The winner of our blogiversary giveaway is...

Just a quick post to announce the winner of the blogiversary giveaway. Since there was only one entry,of course the winner is London Peony. Leave a comment here with your address,London, and the checker board set will be sent out to you. Thanks for entering.
  I will try to get back to blogging soon. I may not return to doll a day right away though. I'm still having trouble getting motivated to do that. My father's funeral was yesterday,and I don't feel normal yet.

Doll-A-Day 142: Dolly Darling Wanna Be

  Today I'm showing you another of my childhood dolls.

This little doll is obviously a rip off of the Dolly Darling doll, made by Hasbro in the 60's.

Particularly this one, Cathy. Not my picture, and I'll be glad to remove it if I'm asked.There's one with rooted hair too, with the same dress. But with molded hair, mine is much more like this one.

 She's about four and a half inches tall. Her bodice is velveteen.

 This doll is marked Miss Merry Hong Kong.

 Her vinyl and her painting aren't as good as the Hasbro dolls. In fact, her hair colour has crept into her face somewhat. BUT she has one up on the Hasbro dolls:

She has removeable shoes! They aren't just painted on like the Dolly Darling's shoes.

Even more amazing, I still have these shoes after all these years!

My sister and I both had one of these exact same dolls, only she bought one with a paint mistake: she had a dot of black paint next to her eye that looked like a beauty mark. I'm sure that's why she appealed to my sister!

Doll-A-Day 143: Baby in a Basket

I know nothing about this little kid except that he/she is marked Hong Kong.

I got it in some thrift store stuff recently.(At least, I think that's where I got it.)

It's only a couple of inches long, or slightly more, with rooted hair and a rubbery head and body.

The top lifts off the basket.

Cute little kid.
Tomorrow is another Skipper Saturday.

Memorial Day

  Remembering those who lost their lives in service to the country, and, as usual, remembering  my father, veteran of World War II, who passed away on Saturday.

Army Dad in France during World War II.

Hiatus

This blog will be on hiatus for an indeterminate time, due to the death of my beloved father.The prize will still be awarded by Ken, although possibly a few days late.

                                                                  I love you Dad.

Doll-A-Day 141: Small Girl

  I thought I'd finish up the week with some more of my childhood dolls.I showed you a brief glimpse of today's doll yesterday.(She was the 'head' purse dolls are known for...) I have no idea who she is or where she was made, but I've had her  almost as long as I can remember. Her name is Jungle Legsly.

I coloured her socks in with an ink pen when I was a kid.

She has no markings, so I don't know anything about her, as I said. I remember the day I got her, (My sister got a brown rubber monkey you could make shinny up a stick.), but I have no idea what she was even wearing, since she spent my entire childhood, and most of my adult life dressed in the shirt from my Breezly Bruin doll.

Apparently Breezly is really rare.Hey! I remember that inner tube now!

Sometime a few years ago I found Breezly and decided to give him back his clothes, so Jungle (I have no idea why I named her Jungle Legsly.) is wearing  a Heidi doll dress I found at school when I was a kid.

"There was a little girl who had a little curl..." Do people still know that poem? "...right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid."

She's about 4 and a half inches tall. I played with her alot, but she has stood up well over the years.

I'm sure she was just a cheap little doll, probably made in Japan or Hong Kong. There are alot of dolls of various sizes from the same era that look exactly like her.

Awww, isn't she cute?

  Tomorrow  I'll show you another little 60's doll.

Doll-A-Day 140: An unusual couple of things, and Part 3 of My Cousins' Toys

   Well, it hasn't been 24 hours yet, but at this point there have been no takers on the competition. Remember,you can enter until, we'll say 6:00, Monday evening Eastern Standard time, May 27th. For details of the prizes and how to enter, see yesterday's post on the Blogiversary, (Not the doll-a-day post.)
   I really shouldn't call this part 3 of How I Coveted My Cousins Toys, since this is more about toys that were gifts from my cousins. I didn't necessarily want them before they were given.
  Today I'm showing you some gifts from a third set of cousins. These we didn't see nearly as often as the other two sets I already told you about. These were my Dad's oldest brother's children, and they were much older than we were. At least, most of them were. The two youngest kids were older than my sister,and so, much older than I was. But apparently, as evidenced by this picture, my sister did play with them.

That's my sister on the left, and my cousin 'Sis' on the right. That's Sis's brother Bruce in the background,up to his shoulder in enjoyment of the Trix cereal.
  I remember Sis gifting me with a pair of Ricky doll jeans. We had no doll that properly fit them, but my Tutti sized Buffy doll came close enough if I rolled up the legs. She wore them, along with a crocheted old fashioned dress Sis also gave me. I have passed both on to Emma, who used the jeans for her favourite doll, Emma the Doll, and the dress for Emma's best friend Susan. They have made them their own now.
  It was my sister who coveted Sis's toys. A couple of years ago my sister admitted that the Barbie bra and undies we had as kids were stolen from Sis. Sis gave me the jeans and dress, but I guess she wasn't letting go of the Barbie underwear! (Not willingly, anyway.)
  Sis also gave me a headless doll-purse...purse-doll. We gave it the head of my sister's Polly doll. She hated Polly anyway, because Polly was so ugly, so I guess she didn't mind giving up the head.

I've seen these purses elsewhere, and they usually have heads like this little doll.We'll see more of her tomorrow.

  One of the two, probably Bruce, gave me this glow in the dark plastic lion.

  He's always been one of my favourite toys. In fact. he still stands on the vanity in my bedroom. And why am I 52 years old and still have a plastic lion standing on my vanity? He GLOWS IN THE DARK! Duh! He glows a really cool blue colour. No other glow in the dark stuff I have glows in his colour.(And yes, I have several things.And yes, I have checked, and he glows the wrong colour to be radium.) I think he was actually a Christmas ornament, because he used to have a loop on his back for hanging him from something. I just checked, and there is actually one on Ebay right now, and they're calling it a Christmas ornament.

  Bruce also gave me some really cool 'engine people' from some model cars he had. I still have those too, even if they do have some broken bits.
  That's it for 'cousins who gave me stuff'.(Maybe that's what I should have called these posts. It doesn't have the same ring though, does it?) And then, there's always the opposite: 'Cousins who snatched my stuff', but there's only one cousin who qualifies for that one. I've already ratted on her to you. (My Susie Slicker!) Of course, maybe my cousin Sis would like to write about that one!
UPDATE:See parts ONE and TWO with these links.
  Tomorrow we'll see if anyone has entered the competition.

Doll-A-Day 139: Casper the Friendly Ghost Talking Doll, and Part Two of How I Coveted My Cousins Toys

  First of all, welcome to our new follower, Dogsmom.I hope she's reading this one, since she still has her own childhood Casper.
  Also, in case you missed it, I'm celebrating the one year blogiversary of Planet of the Dolls with a giveaway. Check out today's earlier post for details.
  Yesterday I told you about one group of my cousins, the doll they gave me,and the toys I'll always associate with them.Today's doll is one I bought because my cousins did not give me theirs. I bought this Casper at a toy show to make up for that.

Casper is a pull string talking doll, made by Mattel in 1962 I think, so he is the same age as me!

But he has less wrinkles than I do.

  His voice is supposed to sound sort of echo-y and ghostly, but these days, since he doesn't work as well as he should, it makes him harder to understand.
  He's about 15" tall, with a terry cloth body and a plastic head.

The creator of  "Toy Story" claims the character of  Woody was based on his favourite childhood toy: his talking Casper doll.

 It's the same head mold as Matty Mattel and Sister Belle.(In an eerie way, it's like seeing Matty Mattel as a ghost.Dead Matty!Yech.)

Casper the friendly ghost has, of course, been featured in cartoons, comic books,and movies. 
This Casper was cleaned up by the lady I bought him from, so he's fairly snowy white.

He's missing his red sash.

  His counterpart was owned by a different set of cousins.This group of cousins we often saw too. They lived even closer to us, so we saw them a little more often than our Kentucky cousins. These cousins were City Cousins too, but they lived in a bigger city. The oldest was a girl about a year younger than my sister, so they stuck together like glue. They were good friends and our cousin spent 2 weeks at our farm every summer.I suppose it was like going to camp for her.(Except more boring.)
   She and my sister lorded their advanced ages over me. My sister enjoyed having a partner to help her torture me, as alone she couldn't easily over power me. Though my sister is six years older than I am, she was the embodiment of the phrase '90 pound weakling'. One summer, in the midst of Monkeemania (Was there such a thing?...Emma will kill me for that one.), they chased me and held me down and gave me what they referred to as "The English Tea Torture" (as opposed to the Chinese Water Torture. We watched alot of secret agent stuff.).

 This was my punishment for not liking Davy Jones. (I'm sorry, but my Monkee of choice was Peter Tork.) It was supposed to involve slow drops of burning hot tea being dropped onto my bare stomach, but turned out to be freshly made hot tea poured all over most of my torso. It's hard to do slow, meticulous drops when target of said drops won't stop wiggling.  
   There were times though, when my sister and I worked together and the target was our cousin,her accomplice.Let's call her Easily Fooled. Easily Fooled believed most anything we told her. When we told her the clumps of grass in the chicken lot were elf houses, she believed us. Like wise the skinny tree stump we told her was a leprechaun.She was,however oblivious to our insisted pleas that there was nothing scary about the poseable Popeye doll, or umbrellas, so we used to chase her with them.Hey, one at a time. It was either the doll or the umbrella, not both at once. Although there were two of us. We could have done that. 20/20 hindsight...  Why she had this irrational fear of the Popeye doll I'll never know. He was pretty harmless looking, especially after his head fell off and Mom used it as a pin cushion.
  The other two cousins were boys. The older one was between my age, and his sister's. He was...well, we could call him 'Damien', but let's be nice and refer to him as 'Teebee', which is what his brother called him when he was too little to pronounce his name.Teebee's  friend was the kid next door who liked to kill baby birds with his slingshot.You know what I'm getting at here.The third cousin was about a month older  than I was. Let's call him Mindless Follower. He often got in trouble, and his usual excuse was, "Well but, Teebee told me to." I've often imagined him getting arrested for something and telling the judge, "Well but, Teebee told me to."(That's unfair really. Mindless Follower has never been arrested as far as I know. Teebee on the other hand...) 
 

Tee Bee,Easily Fooled, and Mindless Follower. And yes, look out world! Tee Bee has a gun. I have wondered if the boys' behaviour was just them over compensating for always having to wear dress pants and dress shoes. Never once saw these guys in jeans or tennis shoes.

  These cousins weren't One For All and All For One like the other set I told you about yesterday. They always struck me more as All For Me types. (Except for Mindless Follower, who was more of an "All For Whatever Teebee Says, But I'll Take Whatever is Left (Especially if no one is looking.)" . 
  Since my sister monopolised Easily Fooled, I was left to hang out with the boys. We usually played together well enough.(Although there were times I had to bail on them and go tell an adult what they were doing.)I remember playing something with them that ended up with Mindless Follower dropping my Chatty Brother doll. Chatty Brother never spoke after that. Sometimes all 5 of us even played together.
   These cousins owned a Casper doll. He lived in the giant cardboard box in the corner of the dining room that they kept their stuffed toys in. (Hey! I had the exact same toy box at my house!) Every time we visited I dug Casper out of the box and played with him. I loved him, and I always hoped they'd give him to me.But sadly, they never did. I finally found an affordable one at a toy show a couple of years ago, so now I have my own, but I still think fondly of the dirty, well-loved little guy in that cardboard box. 

Easily Fooled,my sister, holding me, (Don't let that adoring look fool you.), and Tee Bee, getting an early start at controlling Mindless Follower.Hard to believe there's only a month's difference in age between Mindless and me! 

  

And here we are again. My sister looks a bit overwhelmed by Mindless Follower. Not me. I'm showing him who's boss! Tee Bee looks perplexed. He must be wondering what's to become of him...

Teebee did actually give me a toy once. It was a small rubber pig. He was black and white and was one of my favourite small toys. He traveled with me once, to the house of a relative I had never met before, and haven't seen since. I don't even remember who they were. But I remember that I had three pigs with me, two rubber ones the dentist gave out (I had a lot of cavities.), and Teebee's pig, and walking around outside in the dark by myself I lost Teebee pig. I went inside and managed to get somebody's attention enough to beg a flashlight to search with. I never found him though. I hate losing things. I still think about that pig. I suppose that's related to how Fuzz and I can watch a movie where people are being shot at or chased, and be more worried that they lost their hat. "Isn't he going to go back and get his hat?!", we both cry. You have no idea how relieved we were when Billy unexpectedly showed up with Dr. Grant's hat at the end of Jurassic Park 3! 
  Join me tomorrow for Part 3.
  

Happy Blogiversary To Me! Planet of the Dolls is One Year Old Today!

  Hurray! Today is my one year blogiversary! Hard to believe it's been a whole year. Time flies when you're having fun! When I began this blog it was to have 'someone' to share my excitement with over my doll finds and acquisitions, who would appreciate them more than my family and friends who have no interest! I'm still at it,so I'm still having fun. I've particularly enjoyed doing the themed posts, and the research it took to do them. I learned some things I never knew,and I hope you did too!
  To celebrate the one year blogiversary of Planet of the Dolls, I'm going to do a little give-away. Anybody anywhere can enter. There will be a choice of three different prizes, since my blog is not specific to any one size doll. We're going small and sweet with the prizes, but if all goes well the next giveaway may have bigger prizes. Here are your choices:

For dollhouse 1/12 scale, Kelly/ Chelsea, Ai, Puki, Amelia Thimble, and other tiny dolls, there is this hand made (by me.)checkers game.

The board measures 1 and a half inches wide. It's made of wood with paper overlay, and glossed for durability. (You know how those dolls scoot those checkers around!) The checkers are plastic and hand coloured.(I have little elves come in and do that at night.)And yes, there are the right number of checkers, so you could really play. (If you have the eyesight of an eagle and the patience of a saint!) Here are a couple of pictures of the board in use for you to be able to see the scale.Ai doll Leptospurmum and Kelly doll Betsy World are playing, but the prize is only the checkers set.

For 18" doll scale, like American Girl etc., there is this party dress. I don't know the maker.It's being modelled by American Girl Samantha, but the prize is only the dress.

The third prize choice, for fashion dolls, 1/6 scale, Pullip, etc. is this cozy fleece blanket. It measures approximately 9 and 1/2" wide, and just over 12" long, (so it can be tucked in at the foot of the bed.) Fashionista Ken, a J Doll, and Barbie's 'friend' Raquelle are showing it to you so you can see the scale. Once again, the blanket is the only prize choice in this size. The dolls are not included.

 

To enter:

 You must first choose which prize you want to try for.

Next, if you are not already a follower who shows up on my side bar, you must become one. YOU MUST SHOW UP ON MY SIDEBAR TO BE ELIGIBLE. If you are following invisibly it will not count.

Finally, leave a comment on this post, with your name, the name you're following as,your email address,(I won't publish that.)and the prize you want to win.

All names will be put into a hat (so to speak. I may not actually use a hat...)and one week from today the winner will be drawn at random. (Well, at my house...) I won't draw the winner until evening my time zone, so you can still enter early on next Monday(May 26th, 2014.). I will announce the winner Tuesday, May 27th, 2014.
  I have to thank Ken, the money maker, for sponsoring this giveaway, since he's going to have to ship the prize out.
  That's it for the giveaway.Good luck! And don't forget to check out my regular Doll-A-Day post today too.

Doll-A-Day 138 : Beany by Mattel, and Part One of How I Coveted My Cousins Toys.

   Today's doll is one I bought recently, to have a really nice version of a doll that was a special gift I received as a kid.(But he'll never replace him.) He's this pull string talking Beany doll from Beany and Cecil.

I spotted him in the glass case at our local Salvation Army a few weeks ago.He was part of a silent auction.He was in such nice condition, and I got even more excited when I found out he still talks.

Their suggested minimum bid was $49.99, but I wasn't going anywhere near that! I bid much lower and hoped. Later in the week I noticed their minimum bid had gone down to $29.99. Seems they were having trouble getting anyone to bid. By the end of the auction no one had bid their minimum, so he was put into the next week's auction.I was advised by one of the ladies who work there to leave my bid the same,even though it was still lower than the minimum.(I think I was the only one who had bid at all. I probably could have gotten him much cheaper.) At the end of the week I got the call that I had won him.He was made by Mattel in 1963.  

Apparently there was a slightly shorter, non-talking Beany that looks just like this one. 

  You can see the commercials for both Beany dolls and their friend Cecil the Sea Serpent HERE.
This one is missing the red propeller on his beanie hat.Most of them are.

Beany and Cecil was a cartoon that I used to watch as a kid. Cecil was a sea serpent.There were talking and non talking versions of him too. Cecil's worth a lot more money than Beany these days. I don't know why.

Beany and Cecil were created by Bob Clampett, a former animator for Warner Brothers, (Home of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.). He originally created them for a puppet series in 1949. The series ran for 5 years, and was accompanied by a comic book series.


  In 1959 an animated series began. The shows were repeated between 1962 and 1967, which had to have been when I watched it, since I was  born in 1962.
  At some point in my childhood I was given a Beany doll by my cousins. I'm not sure if they gave him to me because I had admired him or not,but he became one of the all time favourite dolls of my childhood.

 

His shoes were one of my favourite things about him.These days they'd probably be considered lethal weapons. They're heavy and pretty hard.

 

It's nice to have this really nice one, that actually talks, but I wouldn't trade my original for him.

We had a few sets of cousins that were near our ages. Most of them lived far away and we seldom saw them But we had a couple of sets of cousins near our ages who lived a bit nearer, and we saw them on a more regular, if infrequent, basis.
    One set was our Kentucky cousins, Gary, who was my age, Vickie, in between me and my older sister, and Bobby, who was a little older than Vickie, but younger than my sister. 
 

Bobby, Gary, Vickie, me, and my sister, holding our dog Lahoma.We usually called her Homie. This is at my Mom's Mom and Dad's farm.I think this was the year Homie somehow got hold of some chewing gum. She'd chew it all day, and at night she would put it in one of Grama's car tire planters and get it back out the next day. She chewed it until it fell apart.

This made it easy for us all to play together when we were smaller. When you are younger the age difference doesn't matter so much. The older ones usually rule, but at that age the younger ones either don't mind or are at least resigned to it. We only saw these Kentucky cousins once a year, when we went to Kentucky for 2 weeks on vacation. We usually stayed one week with Mom's mom and dad, and split most of the other week with Dad's side: staying part of the week our other grama and aunt, and part of the week with our aunt and uncle and cousins. As much as we loved our grandparents, we wanted to spend as much time as we could with our cousins. We lived on a farm in The Middle of Nowhere, and we didn't see any other kids all summer when school was out. Also, we loved being with our cousins.  There is something special about having cousins your age to play with when you are a kid. They're like built in best friends. Before I started school and actually met other kids,they were my only friends. They lived very differently from us too. For one thing, they lived in TOWN. They could walk  to places. (The closest place to our house was miles and miles away.)They went to the Dairy Queen, and knew other kids in the neighborhood.(They had a neighborhood to know other kids from!) And since there were three of them, the whole way they related together was different from my sister and myself. I always saw them as the 'all for one and one for all' sorts. They were a team.They were the kind of kids who played so hard they had no grass in their yard.One year they gave me the Beany doll. My sister thinks he was Bobby's originally.Beany was missing a hand and had had his talk box removed, but he was one of my favourite dolls. I loved the heft of him. He was heavy, even with no talk box,and solid,and it felt good to hug him.I still have him, even though he's not quite the same anymore.My sister was always disturbed by the way his tongue looked in his open mouth.
  

Gee, I don't know what her problem was...

 She used her badgering technique to convince me that I should allow her to cut it out with that handy razor blade that seemed to figure prominently in her life at the time. (The stuff kids were allowed to play with in those days. It wasn't enough that Penny Brite's hair bow was held on by sticking a straight pin into her head.My sister ran rampant with that pencil sharpener mini razor blade.)  Finally I relented and she removed his tongue, thereby opening his mouth...and causing it to split at the corners. Eventually she had to sew his face up to keep him from having a smile that literally went 'from ear to ear'. With all the stitches he started to look like Frankenbeany. After years of living in a packaway box his hollow rubber head kind of caved in, one of the major reasons being the lack of solid face to hold it up. In the long run I think the decision to cut out his tongue was a pretty bad one, but there you go.   
  Beany wasn't the only toy they gave me.One visit Gary gave me an elf off a Christmas decoration.(Vickie seemed to have a habit of cutting herself on something every time we visited. Once it was on a nail in a piece of wood,leaning against the side of the house, as were were all chasing each other. Almost immediately after Gary gave me the elf she stepped on the piece of wood he came off of and got a nail in her foot.And no, the removal of the elf did NOT expose the nail.)

Vickie, on one of the few occasions when she wasn't being gouged by a nail.

Bobby was pretty ticked when I named the elf after his brother in honour of the gift.I promised him I would name my next elf after him to make it fair. (I had several elves, and I still have them all.You know the kind. Like the Elf on the Shelf. They have felt bodies and plastic heads and can usually sit holding their knees under their chin with their arms wrapped around them. Pixie, who I featured on Doll-A-Day once is an elf like that.) Months later my Dad brought me an elf from somewhere when he came home from work one night. I named him after  Bobby  and both elves sit in the branches of my Christmas tree every year.

Bobby. We always thought he looked like "King of the Road" singer Roger Miller.

  The other toy I was given by one of these  cousins is the most touching. I never loved it with the affection I still feel for Beany, but it was given out of complete love and was a great sacrifice. Gary is about a month younger than I am. Vickie always preferred my sister, who is older than she is and must have been pretty cool to her for some reason. And I wasn't of much interest to Bobby since I was just a little girl. But Gary loved me. He told everyone he was going to marry me when we grew up. Everybody kept telling him, "You can't marry her. She's your cousin." (And no cracks about this being the south!) We were so little, he just couldn't understand why. 
 

Gary. He got his front teeth broken out when he was tiny, tussling with Bobby. We only knew him without teeth, so when we went to visit one year and he had grown front teeth, it took some getting used to.

He had a favourite toy at the time. It was a rabbit named Rabbit McCoy. Rabbit McCoy was purple, with a black and white checked bottom half that was supposed to look like pants, and he had no eyes.Gary loved him. Rabbit McCoy was ever present and his position as top toy was well known. One summer Gary gave me Rabbit McCoy. I tried to refuse, knowing how much he loved Rabbit McCoy, but he insisted. My mom eventually restored Rabbit McCoy's vision by sewing red button eyes on him.(Well, he IS a rabbit.) I still have Rabbit McCoy, in that box with Beany and other toys. I haven't seen him for a while, but I know he's there, and I think of him with love. Kind of like my cousins.
Tomorrow we'll see another doll I loved, that belonged to a different set of cousins. 
  UPDATE: See part two HERE and part three HERE.