FACTORALY - E59 DOLLS

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Dolls are ubiquitous. Wherever there are children, you'll find dolls. They are playmates who never argue, friends who always agree with you, and companions you can take everywhere with you.This week's episode is all about them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello simon hello bruce how are you today i'm absolutely pipping thank you very much how are you pipping that's wonderful to hear i am all right am all right, thank you. Not too shabby. Not too shabby? Not too shabby. But you do look very smart in that wingtip collar. Well, I thought I'd dress for the occasion. I'm admiring your fuchsia tuxedo. Oh, well, it matches the new upholstery. It does, yeah. Indeed. Indeed.

We'll leave this up to the listeners to decide whether we're um telling the truth or not so dear listeners hello good afternoon and welcome don't know why i said good afternoon it's the morning where we are but you might be listening to us at any time during the day whatever you're up to it's three in the morning you can't sleep so you're having to listen to this really sorry absolutely you're out for a walk with the dog and it's a little bit too quiet, so you're listening to us. Yes. And what are we doing? Well, we are doing, first by way of introduction, this fellow over here is Bruce Fielding. And that one over there is Simon Wells.

And we are professional voiceover artists, which is why we sound like this. Yeah, you can tell that we do this for a living. It's obvious, isn't it? Yeah. Obvious. When we're not doing it for a living we do it for fun we we both like a good chin wag we like a little bit of a chat about um useless facts not useless no not useful they're wonderful yes less random lesser used yes random facts unusual facts quirky interesting never knew that facts uh because that's just the kind of people we are.

So what is the topic that we are talking about this week, Bruce? Well, as you have read on the title of this podcast. Indeed. It's dolls. It is dolls. The word doll. Well, actually, let's start with the definition of doll. I mean, we all know what a doll is.

We all know what a doll looks like. But the definition is a small model of a human figure, typically of a baby or a girl, used as a child's toy, which kind of covers it all, except a few variations that we'll talk about later on. The word doll, it's the nickname for Dorothy. It's sort of the pet name for someone called dorothy yeah doll uh how old are dolls where do dolls come from okay you're going to tell me they are either a egyptian or b roman you know me so well um they're egyptian bruce yeah okay they are so they're um there are archaeological finds that have been dug up from from ancient egypt um showing that dolls were a thing back around 3000 odd bc

and these particular dolls were generally sort of carved out of flat pieces of wood they weren't particularly ornate or fancy or lifelike they were just you know carved from bits of wood um often the the hair was sort of made out of um strings of of clay or wooden beads tied together um but they were fairly rudimentary they were often tokens and um you know sort of religious items that were often buried with the the egyptians as symbols of whatever um it wasn't until some time after that they they started being toys children's play things but it has been suggested that they are the oldest form of toy in the world i'm imagining something like a wooden spoon yeah with it with the spoon bit as the head yeah Yeah, something like that. So yes, ancient Egyptian origins around ancient Greece

is when they sort of specifically start being playthings for girls, stereotypically. So they've sort of been religious icons and things like that. They've been burial trinkets. Around ancient Greece, we sort of start seeing them being a bit more effeminate a bit more childlike a bit more deliberately playful yeah the romans this was interesting um both romans and greeks if a girl had a doll they would dedicate it to the goddess

artemis in greece oh yes okay and in in rome they would often dedicate her to the goddess Venus. And they became sort of marriage symbols. They would sort of hold on to these dolls. And at the age of their marriage, they would dedicate these dolls to their respective gods. If the child died before the age of getting married, the dolls would be buried with them. You talked about them being female. I'm going to say Action Man. Oh, I love you just a little bit more now. You went there. Brilliant.

I think Action Man's quite interesting because G.I. Joe was invented in America. So G.I. Joe was licensed to a british company but because we don't have gi's no uh they decided that gi joe wouldn't really work okay yes we just wouldn't understand the terminology no exactly yeah um so they licensed it to palatoy in the uk who re rebranded it action man but palatoy sort of took the technology that G.I. Joe had invented and they took it further forward. They put in things like hands that gripped things and eagle eyes and all that stuff. And because they only had a license, the G.I. Joe people nicked all those ideas

and basically put them all into G.I. Joe. Oh, I see. So Action Man actually became more advanced than the thing that it was based on, G.I. Joe. joe people nicked all those ideas and basically put them all into gi joe oh i see so action man actually became more advanced than it the thing that it was based on gi joe and then gi joe took their technology and adopted it to theirs exactly things like hair and beards and stuff were all action man whereas gi joe was clean shaven and had a like a buzz cut oh i see oh interesting i'm so glad you went here i've i've had an ongoing debate with many of my friends over the years is action man a doll um and many people will say no of course he's not he's an action figure but if we go by the definition that we had earlier on it's a miniaturized human with you know

interchangeable clothes and accessories and so on then yeah of course action man is a doll yeah um he's just a very actiony one exactly um did you ever have action men i think i had a an action man but i was more interested in you know you could buy an army in a box of little little figures that you could then plan out i don't know whether you would call those dolls but they are they are miniaturized people yeah it's it's a tricky one i sort of if we're calling action man a doll then that leads us into basically the whole of my childhood i was a big action figure collector when i was a kid so i had transformers i had he-man i had ninja turtles i had all all of these things i would be very very cautious to call those dolls

because they're action figures but i collected action man quite a bit when i was a when i was a young'un um i had various different variations of them. As you say, they sort of came with some with beards, some with hair, some with different coloured hair. I remember getting my first eagle eyes action man. In fact, I remember asking Santa Claus for an eagle eyes action man one year. And it was just fantastic. All the little accessories, you had backpacks and belts, you had guns and different sort of weapons um and they were obviously all military based so i had a tank i had a jeep i had all of these things i went in for a whole hog um i had um when my parents last moved house and we went through the loft and we found a whole

load of our childhood items there were my action men and i started you know playing with them frankly in in my in my late 30s and um blow me i opened up the velcro pocket on the back of my action man's trousers there was a tiny little folded map inside and you never realized i was so delighted there's all sorts of difficulties with dolls, aren't there? All sorts. Yeah. All sorts.

I mean, you know, is Mr. Potato Head a doll? Oh, crikey. I mean, you play with it, and it's got eyes and legs and stuff, but realistically, it's a potato. And it's kind of human-like, isn't it? Yeah. It's got a face and a character and a personality. Yeah, okay, we'll throw him in as a doll.

Why not? And what about Matryoshka? Who? Matryoshka. Ah, Russian dolls. Yes. Yes. That certainly, I mean, it's in the name, isn't it?

That certainly counts as a doll, I think. Yeah, well, we call them Russian dolls, but they're not called Russian dolls in Russia. No, they're not. It's a bit like Chinese food isn't called Chinese food in China. No, it's just food. I've often wondered, do you get Canada geese in canada or are they just geese interesting um what yes so those those doll within a doll within a doll yes nested dolls yes and and and you can go quite a long way with those you can go from very big ones to very small ones

do you know what the record is no i, I don't. Go on. 72. Really? Yeah. That's going to start off very big and end up very small. Yeah. Crikey. And they're all going to be very thin. Wow.

Gosh. In some countries, they're referred to as babushka dolls, which is Russian for grandmother. Yeah. Again, not called that in Russia. It's just something we've added onto them they generally wear sort of like a traditional russian sweater yes and i think

there's this sort of tradition it's quite a matriarchal thing isn't it the the largest doll on the outside could represent a mother yeah and then sometimes you get ones that are within that that are sort of painted up to be children and then the smallest one right at the end might be a baby and well except if they're 72, I think I should have to start with a great-great-grandmother. Right, and they're very generational. There are quite a few different types of Russian dolls these days. Obviously, they're sort of coming from the location

and the era where they're from. I think they first came about in the late 1800s. And they were, you know, quite rigidly traditional and Russian looking. Yeah. But these days you can get Russian dolls of the Simpsons family, of Star Wars characters, SpongeBob SquarePants characters, political leaders and celebrities, one within another, within another. Yes.

Fascinating things. They sort of of i like the novelty of them i like but sort of once you've taken them apart and put them back together again they don't really do much else no they just sit and gather dust yes yeah exactly yeah unless you have friends around with young children and it occupies them for a good sort of like 35 seconds yes do you know about ningyo japanese dolls no i do not so um ningyo they are these beautiful ceramic porcelain dolls and there's a hierarchy so you can buy everybody in the japanese court from the emperor and empress to the musicians to the court to the courtiers to the um the the um samurai all the different levels of hierarchy in the Japanese court

are represented by these dolls, and they are beautiful. They were very popular in the Edo period, which is like 17th century to 19th century. Okay. They are beautiful. And I think I shall put a link in the blog, which is at factorily.com. Factorily.com?

That's the one. Marvellous. I had a previous career as a postman, and I used to deliver to an elderly lady who had a collection of porcelain dolls. And they occupied the entire lounge. They were sitting on every surface. They were on shelves around the walls.

They were on tables. Really sort of beautiful but in a slightly creepy way yes were they dolls though or figurines no no these were oh right so i see a figurine as being a solid item that doesn't move i see a doll as having flexible parts yeah so so some of these ningos um actually had mechanisms inside them to do stuff. Like one would put a mask on its face and things like that. If you turn the little wheel. Oh, yeah.

Brilliant. Very neat. And they were considered, they were so beautifully made. And some of them were quite big. So the royal house decided that if it was over 24 centimeters centimeters it wasn't fit for commoners oh really so commoners couldn't have big ningyo dolls they could only have little ones right so

they started to make these very small beautifully miniaturized dolls for for the common man or the How wonderful. Absolutely tiny, tiny things. And people actually made this stuff for these dolls. Wow. Accessories go fantastically with a place to keep dolls. Of course. And I went down this severe rabbit hole, I'm afraid. Oh, you went looking at dollhouses? I went looking at dollhouses. I don't know whether you have.

No, that never even occurred to me. Well done. They are amazing. Yes, they are. And the stuff that goes into a doll's... I mean, they used to have like crockery. Hmm. Doll's house crockery, which is like a 1 12th scale or even smaller crockery.

And there were sort of Victorian children who could make 2,000 miniature teacups a day. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Crikey. It defies belief. And they go back a long way. I mean, there was a doll's house found in an Egyptian dig. Really? So the Egyptian kids were playing with doll's houses as well. Wow. But they got really popular in the 16th century. Yeah. And they're kind of used for two things that they were either used as like a historical document so you could say this is my house yes okay and it wasn't for kids to play with at all it was kind of like an architectural record yeah of the house that you were building

or it could even be if you hadn't built the house you built the house at scale yes okay and then and you could populate that house with fireplaces and paintings and all sorts of things. And then you built the house for real. Right, so it was sort of an architect's mock-up of what the thing would look like. Yes, and the first one of those that we know about is the Duke of Bavaria in 1550 had one of these mock-ups made. Right. And then a little bit later, there's a chap called Stromer in Nuremberg in 1639. And I'll put a link.

It's just incredible incredible this little doll's house is just unbelievable and i investigated this a bit and there's a there's a there's a very interesting 1710 one with nine rooms which is now in the reichs museum in amsterdam which was created by petron altman was a very rich woman who married a very rich man so they had a lot of money a lot of money and speaking, doll's houses were not for the common man. They were really expensive. There's another very wealthy woman called Susanna Wynne in 1730, who built a model of nostal priory. And I said, well, these are all quite good. These are all quite interesting. And then I discovered a 1924 doll's house made for queen mary oh this is ridiculous

it's absolutely absurd um it was made of a scale of is 1 to 12 so one inch to one foot right this thing's over three feet tall oh it contains models of products of well-known companies at the time. The detail. Bear in mind, these are all 1-12 size replicas. There were shotguns. They had a flushable toilet with military lavatory paper. No. They had piped running water.

Working light fittings. Writers wrote special books to scale. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a story called How Watson Learned the Trick. And there was a ghost story and Somerset Maugham and George Bernard Shaw. And then composers actually wrote music for the house. Oh, my goodness. You know, Gustav Holtz, Frederick Delius, Arthur Bliss. There were paintings. Wow.

It's just crazy. And even the bottles in the wine cellar were filled with the correct wine and spirits. Oh my goodness me. The wheels of the motor vehicles were properly spoked and some of them worked. There's a needlework miniature carpet. It is just, you know, even if you look at a very high quality photo of the interior, you can't tell that it's miniatures. It just doesn't look like it.

It's just sensational. And this was all made for Queen Mary in the 1920s, did you say? Yes. So the idea came from Queen Mary's cousin, Princess Mary Louise. It was built in the early 1920s. It was completed in 1924. Right. Oh, I forgot to tell you who designed it.

Go on. Edwin Lutyens. Who's that? So Edwin Lutyens was like a famous Edwardian architect. Right. Ridiculous. Wow. Well, that's what you get for being the queen.

Yeah. It was first discussed at the Summer Exhibition in 1921. Right. And it was just, I could go on forever. It had like a medicine chest in it, which was actually full of medicines. Real medicines. Real medicines. And it was about half an inch wide.

Good grief. That's fantastic. Right. Everyone head over to factorally.com and take a look at this. This one's amazing. Yeah, it is quite something. I mean, you compare that with a Sylvanian family's.ian family's yes not quite the same level of detail not quite and no one has more accessories than you know who well shall we talk about you know who because

she's sort of looming over the whole thing isn't she okay um we are talking about a lady called barbara millicent roberts correct from willows wisconsin yes better known as barbie named after the daughter of the creator indeed as was ken yeah ken yes all right so her kids were barbara and ken yeah um this was created by ruth handler who was the co-founder of mattel and um barbie was released in march 1959 i hadn't realized this but um she essentially pilfered the idea from the germans yes she was on holiday in in germany and um she came across this doll called build lily yeah and build lily was a comic strip character in germany and uh they they produced a range of dolls after this comic book character um ruth handler went went traveling in europe on holiday saw this doll and directly lifted the idea the first barbie is very very

similar yeah i mean she's generally dressed in sort of corsetry. And she was given on like stag nights, given as a present to the bridegroom. Oh, really? Yeah. But there were all sorts of legal cases involved with this. You know, she came back from her holiday and started producing Barbie. The company in America that made Build Lily by that time was bought out by another American company. And the American company tried to sue Mattel specifically over infringement for the patent for the doll's hip joint. You can't just sue someone for making a doll that looks a bit like your doll.

But it uses the same technology to make the hip joint. Apparently you can. So Mattel's answer to that was, was well we'll just buy out that company and then dissolve it so then we've got no competition yeah that's that's that still happens today yeah uh they did the same with cindy uh cindy was a uk my sister was a cindy fan rather than a barbie fan um cindy was a uk equivalent yeah and uh again you know mattel said nope that's that's too much like ours we'll buy it up and then cease its production so that barbie is the only thing going um but barbie's quite big

isn't she no she's very small i'll rephrase that as she's quite popular isn't she but she's she's small enough that so that she wouldn't actually work i mean she'd have to walk on all fours basically yeah her proportions they're they're not realistic are they no her waistline's so small that i think is it she'd have room for like half a liver and about a couple of centimeters of intestine that's ridiculous isn't it i think if you if you sort of modeled her up to to life size her legs would be one and a half times the length of a regular leg her neck would be about a foot and a half long but there are people who have who have surgery to make themselves look more like barbie oh really i mean

in 1963 she came up with one of the accessories was a book titled how to lose weight oh crikey and the back was basically the words don't eat no yeah oh dear yeah and in 65 two years later it came together with accessory scales which were permanently set to 55 kilos oh that's so bad yeah it's awful she has moved with the times a little bit i mean you know she is still essentially a fashion doll with lots of clothes and accessories and mansions and fast cars and boats and ponies and so on yeah um but she's had a range of careers uh you know every now and then they release a new barbie with a an outfit pertaining to a particular career over the years she's been a firefighter a journalist a surgeon an astronaut a pilot

and at one point a presidential candidate so that's six so you haven't mentioned the other 194 is that how many there really were? There were 200 careers. Goodness me. Yeah. Wow. So yeah, she's done a lot in her time as Barbie. Yeah. And then in 1961, it was decided that she needed a companion. And Ken was created. Ken has an equally silly, fictitious name,eth sean carson jr um and according to the blurb that came on the back of

the packaging when he was first released had a little bit of a backstory also from willows wisconsin which doesn't exist um according to this backstory ken met barbie on the set of a tv commercial and is now her boyfriend oh isn't that great right one of the things that obviously they don't have is um working yeah certain working parts and there are a couple of fruit flies named after them are there they're scientists okay they they they name things very there's there's a fruit fly which is the cheap date fruit fly which is the one that gets drunk very easily right okay oh that's there's a kenny fruit fly which is the cheap date fruit fly which is the one that gets drunk very easily right okay oh that's there's a kenny fruit fly which dies very quickly after the south park character okay and then there's the ken and barbie ones right which don't have any external genitalia

oh that's brilliant scientists they're a funny lot. That's fantastic. Yeah, Barbie's often in trouble, though. I mean, Mattel sued MCA Records. Right. Guess what for? Copyright infringement? Yes. Do you remember a band called Aqua?

Oh, the Barbie Girl song. Yeah. Oh. Mattel lost that one. Did they? Yeah. That was a creepy song. It just, hmm. Hmm. just it's just creepy but very popular at the time very popular at the time i read on the statistics that uh barbie's signature color of pink is um

pantone 219 and is it copyright given our previous episode on colors indeed it is yeah but again within that sphere no other dog can have that shade of pink you can use it elsewhere but not in dolls uh and uh i found a guinness world record for the the person who has the largest collection of barbie dolls and um this person she basically just keeps on breaking her own record time after time after time so she first got the record in 2005 when she had a collection of 2500 barbie dolls um so that was in 2005 her collection has grown in 2022 she had 18 500 barbie dolls and therefore still holds the record um i did i did the calculations and uh going from the figure in 2005 to the figure in 2022, that means she must have bought an average of 941 Barbie dolls per year since first getting that record to what it is now. Wow.

It's a lot. Alexander Graham Bell, he of telephone fame, invented a doll that said mama did he do you remember those dolls where you kind of you tip them back and forward yes you tilt them and so that's invented by alexander graham bell was it yeah what a proud accomplishment after after doing the whole telephone bit exactly what a great sequel yes edison invented a talking doll did he he built a very very small gramophone with a very, very small record on it. Oh my goodness. And invented a talking doll.

Wow. God, the other lives these people lead. Fairly impressive. Again, show notes are your enemy on this one because you'll probably get sucked into all this. You will. And we're not even sorry. No. Does it count as a doll if it's made of paper? I imagine so because you can get paper dolls, can't you? You can. That's actually their name. So sure, why not? Paper dolls are a

big thing. I didn't go into paper dolls. I don't know whether you did. I didn't. The only paper doll that I engaged with was, I believe it was on the back of Bunty okay there was a cut out figure that you could dress in all sorts of fashion sort of that week's fashion so you could put mini skirts on it and boots and sort of flowing dresses and stuff yeah so you could sort of cut out the outfits in in from a sheet of paper and it had two little sort of hooks over it to drape it over the the doll's shoulders, didn't you? Yes. There is, in fact, a fashion show for dolls every year. Is there?

Yeah. I think it might even be run by Vogue. Okay. Basically, they just pose the dolls on a sort of a catwalk. Yes. And people vote for which doll they think is is dressed best well considering the fact that that the creators of barbie actually employ fashion designers makeup artists etc etc to design each of her new looks wow that seems to work quite well yeah there are other sorts of dolls that you don't play with, I guess. Right.

Voodoo dolls? Oh, yeah, of course, yeah. Apparently, it's a myth. No. That you basically put some hair or something into the voodoo doll that you're making and then you put pins in it. Yes. That's a myth. Is that not a thing?

It's not a thing. Although this may be propaganda put out by the pro-voodoo lobby, that voodoo dolls are actually there as a curative. They're there to lure the evil spirits out of your body into the body of voodoo back in viking times um people would make these dolls and sort of um cast their prayers and good wishes onto the doll so it was actually a way of bestowing luck and health and longevity onto the person that it represented this is like a medium to yeah through which to access the person yeah exactly um but yes so whenever this idea of um sticking pins in came along is obviously the very antithesis of that so you talked about build lilly coming from germany um in fact germany was one of the places where dolls really took off because they were really good with porcelain. Okay.

And porcelain has got that sort of like translucent quality that you get with beautiful skin. Yeah, sure. So to have a doll made of porcelain and with like a rouge cheek and with the eyes done properly, it just looked more human and realistic. And so the Germans were very big into dolls.

And also they liked the so they liked the fact they looked right and also the mechanically and the engineering behind the doll yes they were very happy about right okay so in europe the germans were ahead of the game in terms of and in fact dolls used to have brown eyes did they indeed until queen victoria oh at which point they turned blue yes in. In honour of her. Yes. Oh, great. So the colour of eyes changed with Victoria.

But there are, I don't know if you know, Blythe dolls? Blythe dolls? No, I've not heard of those. They're actually designed by a woman called Alison Katzmann, who worked at Marvin Glass and Associates. And these were inspired by drawings

by Margaret Keane, who painted these doe-eyed children. And it was only sold for one year in the U.S. by Kenner. And then 27 years later, in 1987, it became really popular again. And then the toy company Tonka bought Kenner Parker toys and all the rights. And then they sort of exploded again. And they made them in three different sizes. These Blythe dolls are quite something.

I mean, they had four hair colours, the Blythe dolls, and you could change their eye colour by pulling a string. Oh, really? Yeah. How clever. I mean, they're a bit weird.

I think Tim Burton would like them. Oh, okay. They're particularly large-eyed are they they are very large-eyed but i mean their eyes are like four times bigger than their nose okay good so proportional do you know what the most expensive doll is no i don. Tell me. So the most expensive I could find is Lois Leur, which is the bird trainer. Okay. And that costs $6.25 million. Goodness me. It is quite something. I mean, there are some, I mean, you can get an original vintage Barbie for about $8,000.

Right. Okay. There's a diamond Barbie, which is made by De Beers for Mattel. Okay. And that's $85,000. An original G.I. Joe sold for $200,001. Crikey. So the Loiseur is a four-foot-tall automaton. It's a doll with a complex mechanism. It's dressed in detailed Renaissance clothing. It carries a sword in one hand. It holds a flute in the other.

And it's got a bird. And the doll can play the flute and it can play marche des oies by george bizet on it fantastic and it's 6.25 million dollars man i hope we're putting end of my research on dolls there is undoubtedly far more there are there are things we haven't mentioned there are things we haven't even thought to look at if you our dear listeners have experiences or fond childhood memories of any of the dolls we've mentioned or any others, please get in touch and let us know about it. Share it with the group on our Facebook page.

Please do. And like us. Yep. Subscribe to the podcast and make sure that you get it every Thursday. And tell your friends. They will love it, honestly. Well, thank you very much for listening to Factorally. If you've enjoyed it, please come again next time.

And if you haven't enjoyed it, please come again next time because it might be better. You never know. Here's hoping. Thank you all for listening. Bye for now. Cheerio.