By Wilson
Growing up I had dolls. Not all lot of them, less than most of my friends. There was one doll I didn’t have, Barbie. My mother thought it has better for me to have a friend of Barbie that looked more like me, Casey. She didn’t look like Barbie, but similar. She had brown hair cut in a bob. All of my friends had Barbies as in plural with a Ken and a different friends thrown in. I just had Casey. I begged for a Barbie but it wasn’t going to happen.
I always wondered why my brother would play with G.I. Joe at his friend’s house but never got one for himself. It wasn’t until I was an adult I found out that my Dad wouldn’t allow him to have one. Not because the G.I. Joe was violent, fighting wars and shooting guns all over the place. He couldn’t have one because it was a doll. My dad wouldn’t let my brother have a doll.
Oh, shut up. I know G.I. Joe is called an action figure, but it is the truth. Joe is a doll. Merriam – Webster’s definition for doll is “a small-scale figure of a human being used especially as a child’s plaything.” So my dad was right; Joe is a doll. He was wrong though not allowing my brother to have a “doll.”
I made a point of talking about dolls and boys with my now ex-husband. We agreed that it has fine for boy to have dolls. When they were very young, a baby doll helps them learn to care for others and act out life as they see it just as they do for girls. As they get older, the dolls are called action figures and move as their imagination make them in play.
In geekdom, the doll/action figure gets a new name, collectible. Some are made to stay in their plastic bubble box on a shelf. These are sold on the internet, comic shops, conventions and specialty stores. Some of them numbered or limited editions. Others are made to be played with by children. These are the ones you find in Target and other stores that geeks also buy to enjoy. These are the ones I still occasionally buy if I like the character or if it makes me smile to have it.
I’m a sucker for blind boxes, the geeks version of gambling. You shake, weigh, and feel hoping to get Rocket Raccoon, and not another Groot. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Groot, but while Daenerys Stormborn of the house Targaryen is the Game of Thrones Mother of Dragons I’m Wilson of the house Target, blind box Mother of Groot.
On my last trip to the store, I saw that they had the Avengers Infinity Wars dolls out and had my stomach turn inside out. Why? They looked god (and God is the right word when talking about Chris Hemsworth as Thor) awful. At the store, they had three versions of the Black Widow; one classic, not the Infinity Wars doll, looked good, a small Infinity Wars one that was ok, didn’t really look like Scarlett Johansson but passable for child’s play, and a large one that was so bad-looking it was scary. Johansson should be able to sue over this doll it’s so bad. The male dolls were better but still not very good.
As said earlier, as I looked at them my stomach turned because there was just something in the way they looked that was wrong to me. I picked up one of the 6 inch dolls and it hit me. All of the larger ones had little eyes, the same size as the small ones. No wonder I didn’t like the look of them when they looked at me with beady little eyes. Hasbro blew it big time in my opinion.
I couldn’t help looking at some of the other dolls from different franchises and was happily surprised with the divergence. DC, who has trouble in the movie theaters when compared to Marvel had the better looking dolls by far. DC’s looked like their big screen counterparts while Marvels ranged from somewhere in the ballpark to out of the dog park.
Needless to say, none of the Infinity War dolls made me smile and didn’t come home with me. Hasbro would have done better if they had changed the color of Casey’s hair to blonde and dressed her in Johansson’s costume. Then Black Widow would look less like the Zuni fetish warrior doll in the Trilogy of Terror. That was one scary action figure.
11 March, 2018. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doll 17 March, 2018
GEEK CULTURE ONLINE 