Child Of The 1980’s

There have been a great many different dolls over the years that try to mimic the actions of a real baby, some more successfully than others. It’s a given that most dolls have the weighted eyes that shut when they are put in a lying down position, but there have been attempts at emulating the sounds of a baby crying, gurgling and burping, wetting its nappy and even nappy rash! However, by far the most popular of these many dolls must certainly be the Tiny Tears doll.

As the name suggests, Tiny Tears special feature was that she could be made to cry. This was achieved by feeding her with a bottle of water, and then placing a dummy in her mouth once she had drunk her fill. Pressing hard on her tummy (note to kids - this isn’t recommended with real babies) would cause tears to stream from her eyes. No wonder at it, as I don’t think I’d like being punched in the guts after I’d just finished feeding either. Water also emerged from her other end too, yielding a wet nappy.

The first iteration of the doll was released in 1965 by Palitoy and was 16 inches in height and made from vinyl. The following year a smaller 12 inch version was also released, called Teeny Tiny Tears. Tiny Tears was quite a realistic looking doll, although the shock of blonde hair she sported was rather more than the average baby might have. This original version didn’t actually cry though, and it wasn’t until the early 1970’s that this feature was added after a redesign of the face of the doll, which was made to have softer looking features than before.

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These are another example of a toy that dates back many decades, but which were still popular in the 1980’s, and probably are still popular today, if you can find where to buy one that is.

By Paper Dress-up Dolls what I am referring to usually came in the form of a book. The front or back page would feature a picture of a person, female or male, though usually the former, dressed only in their underwear. You cut this out (using scissors, making sure you got a grown up to help of course), along with a strip of card that had two slots cut in it. By slotting the strip of card onto the picture of the person you could make the figure stand up.

Doesn’t sound that much fun so far does it? Where the fun came in was in the pages of the rest of the book. This comprised various articles of clothing and accessories for the figure, each with little tabs coming off at various places. Cutting these out with your little pair of rounded end paper scissors was a bit of a fiddly exercise, especially around the tabs, but worth it in the end.  By folding the tabs around the figure the clothes could be made to stay on, and so you could have hours of fun mixing and matching outfits to your hearts content.

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Teddy Ruxpin first appeared in 1985 and was intended as an educational toy that would help and encourage young children to learn to read. The toy took the form of a cute and cuddly teddy bear who could actually read stories to a child, with it’s eyes and mouth moving in time with the words of the story.

How did it achieve this magical feat? Well, inside the bear there was an audio cassette tape player. The books that Teddy Ruxpin could read also came with an audio tape that slotted inside the bear, and obviously provided the required speech. The tapes contained signals which instructed the bear to blink or open or close it’s mouth, thus giving the effect of the bear reading the story. This was achieved by using the fact that an audio tape can store stereo sound, so one channel of sound was the speech and music, and the other channel (which was not played by the bear) contained the mouth and eye information. Any tape could actually be played in the bear, but the mouth and eyes would not move unless the tape was specially made for the toy.

Extra books and tapes could be bought, although I believe they were all about the adventures of Teddy Ruxpin and his pal Grubby, a second character also available as a toy that could be connected to the main toy allowing the two to interact with each other as the stories were told. Grubby was a strange orange thing with eight legs (two of which could be arms I suppose). I guess he was meant to be a caterpillar, but I really don’t know.

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It’s less of the case today, but in the 1980’s little girls were generally either Sindy Girls or Barbie Girls (please don’t start singing at this point!). Today Barbie has garnered a pretty big share of the dress up doll market, but in the 1980’s Sindy just had the edge, in the UK at least.

My sister was a Sindy Girl, and I’m quite glad about that, given that her body shape was more representative of that of a real woman. You can imagine if she was scaled up to human size she would look like a woman. Barbie on the other hand is too long and thin. If you were to scale her up by the same amount I reckon she would probably need to be about 7 feet tall. In this day and age, with young girls striving to look like skinny supermodels, Sindy would be a better role model.

Sindy first appeared in the 1960’s, and she was generally sold with a single outfit of clothes. Extra clothes could be bought separately so you only ever needed a single doll. Of course, sometimes a particular outfit was only available with a new doll, but you could always try and buy a Sindy with a different colour of hair to the one you already had.

By the 1980’s, not wanting to be outdone by Barbie, Sindy had amassed a range of accessories such as a house, a beauty salon, a car and a horse. One of the best accessories my sister had was her “working” cooker. This came out at around the time that having a toy that made sounds (almost impossible not to have these days) was becoming affordable for toy manufacturers. The cooker was a very cleverly made toy that came with some pots and pans and a kettle. When one of these was placed on the cooker’s hob, a bubbling sound, or in the case of the kettle a high pitched whistle, would be heard.

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If there was ever a decade where companies learnt there was money to be made from kids then the 1980’s is surely it. This surely was the beginning of the merchandising age, where any toy, cartoon series, film, comic could reasonably expect to be refactored from one form of media to all of the others, with a motley array of lunchboxes, quilt covers, clothing and just about anything else you can think of thrown in for good measure.

One such example is the He-Man range of toys. The toy range was originally conceived as a tie-in range of toys for the Conan the Barbarian film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Given this films propensity for violence and “more adult themes” it was deemed that such a toy range was doomed to failure (no real surprise there - who ever thought it was a good idea in the first place?). The designs were therefore tweaked and in 1981 Mattel unleashed He-Man on the world.

In his original muscular form, our blonde haired hero wore little more than a pair of furry underpants and a harness intended for keeping his Power Sword and Battle Axe on his back. He also carried a shield. By far the most interesting feature of this He-Man was his power punch. The body of the toy twisted at the waist and was sprung loaded, so you could wind him up and make him punch other toys with surprising force. That is until the elastic inside him began to loosen up!

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I certainly remember my sister owning a Strawberry Shortcake doll, but I didn’t realise that, like the Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake started off as a range of greetings cards from American Greetings. The characters were introduced as cards in 1977, but it wasn’t until the 1980’s when the toy range really made it’s mark, spawning other merchandise such as comic books, videogames and the inevitable cartoon series.

The unique selling point of the Strawberry Shortcake dolls was that they were scented to match the desert or fruit after which they were named. Each doll also came with a small plastic pet, with Strawberry Shortcake’s being Custard the Cat. For some reason the advertising jingle sticks in my head on this point, it went something like:-

It’s Strawberry Shortcake in her floppy hat.
Strawberry Shortcake and Custard the Cat.

As already mentioned Ms. Shortcake was joined by friends such as Apple Dumplin’, Raspberry Tart and Lemon Meringue. With names like that most of the toys were female, although there was the odd male character thrown in as well. The advent of the cartoon series meant that Strawberry Shortcake required a nemesis to go up against, which ended up being the tongue twistingly named Peculiar Purple Pieman of Porcupine Peak! He too came with a pet - Captain Cackle the Berry Bird. Read more…

Girl’s World was a toy that allowed young girls to practice their hair styles and make-up techniques without having to do it on themselves, their friends, or their unwilling siblings. The toy consisted of a fairly scale model of a female human head with long hair, and was available in both blonde and brunette versions. It came with a number of accessories including curlers, hairbrush and some toy lipstick and eye shadow in a few different colours. The happy young beauty technician could then give the head a make over, and if they didn’t like it, wipe it clean and start again.

The pictured Girl’s World is the classic example, but there were also some improvements made over the years. I remember the one my sister had a length of hair which could be pulled out the top of the head and rolled back in again to create styles with various different hair lengths. It also came with some hair dying pens that you could draw on the hair with to colour it. The dye was obviously not permanent and could be washed out when you were finished.

I wonder how many hairdressers and beauty salon employees started out their training with one of these toys?

Girl’s World is still available today, with one version now coming with beads that can be put into the hair as well. There’s also a rather disturbing talking model, that has an animated mouth. The reason I call it disturbing is that when it speaks there’s something that looks decidedly creepy about it. I guess it puts me in mind of Chucky from the Child’s Play films a little bit too much. The idea has also been picked up by other toy manufacturers and there is now also a Barbie branded version of the toy.

Monster In My Pocket was a series of small collectible plastic monsters first released by Matchbox in 1990, so it’s possible that if you were born during the 1980’s you will remember them. The reason I’m writing about them today is because I was reminded of them after seeing an advert on TV the other night for something incredibly similar - unfortunately I didn’t catch the name of these new ones, but it appears as though Monster In My Pockets are still available now as well.

Originally the monsters were made from a rubbery kind of plastic and were available in bright primary colours, a single colour for the entire monster. Later editions added painted details or glow in the dark plastic, and the most recent editions are actually quite intricately painted. They were generally bought in packs of four, although there were special edition ones that were made available in packs of breakfast cereals. The idea behind them was that they could be used as a kind of Top Trumps style game - or at least I think that was the idea. Each monster had a number moulded on it’s back or underside which was it’s point total. I presume that you were supposed to use them to battle with your friends, but I’m not sure of the exact rules.

The Monster In My Pocket series was available in both the US and Europe, but it seemed to have more success initially in the UK and Europe than America. They also courted controversy in the UK by the fact that several of the so called monsters were actually Hindu deities, which obviously was deemed to be quite offensive to the people of this religion. The Hindu Gods Kali, Ganesha and Hanuman were all removed from the line up in the UK, although Yama, god of death, wasn’t for some reason.

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