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.
  

Doll-A-Day 97: Happy Birthday Fuzzy! The History of Tommy Doll

  Today is my son's 19th birthday. If I had thought it out better, I would have done his Fuzzy the Doll today instead of the 1st. Twenty twenty hindsight! Instead, today, while Fuzz is out with a friend, I'm covering a little of the history of the Tommy doll, and posting the pictures of Fuzzy the Doll that I couldn't get off my camera for the 1st.

 

Fuzzy in his favourite nose glasses and the hat he brought back from his trip to the Himalayas. By the way, this is the way Fuzz had him dressed. This is pretty typical of what Fuzzy the Doll always looked like, including the Luger and the dagger stashed in his pants.

  I originally wanted to make a doll of Fuzzy out of a vintage Todd doll. Todd has red hair, like Fuzzy. But Todd's were too expensive. In the end, it was a better idea to use a Tommy anyway. Todd would have been in pieces by now!
  Fuzzy the Doll was originally a Tommy that came with the set Big Brother Ken and Baby Brother Tommy. Why Mattel thought it was normal for Barbie and Ken, who were obviously MUCH older, to have baby siblings, I'll never know. I just feel sorry for poor Mrs. Carson and Mrs. Roberts!

The set was produced in 1996, when Fuzz was 1 year old.

This was the first Tommy produced, and the first and only relative Mattel ever gave Ken.

Tommy (and Fuzzy the Doll!) have a lever in their backs that make their right arms wave. Cute idea, but that gigantic lever makes it hard to get clothes on them! The outfit made for the doll is a pair of bibbed shortalls, which conveniently have no back in them. I traded them for Dr. Ken and Little Patient Tommy's blue shorts and red and white striped shirt, because Fuzz had an outfit just like it that I put on him a lot.

Hey, can't Doctor Ken get done for malpractice? Isn't it against the rules for doctors to treat their own relatives?

These days, now that Tommy's friend Kelly turned into Chelsea, (What?!), Tommy seems to have gone into hiding too. There hasn't been a Tommy made for a few years now. There were a few made with the tall skinny Kelly body, shortly before Kelly mysteriously became Chelsea. I don't think they've made any since then. Of course, now that Fuzz is a grown up and I don't have to supply a steady stream of Tommy's and Tommy clothes for Fuzzy the Doll, I don't keep up with it quite as well...

Originally Kelly and Tommy were supposed to be babies, with diapers, pacifiers, and bottles. Then they were starting school and doing all kinds of things.

Fuzzy is the adventurous sort.

The only other boy doll in the Kelly line, or produced in the Kelly size, was Ryan. he was originally just a friend of Kelly, produced for the Amusement Park series. Later he became Midge and Alan's son.

He also enjoys 'hanging'...Who knows.

Tommy doll appeared in various sets with Kelly, but he actually had his own gift set too. Tommy as Elvis contained three Tommy dolls, each dressed as a different version of Elvis, including Jailhouse Rock, the gold lame' suit, and of course, white jumpsuit Elvis.

I don't know what ever happened to the white jumpsuit, but Fuzzy and friends often wore the jail suit and gold Lame' suit, or pieces of them, anyway..

  Fuzzy the Doll was the first of what became a collection for Fuzz. He ended up owning most of the Tommy's produced.His second Tommy was for his 3rd birthday, when he got the Kelly and Tommy Power Wheels car with the African American Tommy and Kelly. Kelly ended up wandering off to live in Emma's Dolltown for most of her life, but Tommy became Fuzzy the Doll's best friend Little Purple.

Fuzzy decided "Little Purple" was the son of Emma's Very Velvet Christie.Christie came in a purple outfit and Emma had named her Mrs. Purple. That made him "Little" Purple, right?

Little Purple makes friends with a yak during their vacation to the Himalayas.(See my post on Doll Vacations.)

Gareth World with Little Purple, who is dressed as "a foreign dignitary" at the World's Halloween party. (See my Halloween photostory from last year.) Gareth is named after my son's real name, since there was already a Fuzzy the Doll.

It's a shame they stopped making Tommy. There needs to be a boy in the crowd.
Happy Birthday Fuzz!  

Doll-A-Day 20,and The Dolls of Our Lives...(Well, mine anyway.)

  This is another combined post: Doll-A-Day, and my childhood Barbie dolls. It kind of runs together anyway, although you may wonder what today's doll has to do with Barbie dolls. The doll today is this elf doll I got when I was almost three. I've had him longer than any other doll I still own.

Unless you count this guy.

He's just a little rubber guy with a squeaker---that no longer works---in the bottom.

"Little Friend Bear" was bought for me by my sister when I was born, so he's around the same age as me. He was possibly sitting around in the store for a while, so he may be older than I am. Wow. That's old.
  When I was a baby I liked chewing on him.

What's that? You say you bought this for me? Nnuummmm...

  I really liked chewing on him.

Yeah, hold that thought Grama.I just have to...ummm nnmmm...

No, I mean I REALLY liked chewing on him.

Geez, I'm really getting into it here.

    But I guess he's not actually a 'doll', so we'll use this guy. He was given to me one Christmas by,again,my sister. (Didn't realize she figured so prominently in this doll thing.) He's one of those old fashioned Christmas elves, like The Elf on the Shelf. His name is Pixie Brennan. 

"They could have used me." "Save it kid. Your time will come."

 He's what's referred to as a Knee Hugger Elf, because they always have their legs drawn up and their arms around them. His hands would have been sewn together originally, so he could hold his knees. As you can see in the photo below, they were sewn together. Undoubtedly my sister cut them apart for me. She was very big on giving the toys 'freedom'. That's why a lot of our plastic farm animals were cut off their stands and consequently couldn't stand up. Ah, 'What price freedom?'

It says May 1965, but I think this is probably Christmas, 1964. That means I got him when I was just short of three years old.By the way, that's a Sheri Lewis Golden Book under the TV.Still have that too.

Me and Pixie hanging out in my sister's room. Pixie and the Golden Book aren't the only things I still have. I still have that toy phone and I still use that bedside table.

     I played with Pixie a lot, as you can see from his current pictures.And that white thing is not underwear. It serves the same purpose as the striped bandage on his leg, (And the scotch tape on his toe.): It's covering holes.

How about a little cheesecake?

He's a bit worse for wear, but I wouldn't take anything for him. 
 

Pixie, secure in his place in my life.

He traveled with me. On one trip to Grama's she made him a hat and a pair of pajamas.

I don't know why they're both pink. Maybe Grama thought he was a girl.

  The hat was easy to get on and off. 

Not so the pajamas. Those things were like a second skin.
  Pixie is about a foot tall when he's all stretched out.He has no maker's mark on him. He probably had one of those little paper stickers that was lost ages ago. He is just a cheap dime store elf, something my sister could have afforded to buy me when she was 8 years old.And what does he have to do with Barbie dolls? Well...
  
As a kid I owned one Barbie and one Ken. 

The only real Ken clothing I own is Night Scene, which is actually for the Mod Era Ken body, but it fits this guy too.He just decided to dress down today. My Barbie is wearing my only real Barbie fashion, Dancing Stripes, which is also Mod Era. There's a reason for her wig. Read on...

Don't get too chummy Ken. She's married you know.

  The opinion seemed to be that I didn't need any more dolls since I had my sister's dolls to play with. My sister had a Polly,(All that remains is her head. She fell apart and her head was bequeathed to a headless doll purse...purse doll.), a Fashion Queen Barbie, a crew cut Ken, a Midge,a Francie, Glamour Misty, Tressy, and the twin blonde swirl Barbie to mine. I can remember the day our dad brought those swirls home from work with him. They were our birthday presents and I got to see them first because my sister was at school. (She is six years older than I am but our birthdays are 9 days apart.) The thing I didn't get to do first was name her. Being the older sibling my sister had dibs on all the doll names. Thus, she had GI Joe and I had GI John. She had Penny Brite and I had Penelope. She had Barbie, and I had....Barbita? (Pronounce Bar-bee-ta.) Pretty awful, but I was only 4 or 5.  My Ken somehow managed to sneak in as 'Ken'. Probably because my sister's dolls suffered from some sort of identity problem. They weren't always the same 'people'. Her GI Joe was sometimes Joe, married to Fashion Queen and sitting around the Dreamhouse in his underwear. Sorry, HER underwear. (Our dad didn't sit around the house in his underwear---or Mom's, thank goodness, and in the era of Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver, who knows where she got the idea that guys did that.) But sometimes Joe wore Fashion Queen's brunette page boy wig and was Sonny to Francie's Cher. Of course, Francie wasn't always Francie either. Sometimes she was Cher, and sometimes she was 'That Girl' Marlo Thomas and Ken was her boyfriend 'Donald'.  I may have been boring and had dolls that knew who they were and who they were married to, but then I grew up and married ONE guy. Nuff said. 
  Barbita was married to Pixie Brennan,who was the Richest Man in  the World, but also,sadly, a vinegar-aholic.Talk about pickling your insides. (I guess the miniature gallon jug of vinegar was the only thing I could get out of the 'gumball' machine, and it had to belong to somebody.) I think they must have been my childhood equivalent of my 'World family'.(The dolls in my photo stories,who have a million kids.) Practically every kid doll I got became their adopted child. They have a very big family.

The happy couple. "Is that vinegar I smell on your breath?"

  My sister's swirl Barbie  was, like Mary Poppins,"Practically perfect in every way". Barbita on the other hand... Suffice to say that the swirl hairdo was not the easiest to maintain for a young child. For one thing, it wasn't long before that swoop of bangs started to stray. The more I tried to push it into place, the worse it got. Then there was that ponytail and the smooth sides. Once they got snagged there was no way to fix it without taking the whole thing down. For one thing, I'm not sure that occurred to me. For another, that rubber band got all tangled up in the hair.  What did occur to me was that the hair needed to be held in place, and hey, wasn't that what glue was for? That didn't work for very long though, and soon more glue was needed. Eventually poor Barbita's head was a mass of snarled hair and glue. My sister, ever willing to help (and find any excuse to use those little razor blades that came in the pencil sharpener), shaved Barbita's head for me. The up side was, she could now wear those cool Fashion Queen wigs I coveted so much. The down side was, my sister still needed some practice with the razor blade before she could shave a head without taking off the tops of ears and the tips of noses with the hair. It wasn't too bad, and not noticeable from a distance, but how could she shave off the ears and still leave so much hair stubble on the head? (I think I have figured that out now. The same way years later she could convince me to buy a pair of pants by saying,"They make you look skinny.", and then after I've bought them and am wearing them in public, say, "Those pants make you look huge.") Barbita won out in the end though. She still looks great in a wig. But Barbie... She spent some time in the attic and came back out into the light of day a bit worse for the wear. But her right eyelash and chin were delicious. (I assume. I didn't eat them myself.) Ironically, that hair? Still perfect.

Hi Barbita. Nice "hair".

   

Well thanks Barbie. I was afraid the colour was a little too...'mousey'... 

Barbie: Sob! Barbita: Yesss! 

I can't bear it!

I touched up the colour on the eyelash, but there's not much I can do about the chin.

The irony of it all. By the way, she's wearing a clone dress that originally had a bolero jacket that matched the skirt part. That must have gone with the Dreamhouse and Fashion Queen.You'll understand if you keep reading.(I wonder about FQ. The only other things missing are another bolero jacket and a faux leather skirt.Not much of a wardrobe.)

My Ken is a Bendleg kind of guy. He has a brunette crew cut and blushy cheeks. 

I vaguely remember holding him in a car in my Mammaw's driveway, so I may have gotten him on vacation.(The only time we ever went to see my Grandmas was once every summer.We always got spending money before we went on vacation, with which I always bought at least one toy.  I always remembered him as wearing a short blue jacket, and yet I don't remember every seeing it again, and we had TWO red and white striped Ken beach jackets. Years later,as an adult who was starting to learn about Barbie and Family I found that Bendleg Ken did indeed come in a short blue jacket. So what happened to the jacket? I think I have that figured out too. My sister always hounded me until she got her way. (Both I, and later one of my kids, bought a blue haired troll to replace the one that my sister hounded me into trading to an anonymous (to me) schoolfriend of hers for an ugly purple and white striped haired troll.) She may have done the same with the jacket and I don't remember it,or she may have just stolen it. As an adult she admitted to stealing Barbie clothes from our cousin Sis. She who steal's Sis's Barbie underwear is not above sneaking her sister's Ken jacket.
  A (very) few years later when my sister outgrew her dolls, (She never was much for playing anyway.), she gave them all to me, along with the Dreamhouse. A few years after that she conveniently forgot she had given them to me and got them out of storage in Mom's attic and gave the Dreamhouse and Fashion Queen to her first husband's nieces. Another few years and she gave the others to her daughter. (Ok, that one I can see. I let my first daughter play with my Ken too. For about a day, until I found out that at the time he was worth about $200.That was a while back!) However, at one point Unsentimental Niece decided to sell them at her yard sale. I happened to arrive for a visit the evening of the first day of her sale. Somehow they hadn't all sold. Ken though, went the way of the yard sale for $2. (Why had I gone to all the trouble of dividing our dolls when I took mine? Why did I think she would want them back? I could have just walked off with everybody but the long gone Fashion Queen. But no. I'm nice.)I managed to talk my sister out of allowing Francie to be sold because she was worth something. How stupid am I? I should have just bought Francie for what the kid was asking. (But then, remember, I'm nice.) So then my sister had me sell Francie for her. She also sent along Misty and Tressy. I knew there was no way I could tell her Francie went for $5 and just give her the five. Like an idiot I had told her how much Francie might sell for and it was more than I could afford for a doll. So I watched a stranger walk away with Francie and my sister was $45 richer. Misty and Tressy were a different matter. They weren't worth much and eventually my sister had me sell some other dolls a friend had given her daughter when she was little and with  the money passing to her, Misty and Tressy got lost in the mists of time. (I always loved Misty, with her realistic and graceful hands. Tressy is still wearing a necklace my sister made for her/me when I was little.)

Tressy and Misty hang out with Barbita. My sister made the necklace and the dress on Tressy. The satin dress Misty is wearing came from a garage sale, but is old. Home made? Does anybody know? Misty's soft rubber arms allow her graceful hands to be lifted to her face, although she doesn't hold a pose with them.

My GI John was married to my sister's Midge. 
 

John definitely has problems. (Or maybe he just lost his castanets.) One wonders what Midge sees in him. From the look on her face, maybe she wonders too.

They both had red hair (It wasn't my fault. My sister had dibs on the brunette guy too.), like me.Unfortunately, red haired John always looked sort of  droopy eyed and not all there. This impression was intensified by the fact that, as the younger sister, I wasn't very good at keeping my dolls 'nice' either. My sister's Joe always came out of storage looking straightened out and quite normal. My John always seemed to look as if he were trying to scratch some unattainable itch. And fell asleep doing so.My sister tried to perk him up for me by shaving off part of his droopy eyelids with her ever present pencil sharpener razor blade.

It didn't help.

    At this point you may be asking yourself, what happened to Midge? Did Midge get sold too? Can John function alone? Well, Midge was saved, oddly enough, by my sister. Not intentionally, but still. Once,when I was about 6 or 7, (after my sister had given Midge to me), I  had a really bad cold. I was lying miserably on the couch one evening watching Dragnet. My sister had been upstairs for a considerable time.Hmmm. What was she doing? Finally she came down, extremely pleased with herself. She was toting Midge. Or, should I say, the FORMER Midge. The ex-Miss Hadley/Mrs. GI John. My sister proudly proceeded to explain how she had "Made Midge Chinese!"  This was accomplished by cutting Midge's flip into a pixie cut, popping a brunette Fashion Queen wig on her, removing her freckles and most of her lip paint (That part may not have been intentional.), and changing her skin tone with a coloured pencil (These were the politically incorrect days of the 60's, and we were Ohio farm girls who had never seen an Asian person in real life and only had a black and white tv.) I couldn't believe it. "But you gave Midge to me!!" I don't remember what immediately followed, but I know I spent considerable time and cleanser trying to turn Midge back into her old self. In the end she looked a little washed out, but nearly like her old self with the addition of Fashion Queen's red flip wig. Of course, the wig went with Fashion Queen and the Dreamhouse when they were given away. But still, she looked so awful nobody else wanted her or thought she was worth selling.That's what I mean when I say my sister saved her. Somehow she ended up with me.

The crowd. Midge, do something with John, please. Midge is wearing the only Barbie dress my mom ever made for us.

    So  that's the story of my childhood Barbie dolls. I didn't buy another Barbie until I was in my very early thirties. And that time, there was no stopping me...