Throwback Thursday review: Ideal Saucy Walker

Yet another craptastic week, as Grandma is once again ill and refusing to go to the hospital.  Le sigh, it's approaching a full year since this B.S. started, and she's still about the same as she was.  Anyway, once again I present an Ideal doll for the perusal of y'all, my dear readers.  I hate biasing this blog towards Ideal toys, but I've got so danged many of them and they're all so cute!  This one is Saucy Walker, whom I bought from a beloved (and sadly defunct) antique store for my...oh, I think it was my twenty-fourth birthday.  This is what she once looked like.

If only I'd left well enough alone.  I originally had Saucy's review scheduled for last August (the 24th to be exact), but in the above picture her hair is a mess.  I undid her pigtails and tried to smooth the hair out...and it was the same problem I encountered with Peaches.  A huge chunk of the wig came off in my hand, cap and all.  One thing led to another, and my poor little dolly ended up looking like this:  mostly bald and in a state of undress, with big chunks of wig still clinging to the back of her head.

I promptly ordered a new wig and it looks great as y'all will see, but I'm pretty ticked with myself for wrecking Saucy's old one.  Unlike Peaches' old wig Saucy's did NOT smell like cigarette smoke, and it was a lovely color, dark brown with a little red mixed in.  Truthfully though...it was getting ratty and dirty.  Check this out.

Furthermore, when I disrobed Saucy her dress started to crumble in places, so I needed a new outfit for her as well as a wig.  In short, I had a lot to do before Saucy would be presentable for a review, thus why I'm doing it now instead of last August.  Y'all will just have to take my word that this is the same doll as before, because she looks VERY different!

Like her Ideal relative Kissy, Saucy came in several different sizes and was available for many years, with my particular example being twenty-two inches tall and dating from...well, she's hard plastic, so she'd have to date from between 1951 and 1957.  I can't pin an exact year down, but Saucy dolls from the sixties were all vinyl, and as far as I know Saucy Walker didn't exist in the forties so my doll would HAVE to be from the fifties.  Why is all this important, you ask?  Well...it's not, not really; I just like to know the nitty gritties of who I'm reviewing.

With nitty-gritties over, let's get this show on the road.  Saucy's hair is obviously wigged, and as I mentioned above, this wig is a new one.  It's a Monique wig, size 14-15 in light ginger, and it fits nicely. 

I wanted a short auburn wig with bangs in the front, but that proved to be an elusive creature to find so I settled for the one I now have.  The style is more elaborate than what I'm used to, with soft, loose curls framing Saucy's face and trailing down her neck.

The rest of the hair is gathered into two thick braids.  The base of each braid is trimmed with a white ribbon...

...but the ends just have these rubber bands, which appear to be aging.  I'll need to replace or cover those somehow.  The ends of these braids are curled nicely.

It's a nice wig, though I don't think I have it properly positioned on Saucy's head.  It looks like it should come lower on her forehead than how I have it.  As a little addendum, notice the back of Saucy's hairline.  Fragments of her old wig show.

Those fragments will eventually have to come off, but it showed me that the color of the new wig is closer to the color of the old one than I originally thought.  The style is radically different, but I got the color very near dead on.  Notice that under this hairline it's possible to see Saucy's markings; like the vast majority of Ideal's products, she is marked "IDEAL DOLL."

Now to the face.

Sure, Saucy may look adorable, but it's possible and surprisingly easy to catch this doll at a bad angle.  Indeed, I saw many a Saucy Walker doll in a magazine that was poorly photographed, and I dismissed her as "ugly" or "goofy."  Joke's on me, because if I get the camera just right I can catch my doll looking cute.  It's not easy though, for reasons I'll discuss when I go over this doll's body.  The eyes are silver and they sleep when the doll is reclined.  When the walking function was functioning these eyes would move from side to side or "flirt," but since my doll's walking mech is out of commission her eyes stay permanently gazing to her right/my left.  The eyes are topped with dainty multi-stroke eyebrows in a smiling expression, and rooted eyelashes that match her hair...both old and new.

Apparently these eyes can pop out of joint and become disconjugate, but for now my doll has dodged that bullet.

I did say that I'd discuss the difficulties of photographing this doll when I got to joints, but truthfully, the lower part of the face is part of the problem.  It's got full, blushed cheeks and a nicely sculpted mouth with little teeth and a molded tongue...

...but if I don't get the angle of the camera just so, she looks like she's high on something...or worse, she looks like she's been HANGED, like my poor little Shirley Temple tends to look!  At least I could restring Shirley and tighten her up a bit.  Saucy is NOT strung, so I can't tighten her strings.

Saucy's body is similar in shape and size to that of her Ideal cousin Kissy, but her legs are longer and she has more of a "little girl" shape than a toddler shape.  She is made of hard, smooth plastic all over, plastic that feels and sounds a lot like composition.

As far as I know Saucy Walker was never made out of composition, so there's that out of the way.  I think Saucy Walker dolls either talked or cried somehow, as my doll has holes for a speaker cut in her chest.

Some of these dolls vocalized and some didn't, so I'm not sure if my doll has a crier that's mute, or if she just doesn't have a crier.  Doesn't matter much, I guess.  It's not like I intend to wind her up and play with her or anything.  No, I just want my girl to look nice and stay in one piece, and fortunately when I managed to get her clothes off I found no signs of splitting or cracking in the seams (apparently these dolls can and do split).

Like Shirley Temple, Saucy is marked on her back as well as on her neck.

I'm unsure what aged child Saucy is supposed to be, though the walking function suggests a very young child.  She's the same height as Kissy, but her proportions suggest that she's out of the toddler stage, so maybe she's about four or five.  Saucy's hands are chubby, much more so than Kissy's, with short fingers, little dimples on the knuckles, and blushing.  The right hand also shows a little crazing, which I was not expecting to see on this hard plastic doll.

Her feet are also chubby, but not as boxy as Kissy's.  They too have little dimples and nails molded on, details that are more sharply defined than those on her hands.

Now, joints.  Here is where I'm a little hesitant to continue, because all of Saucy Walker's joints move in tandem with one another.  Originally, when the walking mech operated her arms and head would move right along with her legs.  This normally isn't a problem for the walking dolls I've encountered...but remember what I did to my Crissy doll!  I was checking for motion in her neck and I ended up breaking the mechanism that made her move!  So I'm going to proceed with Saucy's review, but I'm going to do so with EXTREME caution.  Saucy is jointed in the usual five places, shoulders, hips, neck.  These joints only move back and forth, no lateral motion, and they do not hold a pose.

The arm joints are a little loose and sometimes like to sag out of their sockets.

As for the legs, they're screwed on.  Sort of like a modified pin joint.

My Saucy can't walk (I assume that that mechanism broke long ago), and I can see no way to make her walk even if she could.  She certainly can't stand on her own, not the way she pitches forward.

She can sit though, provided that I move her hips carefully.

The Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll" utilized a Vogue Brikette that had been modified to move through the use of a small Saucy Walker body.  In one scene a knob can clearly be seen on the doll's back, a knob that is used to wind the doll up and set her on her course of mayhem.  I'm unsure if this was just thrown in for the sake of the show or if the smaller Saucy Walker dolls actually did wind up.  If the latter is true, then the same can't be said for my Saucy.  She lacks anything of that sort on her body, no knobs or levers or buttons, nothing.  If any of y'all are experienced with how Saucy Walker is supposed to work, kindly give me a holler.

I don't know if Saucy's old blue outfit is original to her or not, but I do know that it looked terribly cute on her.  Unfortunately it is not aging well; when I took it off of her to fix her wig I found plenty of holes and splits that I didn't know were there previously.  I didn't want to put Saucy back in a tattered dress, so I did the impractical thing and bought her a new dress, one that looks eerily like the dress Shirley Temple wore in Stand Up And Cheer.  Like the wig, it came from eBay.

Instead of red polka dots, this dress sports a print of red cherries, pink hearts, and tiny green polka dots.  It's also possible to see the hem here, which is a bit overdone but is in no danger of falling out.

The skirt appears to be both gathered and pleated at the waist.

The back sports a sash, which I'll be treating with care.  The sash was the first thing to break on Saucy's old dress.

The back closes with two snaps. 

If I had any critiques about this dress, it would be these.  Both of these snaps are in the bodice, while the skirt has none.  If I'm not careful the skirt will flop open like a hospital gown.  That wouldn't be such a big deal, except that Saucy does not yet have any skivvies.

The dress came with this red satin ribbon, which I assume is supposed to go around the waist of the dress and add a decorative touch to the sash.

Indeed, it does make the sash look better.

On her feet Saucy wears these socks, which are topped with lace.  These are starting to thin a bit so a new pair of socks may be in Saucy's future.

Topping off the look are these cute little cat shoes, which are real little shoes for real little children.

I originally got them for Kissy, but they proved to be too small.  Saucy can wear them easily though; in fact, they're a little too big!

I also kept Saucy's original shoes, which are in storage.  They're simple black vinyl mary-janes and they fit better.

Finding replacement clothes for Saucy was once quite easy, as Jan's Doll Closet carried a wide selection of items for the multiple sizes of Saucy Walker.  However, that website appears to have downsized quite dramatically and has nowhere near the selection of things that it did, and that in turn means that I can't get any new dresses for my larger dolls like I originally wanted to.  Yeah...I'm kinda, sorta, really IRKED about that.  Anywho, I suspect that my particular doll can wear Kissy's clothes, but that's merely a suspicion, and when I have suspicions I like to try and verify or debunk them.  Here's what Saucy looks like in Kissy's romper.

Kissy's romper is too big, though I could still put this on Saucy if I was absolutely strapped for clothes.  The romper has a sash just like Saucy's new dress does, so I was able to bring the waist in a bit, but even with that measure Kissy's outfit doesn't fit well at all.  Nor does this cute Hello Kitty outfit fit.

I know that too-big doll clothes are not the end of the world, but this just does not cut it for me.  I prefer this outfit on next week's doll.  A smaller size would probably fit Saucy okay, but I don't have a smaller size so that's that.  Baby clothes are hit-and-miss, and Kissy's outfit is out altogether.  That leaves eBay and Etsy, and both of those are problematic as well.  Etsy has patterns for Saucy Walker dolls but very few ready-made clothes, and eBay has ready-made clothes that are expensive.  Saucy's cherry-print dress cost...I think it was twenty bucks, and prices just go up from there.  Most of the dresses I've stumbled across require at least two Jacksons.  I guess I should consider myself fortunate that dresses for vintage dolls aren't more expensive, but I still don't want to spend forty to fifty bucks on a single doll dress...at least not on a regular basis.

Time to sum it up!

BAD
*Walking mech is broken, though I think this is par for the course with these dolls.
*Original wig was in bad shape and eventually disintegrated.
*Original clothes are VERY fragile
   *all of these things are age-related, not due to manufacturing flaws
*Hard to find affordable new clothes for a doll like this!
*Joints are hard to manipulate; she has one position, and one position only

GOOD
*This doll has a cute face, one that changed my entire opinion of Saucy Walker dolls.
*She cleaned up nicely; with her old wig she looked a little scruffy, but now she doesn't.
*Surprisingly sturdy; I wouldn't want to drop Saucy, but she doesn't feel as fragile as some of my other vintage toys.
*Easy to rewig.  I was expecting that to be the hard part, but it wasn't.

I think I said at one point in the beginning that I once did not care for Saucy Walker dolls, as their open mouths and off-kilter heads made them look slack-jawed and vacant.  Owning this doll has changed my opinions completely, and I advise anyone who has been put off by these dolls to get a look at one in person before making a final judgement.  I advise caution when messing with original wigs, as I ruined my doll's old wig through stupidity on my own part.  I also warn against trying to stand this doll up on her own and trying to put her in some cutesy position.  These dolls are largely for being looked at now, but that being said it doesn't take much effort to make them look presentable.  It does take some cash though, since dresses this size aren't the easiest to find.  For me though, this doll was worth the money and the effort; I get a kick out of seeing her grouped with my other tall vintage dolls.

Much love,
RagingMoon1987