Tag Archives: Peter Pan Syndrome

Beautiful Barbie Dolls

Believe it or not, I like to play with dolls.  It all started in 1965 with a Navy G.I. Joe doll.  I had a black rubber scuba suit for him and it was the neatest toy I owned.  My sister had a Barbie’s friend Midge doll.  The comic-book adventures of the romantic heroes, Midge and Joe began that year.  I added a Captain Action with an Aquaman suit along with a German G.I. Joe and an Astronaut Joe with a Mercury Capsule.  My sister added a dark-skinned Christie doll and little sister had a Tammy doll.  I built a submarine/spaceship with my Constructor Set, and then the adventures were really off into the blue.

Today I collect Barbie-dolls, G.I. Joe action figures, Captain Action figures and suits, and a hodgepodge of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Planet of the Apes 12″ figures.  I am not ashamed to call them my doll collection.  I use my wife and daughter as an excuse for buying Barbies and my two sons as an excuse for buying the rest, but it is entirely me who is obsessed with dolls and doll clothes.  Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I will always be ten years old when I have a doll or action figure in my silly old hands.

There is something really absorbing about dolls.  My mother made them in a kiln we bought one summer.  She fired beautiful works of porcelain, painted, stuffed, and dressed them, an expensive obsession, but cheaper than buying them.  I know a fellow through e-Bay who molds his own reproduced Captain Action masks, and I’ve seriously thought that toy-making might be my next business.  Who knows?  Obsessions are often the best sort of inspiration.

Did you know Barbie started life as a German prostitute doll named Lily?  Mattel copied one brought back from Europe after World War Two.  G.I. Joe wouldn’t have existed if some bright boy hadn’t decided that little boys would accept the same doll-and-changeable-uniform toy if it was marketed as a fighting man action figure!  Captain Action was Ideal Toy Company’s plan to use superheroes to make an action figure to compete with Hasbro’s G.I. Joe.  The current market in dolls as collectibles is now driven by doll-playing old men like me, Baby-Boomers who long to recapture youth by recapturing the toys of their childhoods.  At least I am not the only Peter-Pan-Syndrome, sad old obsessed guy out there!

Take my advice.  If you have to develop a vice, ignore booze, drugs, and sex.  Stay away from identity theft and computer porn.  Go buy a doll, and see if it doesn’t bring back the child in you!