Okay, it's not so live since I'm sharing it, but while looking for information on Ideal's Lazy Dazy I found
a list of thirteen dolls from the Me Decade that were listed as "funky" and "bizarre." Granted, some of 'em were a little on the odd side; one of 'em was a talking Redd Fox doll. Too bad he didn't ask his young owners "
How would you like one 'cross yo lip?" Lazy Dazy was there too, for reasons I'll never know. Maybe the fact that you had to "spank" her to get her to work added to the bizarre bit. But mixed in with Redd and Dazy were a few friends I've shared here in the past. The Rock Flowers were on the list. Remember
Heather?
I went through a brief period where I wanted to find every Dawn competitor I could think of, but thankfully that phase didn't last too long because those tiny dolls lose their shoes too easily! Anyway, music was amazing in the seventies, ranging from Glen Campbell's smooth country baritone to Deep Purple's proto-metal wailing. There truly was something for everyone, and...well, I hesitate to say that ALL the toy companies got in on it, but Mattel certainly did! Heather and her Rock Flower friends were essentially Live Action Barbie and her friends shrunk to Dawn's size and given a stand that could fit on the spindle of a record player. Seeing as lots of little girls of the seventies loved both music and dolls, I fail to see what's so bizarre about this bunch.
Softina, on the other hand, I get. Here's
Softina; mine looks a little different from the one in the article, and indeed the article shows their Softina as being eleven inches. Mine is bigger than that. Pardon the honking watermark, by the way; the blog was having trouble with photo theft at the time.
Okay, Softina herself isn't so bad. She's essentially just a foam-filled baby doll that was and still is good for cuddles. No, what landed her on the list was a swaddling that was available for her. It was...a shoe. Not just any shoe, but apparently a Converse-style sneaker, the kind that I often wear and the kind that the Tenth Doctor loved a bit too much! WHYYYYY would anyone put a baby in a shoe??? That's...that's just weird. I guess that a shoe is kinda tame compared to the ice cream cones and bumblebees that swaddled the
Baby Born Surprises, but it's still pretty out there.
The Sunshine Family also made the list, and I've talked about them in the past.
The list called them the most seventies dolls of the seventies, and...yeah, I agree. Stephie, Steve, and their revoltingly-named daughter Sweets were hippies to the core, living in a motor home and selling handmade stuff. Now I'm not knocking that. I love handmade stuff, and if folks want to live earthy-like, the more power to them. The Sunshine Family did that without being repulsively preachy about loving the Earth, reducing-reusing-recycling, all that jazz. There's just something kinda...since I'm a modern-day woman there's just something kinda weird now about all that. Probably back then it was NBD since just about everyone was doing it. More concerning to me about these dolls is how they're aging; Stephie's feet melted to her shoes, and their Southern belle friend
Rosa Lee Linden had to have a new body altogether. But these were sweet, wholesome dolls that put some emphasis on family and togetherness, something that a lot of folks take for granted nowadays. They're dated, I suppose...yeah, that's it! They're dated! They're not all that weird, they're just very, very, VERY old-school. I wouldn't mind finding their truck, by the way! I've got the family, so why not give 'em wheels?
Lastly, there was Baby Beans. This doll is NOT mine, though I do have my own Baby Beans doll on the way. This one belongs to Tam, and this photo was used with her kind permission. The link to this doll's post is
HERE. Thank you, Tam!
Again, I can kinda see where the article was coming from, but the only weird thing about the dolls is their name. And even then it makes sense, because they're full of plastic pellets or "beans," just like Beanie Babies were and are. Some of the individual dolls also had goofy bean-themed names like "Green Beans" or "Navy Beans." Thank goodness there was never one named "Kidney Beans"! Oh, and guess what? Some of them came packaged in shoes as well. I fail to see the connection between shoes and beans, but at least Softina isn't alone. Besides, I'm working on a post that involves two small dolls that reside in plastic fruits, so it's all good. Baby Beans were ridiculously popular and came in a wide assortment of colors, expressions, and sizes. There were even Mama Beans and Daddy Beans, each with a small Baby Beans of their own. Daddy Beans was the one who made MeTV's list, by the way. Wait 'til y'all see the one I picked; he's pretty goofy himself.
Do any of y'all remember these? Did any of y'all own any of 'em? Do you still have any? Discuss. As for Lazy Dazy, she will come to live at Casa del Luna someday, but it won't be anytime soon. She's expensive when in good shape!
Love to all,
RagingMoon1987
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I owned the Sunshine Family, plus Grandma and Grandpa, their house, the "surrey cycle," their dog and cat, and a little house for the dog and cat. As an adult, I got the barn, but later sold it on. There were little pamphlets that came with everything (I think) that gave ideas on how to use things from around the home to make things for the dolls to use. For example, you could use a milk carton and some Con-tact paper to make a sofa, which my mom helped me do. You could make a crib for the baby from the green plastic baskets that fruit gets sold in. My mom actually disliked it because I bugged her for help making things. They've always seemed normal to me, if hippie-ish. I don't even know now why people would see them as weird, although of course I grew up with all that. Nowadays, they'd have an Etsy store, and Stephie would have a blog titled "Sunshine Stephie" where she posted about her crafts and her garden.
ReplyDeleteMy sister had a Baby Beans. Baby Beans spent all of her time in my sister's bed; my sis slept with her at night, but didn't really play with her.
Pity I'm such a lazy slob, or I could make a blog for Stephie. You're right, of course; they would've had an Etsy shop and it would've been kickin'!!
DeleteI have my own Baby Beans on the way so I won't have to steal from Tam in the future. He's gonna be a funny-looking little goober!
I see nothing at all repulsive about reducing, reusing, and recycling. If we'd all stuck to that kind of thing, maybe the world wouldn't be in the state it's in today. (I can get a bit 'preachy' about that stuff myself!) They used to do that stuff back in the 30's, during the depression, and the 40's, during the war, out of necessity. Then we got out of the immediate 'need' for that behavior after WWII, and became the wasteful, over producing people we are now. And being wasteful and overproducing means we're creating more pollution, more waste for landfills, (and oceans!) and using more resources doing it. Hippies had their drawbacks, but being more Earth conscious was not one of them.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there were several other 'shoe babies'. I'm thinking of something very small. I'm looking forward to seeing your Bean. I love those.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that reducing, reusing, and recycling was a bad thing! I wish recycling were the law, like it is in other countries. I should probably clarify that. No, I think the three Rs are good, but not enuff people do it.
DeleteI'll share my Bean when he gets here; he's funny-looking!
I have the whole Sunshine Family including grandparents *and* the carry case for them - I have to say I thought they were funny looking little dolls when I first met them, but I wouldn't say they were any weirder than Mattel's Heart Family in the 80s. Just a little off scale to use with anything Barbie. I actually have two sets of the mom and dad, I found a second set in with my vintage Barbie dolls about a month ago.
ReplyDeleteI actually think the Heart family is kinda cringy, LOL! The Sunshine family had more of a point than they did.
DeleteI think all dolls are products of their time, to some degree. I could view the whole history of what was considered trendy and in vogue just by looking at dolls and their wardrobes through time, especially longstanding lines like Barbie that crossed multiple decades. I think that at least part of the reason that Barbie has lasted so long as a brand is because her look kept evolving over the years: from the Paris fashions and pillbox hats of the early 60s, to the Carnaby Street British Invasion, through peasant dresses and polyester plaids, disco wear and primetime soap style glamour with big hair. There were even Barbie's that tied in with popular, non-fashion national fads like the Bicentennial, Pogs, and Build A Bear.
ReplyDeleteTo get back to the point, people of later generations tend to view what came before as passe at best or weirdly nonsensical at worst. Anyone remember pet rocks? They're one of those generation specific things that receive frequent ridicule from people who weren't there and so just don't get it. I wasn't there myself, but I wouldn't ridicule someone else who was there for having fond memories of their pet rock.
I do have a few Sunshine Family dolls in my collection, and a few dolls from the African American spin-off line The Happy Family, that I bought second-hand. I'm pretty sure I heard that some people found the insert eyes on these dolls off-putting when they were released, because they were so different from previous Mattel fashion dolls. As far as the Rock Flowers dolls go, it's possible they ended up on a list of bizarre dolls because the idea of a doll that dances on a record player seemed strange to a society where record players themselves are no longer ubiquitous in every American household. Although record players did experience a bit of a resurgence in the U.S., so maybe it was the dolls brightly colored 'dated' fashions that landed them on the list.
Signed, Treesa
Yeah, I was thinking about how all our dolls are dated to a certain extent. Heck, Luciana was dated as soon as her year was over, because so few people took to that spacey style. I like it myself, but that's just me.
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