Doll-A-day 2017 #156:Puppetrina

  Ok. I confess. I bought this doll for myself and then justified it by telling Ken to give it to me for Easter. (Since I'm on a diet I was trying to go candy free.) I am awful. But I have been wanting one,and when I happened across this one in her original dress for a really good Buy It Now I couldn't wait for Ken to...forget to buy it. So I bought it myself. She's Puppetrina.

Puppetrina, as her name suggests, is not just a doll. She's also a puppet.

 

More on that in a minute.

Puppetrina was produced by Eegee in 1963.

 I bought my doll second hand and without her box. Here's how she would have looked in her box.

 

She measures about 22" tall.

Her head and arms are soft vinyl.

Her legs are hollow plastic.

She has  very striking eyes,with 'real lashes'.
 

Her eyes are sleep eyes.

Her cheeks are very blushy,her lips very bright and glossy, and she has two tiny molded and painted teeth.

 As pretty as she is from the front...

  

 ...she has a somewhat odd profile.

Kind of  like 'Henry', from the old "Henry" comic strip.

 She had a trip to the beauty parlor and laundry when she arrived here. I washed and ironed her clothes. Once she was unclothed I washed her, and washed and conditioned her hair.

The hair turned out pretty well. It's fairly smooth. She has a replaced hair ribbon, and is missing her shoes, but she does have her original clothes.

 She has a heavy cotton pinafore.

 Under her pinafore there is a dress with a cotton skirt and knit top half.
 

The whole outfit has sort of a nautical look. 

Maybe that's one of the reasons I like her. I love sailor suits. There were also several outfits, available separately,made for Puppetrina.
 Under the dress she has striped underwear/body.(the shoulders are connected to her arms,but the body of the underwear isn't connected.Her body is foam...

I rolled her underwear up to show this part of her body. The undies connect in the crotch with a snap.

...surrounding the plastic parts that are strung together. The upper half has springs that attach to clear plastic pegs under Puppetrina's shoulders.
 

Mine weren't connected, so I took her apart to fix that. I thought it would fix the floppiness of her head, but it made no difference at all.

She has a pocket in the back of her underwear which allows her to be operated like a puppet. One arm is operated by a thumb, and the head and other arm are operated by the other fingers.

 The back of the box instructs the owner how to operate Puppetrina.

 

What it doesn't tell you is that she is, in Ivy's words,"The worst puppet doll in the whole world". For one thing, neither my hands nor Ivy's were really big enough to properly operate Puppetrina. For another thing, if our fingers were any longer they still couldn't have operated her any better, because the cup shaped plastic bit in her head where the fingers go is extremely short. If the fingers could go in farther her head could be held up, and moved much better. But even though I have small hands, they are bigger than a child's.I wonder just how well little hands could operate Puppetrina, because their fingers are even shorter than mine,(although, not by much!),and I couldn't do much with her. It took the entire span of my or Ivy's hands to reach both arms with our thumb and fingers. She doesn't have a wide range of movement with those arms anyway.

 That's about the extent of it. Her arms are a bit long too,and with no bend in them, she can't do much that doesn't look awkward.

Not quite sure what she's doing to this guy.Looks like one of those very slappy massages.

In spite of the drawbacks, she is apparently 'loaded with play value'.

This ad is a little scary.

Let's have a last look at Puppetrina.

 

See you tomorrow for another doll.