Doll Development in the 1960s-1970s
by The 1960s were dominated by manufacturers’ desperate attempts to decrypt or improve on the seemingly undefeatable Barbie formula, including the British Sindy, who was the most successful of these rival dolls.
She was consciously developed to counter the explicit U.S. cultural references in the Barbie narrative and is still celebrated among Britons as an icon of resistance to the global reach of North America. Mary Quant, the most internationally successful British designer of the early 1960s, is believed to have provided advice about Sindy’s wardrobe. Sindy’s boyfriend, Paul, is believed to have been a reference to Paul McCartney of the Beatles-again a nationalist entry in the contest of the world’s public cultures.
There were Barbie clones from many different nations in both Europe and Asia. Some of these dolls were directly copied after Mattel products and often were offered at a lower price, because authentic Mattel products in the early days of Barbie were extremely expensive outside of the United States. Thus such dolls were not always regarded as “cheap” or tawdry. Barbie’s cost, which was seen as beyond the reach of ordinary families, and the urgent pleas girls made to their parents to buy them a Barbie were also read as part of a pernicious plot by America to destabilize the family unit and the economies of countries beyond its shores. In the last 20 years Mattel has marketed its product at a more accessible price as the dolls have lost their luxury status and presentation.
Technology began to be applied in earnest to novelty doll products of this period. There were innumerable battery-powered dolls, both iconic branded products and unnamed. Typical novelty dolls of the period were Chatty Cathy, Dancerina, Tiny Thumbelina, and Giggles. Inevitably these dolls would break and were too expensive to be replaced. From Tressy to Chrissy, the growing-hair doll, whose hair was wound and unrolled on spindle inside her head, was a very popular novelty of this period. Simpler mechanisms, such as crying (e.g., Ideal’s Tearie Dearie) and drinking/wetting dolls, were also very popular. Parents and adults may have seen in these dolls admirable images of maternal care and devotion, while children may have enjoyed the more prurient implications of the “wetting” dolls and their soaked panties.
Bizarre-shaped dolls were also popular among designers of the middle to late 1960s and into the 1970s, including Flatsy, Blythe, Little Sophisticates, Little Miss Sad Eyes, and the Liddle Kiddles. Another high-profile, strangely shaped doll format of the 1960s were the rag dolls with extremely long legs and dolls made of cord and strung-together puffs of material, often taking the form of clowns but also girls and women. These dolls were often seen lounging on beds and chairs. For teenage girls of the period the beautiful, large-eyed, animé-inspired Bradley rag dolls (made in Japan), which had hand-painted organza faces over molded (plastic) masks and were sometimes mounted on lamp bases and music boxes, were standard bedroom fixtures. Often they wore exotic international costumes or Victorian and Marie Antoinette styles. Another successful manifestation of this interest in novelty doll formats conceived to counter Barbie were the miniature Dawn dolls, which outsold Barbie until 1977, a few years later, when Superstar Barbie won back most girls. These dolls had an extensive, but tiny, wardrobe of mid-1970s fashions. Troll dolls of various sizes, with their wildly colored long hair, were a massive doll fad of the mid-1960s that extended to boys and adults.
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