis in exchange for fertility in their marriage.

Speaker 1 And then if they never got married, they were buried buried with their dolls.

Speaker 1 Isn't that bittersweet?

Speaker 2 Kind of just bitter.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 I'm looking for the sweet. I guess you're buried with your toy that you loved.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's the sweet part, for sure. It's like the nougat of that situation.
All right. I'll take it.

Speaker 2 All right. We promised talk of Aerosmith and their great, great, great song, Ragdoll.

Speaker 1 I thought the same thing, too.

Speaker 1 Coming up and see me. That's awesome.
New version of an old scene.

Speaker 2 Oh, I guess that song's okay. That was late Aerosmith.
They put out a bunch of songs like that for a while.

Speaker 1 Oh, I can't imagine how bad the subtext is, though.

Speaker 2 Oh, sure. I never really thought about that, but you're right.
I think I don't know if there is an Aerosmith song where there wasn't a sexual subtext.

Speaker 1 I don't think so either. They were really into sex.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, that Love It and Elevator song. That was just talking about elevators going up and down.
That's right.

Speaker 1 Sponsored by the Otis Corporation. That's right.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. I'm glad you could call that up.

Speaker 2 Rag dolls, not Aerosmith, but the little floppy dolls made out of fabric and not, you know, hard dolls that you can bang against the wall.

Speaker 2 They have been around for a long, long time since the ancient world. But because they were made out of things like,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it also raises the question: like, how long have humans been playing with dolls?

Speaker 1 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 2,000 years old, Chuck.

Speaker 1 It was found in a trash pile in Egypt. And it was linen, stuffed with some papyrus, had some paint on it at one point, but now all that's left is a single bead that was once attached to its hair.

Speaker 1 So, but it's 2,000 years old, so give it a break, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah, sure, of course.

Speaker 1 But what about in North America? There's a doll that says, I'm the oldest, and everyone says, Yes, you are.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's right. There is a rag doll, the oldest ragdoll in North America.
It belonged to a little girl who was blind named Clarissa Field from Massachusetts.

Speaker 2 And the girl, the actual girl, was born in 1765.

Speaker 2 And I think this is a great deep-cut band name. She named her doll Bangwell Putt.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is a great band name for sure.

Speaker 2 Because no one will know what it is except for the rare stuff you should know listener, and they'd be like, bruh, you named your band Bangwell Putt after the oldest rag doll.

Speaker 1 Right. Or visitors to the Pacumatuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, Mass, which is where it's kept now.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I guess they would know that.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There's just a blank face.

Speaker 2 But there are 10 individually sewn fingers and thumbs,

Speaker 2 which might be a reason that young Clarissa, like I mentioned, she was blind and it might have sort of

Speaker 2 indicated the importance of touch for her.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I saw that

Speaker 1 the 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

Speaker 1 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 corn husk dolls don't have a face.

Speaker 1 And that's possibly why rag doll dolls don't have a face either. Like Bangwell Putt.

Speaker 2 Like Bangwell Putt. And to be clear, no facial features.
There's a face, but there's no eyes, nose, or mouth, or,

Speaker 2 you know, eyebrows. All the things that make a face.

Speaker 1 What about eyelashes?

Speaker 2 No eyelashes, no pimples, no freckles. Pores? No frinkles, no wrinkles, no pores.

Speaker 2 What else is on the face? I'm looking at my face.

Speaker 1 Nose hair.

Speaker 2 Beard, nose hair, mustache.

Speaker 2 All right. I think we covered it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I know for a fact we left something like the mouth out, something super glaring.

Speaker 2 Oh, I said mouth, and inside the mouth, everything counts as mouth. So don't come at me with teeth and tongue.

Speaker 1 Exactly. I'm glad you said that, Chuck.

Speaker 2 That should be on the shirt. Don't come at me with teeth and tongue.
It's the stuff you should know, A.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 What about Victorian dolls?

Speaker 1 Well, this is really where doll um obsessions, I think, kind of start to take off because up to this point, rag dolls, like you got to be a pretty niche collector to be collecting like 18th-century rag dolls.

Speaker 1 Victorian dolls is where people are like, gimme all of these.

Speaker 1 And one of the reasons why is because doll making became a real art by the 15th century. And the seat of it originally was Germany.
They had Dachenmachers, which are doll makers.

Speaker 1 And they were for aristocratic families who were the only ones that could afford these things because they were works of art.

Speaker 2 Yeah, works of art that very keyly looked like them.

Speaker 2 They really showed their sort of obsession with their own selves and their own class.

Speaker 2 They were made from porcelain and not because that was just some superior material.

Speaker 2 They were literally made from porcelain because they thought that represented the ideal skin tone, that porcelain white.

Speaker 2 They were dressed very fashionably, obviously. They had human hair wigs, apparently from the hair of working class girls.

Speaker 2 And they were true status symbols.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like you would be painted with them, a portrait. That's pretty big status symbol at the time, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 So one of my favorite things, so Dave helped us with this. Thank big head tip to Dave.

Speaker 1 And Merry Christmas, Dave.

Speaker 1 And apparently around the time of Prince Albert's death, he was trapped in a can.

Speaker 1 He died in 1861. It's Queen Victoria's husband, by the way.

Speaker 1 Like funerals and mourning became all the rage. We often associate like mourning and death stuff and memento mori with Victorians, and this is why.
And so

Speaker 1 dolls were not immune to this trend, and little girls were given death kits to use with their dolls.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 you know, cooking. dinner in your home or you're doing other household things or you're, you know, now you're mourning because somebody has died.

Speaker 2 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 1 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 2 Yeah, I mean, you might sign them up for therapy or something when, in fact, I think it's a pretty normal thing.

Speaker 1 I think it is too, but it would definitely make you stop and say like, hey,

Speaker 1 what you doing with your doll right now?

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 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 2 Yeah, you do the darndest things.

Speaker 1 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 2 Yeah, that'd be a good listener, Mel.

Speaker 1 So dollhouses also really kind of came around at this time, too, like the dollhouse as we think about it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that was thanks to the Victorians. And that's why dollhouses are always very nice and big

Speaker 1 because they were basically what the Victorian aristocracy thought that houses should look like at the time.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 Yeah, ring this bell if you're hungry.

Speaker 2 So, you know, we talked a little bit about the complicated history of

Speaker 2 race and facial features when it comes to race and skin tone and stuff like that with dolls.

Speaker 2 And so we have a whole kind of robust section here on the history of black dolls because it's a pretty complex story

Speaker 2 as far as race and self-image goes. And the first

Speaker 2 one we're going to talk about 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 in the antebellum South. They were made by enslaved black women as dolls for their daughters.
And the idea is,

Speaker 2 hey, we have to take care of the white kids during during the day, and then we have to take care of our own children at night.

Speaker 2 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 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You could buy from catalogs like Montgomery Ward,

Speaker 1 which is not surprising, but

Speaker 1 the thing to understand about that is that this helped lay the groundwork for

Speaker 1 reinforcing social norms about the

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It was much more subtle and much more pervasive than that

Speaker 1 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.
Yeah. White dolls were.

Speaker 1 They were very pretty. They were collector's items.
They were gorgeous in a lot of cases. They were the doll that you wanted.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you should feel about white people how you feel about this doll. Very pretty, huh?

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. I mean, it makes it all the more nefarious, I think, because these are children.
Right. Like, the more subtle it is, the more nefarious it is.

Speaker 2 And this culminated in the 1940s with what was called the doll tests from Mamie and Kenneth Clark.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then they would ask them 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 asked kids give me the doll that looks like you a lot of these little kids would uh 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So this was brutal.
It is brutal, but it also was just groundbreaking research that the Clarks created.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 And it was so groundbreaking and so

Speaker 1 convincing that the NAACP came to them and said, hey, can we use this in these cases?

Speaker 1 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 9-0 decision to overturn segregation in public schools.

Speaker 1 That's how convincing these doll tests were, that they were cited in some of these cases.

Speaker 1 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 2 Yeah, pretty amazing result from that study.

Speaker 2 Sarah Lee Creech was a dollmaker, I guess, who created the Sarah Lee doll in 1951. And that was the very first realistic black baby doll produced in the U.S.

Speaker 2 But not to be outdone during the black power movement, Baby Nancy came along. And that was kind of in the middle of the 65 Watts riots.
It was a black-owned company called Shindana Toys.

Speaker 2 And it was the very first doll with realistic Afrocentric features. It was not like, hey, let's.
Let's run a run of white dolls and then just change the skin tone and color them brown.

Speaker 2 This Baby Nancy was

Speaker 2 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 seller.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I just thought that was pretty cool.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's amazing. Very cute doll, actually.

Speaker 1 So, um, I mean, I'm not into dolls because, you know, I play with trucks. Okay.

Speaker 2 But if I played with dolls, baby Nancy might be my doll.

Speaker 1 I can't remember. Did you have a cabbage patch?

Speaker 2 I did,

Speaker 2 sort of. We bought a bunch of them when they were handmade by the original Xavier Roberts guy.

Speaker 1 Creepy pantyhose dolls, right?

Speaker 2 And they assigned a couple of them to me as mine, but they were never like in my room.

Speaker 1 And it's not like I was like, oh, don't put that in my room. I don't know why they did that.

Speaker 2 It was weird. They were like, here's Scott's two, and your two, and here's Michelle's.

Speaker 1 And don't touch them.

Speaker 2 I know. I think they're worth a little bit of money.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm sure.

Speaker 2 I do remember mine as a little boy and a girl, and it's their shirts. And I guess the doll, whatever they were, were my little TV star or something like that.

Speaker 1 I know that one.

Speaker 2 I don't even know what that means.

Speaker 1 Let's say, hey, let's move along to paper dolls, or do you want to take a break now?

Speaker 2 Let's take a break, and I'm going to look up and see how much those

Speaker 2 Xavier Roberts dolls are worth in mind, and I'll see if I can list them on eBay, and I'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 Okay, we promised to talk about paper dolls and what kind of Grinch Scrooges would we be if we just didn't deliver on that. That's right.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, paper dolls were this trend from

Speaker 1 like the apex was from 1890 to 1920, but I mean, you could find them pretty easily into the 1970s, and they're still around today in different forms.

Speaker 1 But they were, like, think about this. What trend can you think of, Chuck, that lasted for 30 years? This is a huge, huge trend.

Speaker 2 Grunge?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Grunge, I will say, was 10 years tops.

Speaker 2 Petrox.

Speaker 1 Petrox is maybe, maybe two.

Speaker 2 That's it. I got nothing else.

Speaker 1 Okay. That's what I'm saying.
That's how massive a trend paper dolls were from the late 19th century to the early 20th.

Speaker 2 Hot pants?

Speaker 1 Okay, there you go. Daisy Dukes, they've been huge since the 70s, definitely.

Speaker 2 So a paper doll is a doll that you cut out.

Speaker 2 And the fun thing about paper dolls was, and I guess is, if you're still into them, is

Speaker 2 they would come with different outfits and things, and you would cut out the different outfits and put them over the doll.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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 2 Yeah, that's kind of it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Or in some cases, buy your product, like Pillsbury products.

Speaker 1 You would get a set of these collectible paper dolls and new outfits and for 30 years people would go buy Pillsbury everything because they had the best

Speaker 1 paper dolls.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this still continues.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But the whole idea 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.

Speaker 1 No. This is plastic.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And Cheap enjoyed that for a while.

Speaker 1 Oh, good. Who was that that gave her that present? My friend Meredith, her auntie Meredith.

Speaker 2 She and Ruby are big, big buds.

Speaker 1 Meredith?

Speaker 2 Yeah. I think you met Meredith, maybe.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you have it at New York Live Shows.

Speaker 1 Okay. Well, great pick, Meredith.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I say we move on to famous dolls of the 20th century, Chuck. This is the part I've been waiting for.
This is the reason we did this episode.

Speaker 2 You got to start, and we're not going to spend too much time on QP doll, except to mention that the QP doll was kind of the first big doll of the 20th century in 1912, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and the great Mayo, too, by the way.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Yeah, I tried the QP Mayo because of you.

Speaker 1 What did you think?

Speaker 2 It was great. It's not going to replace Dukes for me, but very good Mayo.

Speaker 1 It shouldn't. You can love both.
Yeah, I do.

Speaker 1 I think QP was huge, so huge that it took Mickey Mouse to topple them, him, her, it,

Speaker 1 I think.

Speaker 2 Mickey Mouse is an it.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, Cupie.

Speaker 2 They're both it's.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. So, yeah.
Well, Mickey Mouse is an owl, a mouse.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but he's an it. He's living in that gutter with a clown.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 In the sewer gutter.

Speaker 1 So along after that, I think Cupie Doll was, I mean,

Speaker 1 I know Steamboat Willie came out in the 20s. I'm not sure when it was actually Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse, right?

Speaker 1 So Cupie Doll was on top for a while, but even if Mickey Mouse hadn't have come along, Raggedy Ann would have eventually come and pulled little Cupie Doll by her little couple hairs on the top of her head down from the top spot and took it over.

Speaker 2 That's right. Raggedy Ann and her little brother, Raggedy Andy, were big hits.

Speaker 2 I had Raggedy Ann and Andy when I was little. It was a children's book from cartoonist Johnny.
Gruelle. He made it for his daughter.
It's very sweet.

Speaker 2 Dolls came out a couple of years later in 1920, but they had movie appearances. They had a TV show.
They had a Broadway musical in the 80s.

Speaker 1 What was it about?

Speaker 2 I don't really know. Raggedy Ann, I guess.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 It was called ⁇ it might have been called Raggedy Ann Ragdoll or something Ragdoll. I didn't look too much into it.
I don't think it ran too long.

Speaker 1 Aerosmith did the score?

Speaker 2 I'm pretty sure. They did the book, too.

Speaker 1 So one other thing about Raggedy Ann, you know, Annabelle from the Conjuring series?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I never saw that, but I know what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 You never saw The Conjuring? Oh!

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 you're going to like it, dude. It's one of those very few modern,

Speaker 1 like, good ghost movies. It is good.
Like, like

Speaker 1 goose pimple stuff, good.

Speaker 2 I'm going to conjure up some goose pimples for myself then.

Speaker 1 I think, and the Conjuring 2 is okay, but the first one's very good. I'll be very surprised if you don't like it.

Speaker 2 I'll check it out. Most of my doll, scary movies have been Child's Play and Megan.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Child's Play's coming up. Don't worry about it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. Megan was pretty good, too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Megan was fun. It wasn't so scary.

Speaker 1 No, it's no conjuring for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So now we're coming to Betsy Wetze. Just wait for your chat and Kathy.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about Betsy Wetze first.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Betsy Wetze was,

Speaker 2 well, let's just say this. Betsy Wetze could drink.

Speaker 1 Betsy Wetsy could drink you under the table. Could pee-pee herself.

Speaker 2 Betsy Wetze could cry. I was about to say real human tears, but no.
Could cry fake tears. Yeah.

Speaker 2 This was from a company called Ideal in 1937. And Ideal got sued a few times because

Speaker 2 they had other dolls out there that could cry and that could pee themselves and drink. But apparently Ideal was like, but can they do all of that?

Speaker 1 Right. And yeah, Betsy Wetze was a huge smash hit.
I think she was most popular in the 50s, but you could find her on the shelves through the 80s.

Speaker 1 And you would give her a little bottle. She had a tube running through her.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then you would get to change your diaper or maybe give her a bath or something like that. And

Speaker 1 start all over again.

Speaker 2 That's right. Not to be undone in the early 90s, Magic Potty Baby came out.
And I think I remember this actually because

Speaker 2 this was a,

Speaker 2 it didn't pee-pee itself, but there was a toilet that came with it. And it was all about toilet training, of course.

Speaker 2 But the toilet would fill up with this, you know, fake yellow liquid, or it wasn't fake, it was a real yellow liquid, I guess, fake urine.

Speaker 2 I hope it was fake urine. I never tasted it.

Speaker 2 And the doll would sit on it, and then you would flush it, and it would disappear back into its temporary holding tank.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 it's even more bizarre when you see it in person. Yeah, agreed.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 2 This was a Mattel product along with Barbie. And, you know, Chatty Kathy was chatty and talked.
So you would pull a string and there were, I think, 11 initial phrases.

Speaker 1 I hurt myself.

Speaker 2 Please brush my hair.

Speaker 1 That was a great Chatty Kathy.

Speaker 2 That was it. That was Chatty Kathy.

Speaker 1 Chatty Kathy, get this, was not the first doll to talk.

Speaker 1 As far back as Thomas Edison, in I think 1890, 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

Speaker 1 read, I guess, the Lord's Prayer.

Speaker 1 And I, Chuck, we have to share it because I haven't laughed out loud in a really long time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we don't play clips a lot.

Speaker 2 So I think we're probably legally okay to play this clip. So, Jerry, can you run that?

Speaker 2 die before thy break, I praise the Lord my soul perfect.

Speaker 2 Amen.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 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 2 Yeah, or imagine is you're just in a dark room and hear that and you turn on your Edison bulb and that's the only thing in there.

Speaker 1 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 camera

Speaker 1 for some reason staring at you.

Speaker 2 Your biggest fear.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, pretty good stuff.

Speaker 1 I agree.

Speaker 1 So, Chatty Kathy, back to her.

Speaker 1 She was actually an inspiration for a very famous Twilight Zone episode, Living Doll. Do you remember that one?

Speaker 2 I don't remember that, but I did watch the clip.

Speaker 1 It's good. So this was Talkie Tina, and this is like three years after Chatty Kathy came out.
It's very clearly Chatty Kathy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And she has this kind of

Speaker 1 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 Talkie Tina, and I'm beginning to hate you.

Speaker 1 It's a really good Twilight Zone episode, which I can't really think of a bad Twilight Zone episode, but this one is particularly good. Yeah, it was good.

Speaker 1 I found two other things about, or one other thing, I guess, about Chatty Kathy. Did you see the voice thing I sent?

Speaker 2 I did not.

Speaker 1 So, June Faraday, who was the voice of Rocket J Squirrel on Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Cindy Lou Who on the Grinch Christmas special, she was the first voice of Chatty Kathy. All right.

Speaker 1 And then they re-released Chatty Kathy in 1970, and the voice was Maureen McCormick, who played Marsha on the Brady Bunch. Wow.

Speaker 1 Marsha, Marsha, Marsha. Trivia Masters, if you're looking for a new question,

Speaker 1 Merry Christmas.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that no one will know. Unless they listen to stuff you should know.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We should talk about Polly Pocket for a minute because that was

Speaker 2 a miniature doll. It was a British inventor named Chris Wiggs who built a mini dollhouse for his daughter out of a makeup compact in the early 80s.
And Mattel was like, this thing's great.

Speaker 2 And they licensed Polly Pocket as a doll in the early 90s. And all of a sudden, mini toys were a big craze.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Reese Witherspoon and her production company has optioned this away.

Speaker 2 I don't know about away from Lena Dunham, but Lena Dunham was originally attached a few years ago and is no longer attached. And so they're trying to make Polly Pocket into a movie.

Speaker 2 starring Lily Collins, Phil Collins' daughter.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What about American Girl dolls? Did you know about the origin of them? They came from an elementary school teacher in Wisconsin named Pleasant Roland, which is a great name.

Speaker 2 That's Jerry's nickname.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 it is.

Speaker 2 Jerry Pleasant Roland. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But Pleasant Roland wanted to teach kids about history, I guess, specifically girls.

Speaker 1 And she started releasing them in 1986, these American Girl dolls. And at first, they were just mail order and they were expensive too, $65 in $198,

Speaker 1 which is like $100,000 today, I'm guessing.

Speaker 1 But they were a big seller right off the bat. And eventually you could find them in stores too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like their own stores,

Speaker 2 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 1 That is quite a dare.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 that's not a dare, actually, because that's not funny if you have a real fear like that.

Speaker 1 Rich, 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 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And, you know, American Girl dolls look sort of real, but that ain't nothing like what's coming out of FAO Schwartz and companies like Reborn and companies like Ashton Drake because they are making these realistic baby dolls.

Speaker 2 We finally, on this last trip to New York on fall break, I'd always wanted to go to FAO Schwartz in New York City.

Speaker 2 And we did. We took a trip through FAO Schwartz and I recommend it.
I mean, it's very, very busy.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like down to like the little veins in their temples, the little capillaries and the smell.

Speaker 1 Did the one you hold smell of like talcum or anything?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they smell and look like babies, like full stop.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and they even have weight to them too, like heft.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 For a close-up if you're Bradley Cooper in a Clint Eastwood movie.

Speaker 1 Oh, really? Which one?

Speaker 2 The American Sniper, this very famous scene where he's clearly holding a fake baby.

Speaker 1 I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 Check it out on YouTube. It's hysterical.

Speaker 1 Okay, but

Speaker 1 people collect these things. I mean, they are essentially like works of art.
They're usually made individually.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But there's other things that people do with them too. There's role-playing, like just for fun, treating them as if they're alive.

Speaker 1 Because again, they look a lot like a live baby or infant.

Speaker 1 Some people use them to fill an emotional void.

Speaker 1 And then apparently they're also useful for Alzheimer's patients and dementia patients. And when I first saw this, I was like, that sounds pretty mean, actually.

Speaker 1 They don't tell the patient that this is a real baby. They're like, here, hold this doll.

Speaker 1 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 or taking care of their own kids.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I looked that up. I mean, it's sort of pluses and minuses.
It can definitely help reduce dementia-caused agitation and stuff like that,

Speaker 2 all in a non-pharmacological way, which can be good. But there are critics that say like,

Speaker 2 You got to be real careful how you do this because it can also reduce dignity and give the impression like a reinforced like viewing viewing people with dementia like they're children.

Speaker 2 So you just gotta

Speaker 2 do it the right way is what I've read.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's I'm sure there's a myriad wrong ways to do it too.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 that was a great, great call out, Chuck. Yeah.
Do you remember my buddy?

Speaker 2 My buddy and me?

Speaker 1 My buddy.

Speaker 1 Keep my body. My buddy.
My buddy. My buddy and me.

Speaker 2 Something like that.

Speaker 1 That was close. Close enough.

Speaker 2 That was the,

Speaker 1 what do you call that?

Speaker 2 When you got a song?

Speaker 1 An earworm, an earworm.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no, the jingle. Yeah, that was the jingle.
Everyone's screaming, jingle.

Speaker 2 It was very infectious. I still remember it for the most part all these years later.

Speaker 2 That was the inspiration for Chucky from Child's Play, but that was a doll that came out in 1985 that was

Speaker 2 kind of during the Cabbage Patch Kid craze. They were like, hey, what about a doll that's made specifically for boys? Right.
And listen to this.

Speaker 2 Hasbro Senior Vice President president of marketing Stephen Swartz in 1995 told the Boston Globe this.

Speaker 2 My buddy is positioned as macho. Like it's soft macho, but still macho.
Like we show him climbing trees, riding their bikes. We didn't position it like a girl doll, like soft and sweet.

Speaker 2 It's macho, but soft macho.

Speaker 1 Right. He was wearing all these medallions with his chest hair poking through.
Yeah. So that was thanks to our friends at Mental Floss who turned up that quote, which is priceless.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I should have read it in a Boston accent, but oh well no i think you you got it that was great missed an opportunity that was philly right

Speaker 2 uh well that was for the boston globe but i don't know oh you mean my accent

Speaker 2 no no no no that philly accent's much different okay um yeah you didn't say yin's yeah and he would go out after and have a hoagie

Speaker 1 so like you said he was the role for or the model for chucky from child's play

Speaker 2 That's what they say. They didn't never confirm that.

Speaker 1 It's pretty, it's pretty close. Like Talkie Tina, Chucky.
Yeah. These things are close enough to just draw some assumptions here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I know to people who don't have it, it can sound like, well, fear of dolls. It almost sounds like something you can make a movie out of.
If you have a fear of dolls, a petiophobia,

Speaker 1 like you can...

Speaker 1 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 pediophobia.

Speaker 1 But one of the

Speaker 1 causes behind it or 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.

Speaker 1 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 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 You know, you used to publish when we were doing like image lists on the old houseupworks.com days, your list of scary looking toys.

Speaker 1 That thing is just gone.

Speaker 2 Isn't it not on the web anymore? No. Oh, well, that's probably good.
But a lot of these things are creepy looking, and a lot of them are dolls.

Speaker 2 And, you know.

Speaker 2 They didn't mean to make them creepy looking. I think this just, you know, some decision is made.
Like

Speaker 2 Little Miss No Name in 1965,

Speaker 2 Margaret Keene's Big Eyes was a big deal. And so we were like, why don't we make a doll with those big giant eyes? And they did, and it's terrifying.

Speaker 1 She is terrifying. Again, unintentionally.
I think also part of it, she has like shadow under her eyes.

Speaker 1 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 terrifying.
Little Miss No Name.

Speaker 2 Yes. It's awful.

Speaker 1 It is awful. But this was like a serious release of a doll in 1965.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 there's plenty you can come up with. I would suggest just go looking up terrifying dolls, knockoff dolls or knockoff toys is always a little fun rabbit hole to go down.

Speaker 1 But they're not inherently creepy is the thing.

Speaker 1 And the reason we know that is because there's kids out there who will play with what older people will consider a creepy doll, but the kid doesn't think of it that way.

Speaker 1 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 is really creepy, because that's how humans start to think of things as creepy.

Speaker 1 And if they don't think of their doll as creepy, it is not your place to tell that kid that doll is creepy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 There's an Instagram account of a mom

Speaker 1 who has been documenting her daughter, Briar, with her doll, Creepy Chloe.

Speaker 1 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 2 Yeah, just resist the urge, parents.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Stifle.

Speaker 1 If you want to know, if you want to know,

Speaker 1 yeah, can't you see Briar like growing up and sitting in her dorm smoking pot one day and being 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 2 Or why didn't she ever tell me?

Speaker 1 It might be the other

Speaker 1 way of thinking about it. Yeah.
So

Speaker 1 just real quick, the thing that usually explains why we're creeped out by dolls is the Uncanny Valley.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 It's a good one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You can find it on stuffyushouldknow.com, by the way.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 1 You got anything else on dolls or Christmas or anything like that, buddy?

Speaker 2 Nothing.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm glad we did this one.

Speaker 1 I too. Thank you for coming in from home this morning on Christmas morning to do this.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Well, hopefully your orange rolls aren't cold or anything like that. So let's go home.
Let's go to our homes, our shared home. Yeah.
That's something else.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's for New Year's.

Speaker 1 And we'll wish everybody a Merry Christmas, huh? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I hope everyone has a great holiday, and I hope you're with ones you love. And if you're spending Christmas in a less than ideal way, we are always thinking about you for real.

Speaker 1 Very nice, Chuck. And I don't think we'll do listener mail, huh?

Speaker 2 Nah, nuts to that, as you say.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, if you want to say Merry Christmas or Happy New Year, Happy Holidays, or anything, hi, whatever, you can send it via email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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