Dolls Ahoy!

#just now realizing that one of the ‘ken’ dolls my sister and i had as a child was a ‘dude’#but i’m certain we never had a jazzie#he must have been secondhand#that hair sculpt is unmistakable

He was possibly one of the two versions of Rocker Derek!

There were no doll sculpts created specifically for the Jazzie line. Jazzie herself used a sculpt from a non-Barbie Mattel line called Starr, as did Jazzie's friend Chelsie (Kelley and Tracy were the Starr character names, respectively.) (The Jazzie body is also extremely similar to the female bodies in the Starr line, with some simplifications.) Jazzie's friend Stacie used the early 1970s Barbie friend Steffie sculpt. Dude not only used the Derek sculpt, but also a standard Ken body.

(Incidentally, the Jazzie line was pretty much thrown together at the last minute to directly compete with Hasbro's Maxie dolls, which would explain why they were cobbled together from existing parts)

(also, yeah, once Mattel has a doll name registered to them, it is highly likely they will re-use it, which is why Stacie and Chelsie have been the names of several Mattel dolls, along with Spectra and Clawdeen. Kelley was also a re-used name.)

Some fanart sketches attempts at drawing some cat doll lines that have been discontinued but I find them interesting

The cat dolls I was trying to draw (don’t own any but I’d like too

Found out some more information about these discontinued cat doll lines so did another drawing of one of them

Hold. The. Phone. These are real?!?

@sleepytoycollection and @queenofsquids - did you know about these? @dollsonmain? @dollsahoy? @firespirited?

Dollblr searching party!

The Madame Alexander French Kitty dolls? I had a few in 2006

I customized one, repainting the eyes and putting the head on a Star Team Stacie body with high heel gymnast Barbie legs, spray painted white

That was back in the time when I didn't hold onto dolls very long, so I haven't had either of them for years.

The Lanard Catwalk Kitties are from a few years later. They're a little better-known than French Kitty. I had one complete

They had shoe feet like Bratz, and I hadn't really come around to appreciating bodies with low articulation but interesting design, so she moved on to another home.

I got some Catwalk Kitty heads in a trade about nine years later and painted some gymnast Barbie bodies to match

(also long gone)

For trivia's sake, Lanard (who made Catwalk Kitties) also made a line of action figures around the same time with dog heads, called K9 Corps (Corps is Lanard's general name for its action figures.) Of course I had a few of those, too

These were never common to begin with, and their knees were made of an ill-advised plastic that crumbled after only a year or two of belonging to adult collectors, so I'm not sure if you'll ever see any of these in the wild these days.

I moved recently and I get to get all my dolls out of storage again!

@mediocreartchannel

Theyre a pair of Mattel dolls from the 70s named Michael and Melinda, their line is called Young Sweethearts and they were sold as a pair and all their outfits were sold as coordinated sets with an outfit for each of them! They're very interesting dolls and have amazing articulation.

Thanks for the info I had no idea mattel made these dolls, they look pretty ahead of their time with the articulation, wonder why they did not make more dolls like that

Actually!

Michael and Melinda's bodies, with modifications (the modifications being "removing wrist, ankle, chest, and lower neck articulation") were used for the Spectra dolls and then the Gymnast Barbie and Ken dolls--in fact, Mattel still uses the same knee design sometimes

This is so 90′s it feels like I’ve fallen into a time machine.

No wonder I was confused…..

Tammy and Cindy look a hell of a lot alike.

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