Tiny Tuesday - Baby Secrets

 These dolls turned up in our supermarket last week. Little blind bag babies, that come packed in bathtubs. For some reason I felt compelled to check them out. The display they're in, in the store, has a couple of shelves of the bathtubs (each with one doll) and larger packs with two visible dolls, one blind bag doll in a bath, and an accessory. Initially I planned on getting one bathtub and one of the accessory packs. But the only accessory packs left in stock had a highchair which, frankly looked like something from the two dollar shop. I couldn't bring myself to spend sixteen dollars on it, so I got two of the blind bags instead.

 The name Baby Secrets unreasonably irritates me. When I was a kid, I had this doll. . .

named Baby Secrets. And in my head, that doll will always be Baby Secrets and the nine year old that lives in the back of my head is annoyed at her doll's name being stolen.

Anyway, the cover art on the packages, shows extremely cute babies but from the ones I saw in the accessory sets, I had a feeling these dolls weren't going to be as cute. To be honest, lately there is such a proliferation of blind bag toys on the market, that sometimes I wonder if A) The toys that get blind bagged would sell at all if people could see what they were getting (I have an inkling most wouldn't), and B) Whether toy companies think they can sell any piece of rubbish they like by putting it in a blind bag. (I'm pretty sure they do.)

 The first thing you get when you unwrap the bathtub is the obligatory checklist. Dolls on one side. Accessory packs on the other. The checklist makes a big deal about there being 50 dolls. Strictly speaking there are 25. 15 standard blind bag dolls. 1 limited edition furry blind bag doll (That is a total Twosies rip-off). 8 dolls that are exclusive to the accessory packs. And 1 Sparkle blind bag doll, that you can only get in the accessory packs. But each of the dolls has a nappy that changes from white to pink or blue in cold water, so if you have one of each doll in each gender, that's 50 dolls. Except I only ever seem to get girls in things like this, and I can't picture parents being willing to shell out for multiples of each accessory set on the off chance of maybe getting a boy.

Next there's a "Birth Certificate" to fill out. Being an adult, I'm not overly interested in this but it's exactly the sort of thing I would've eaten up with a spoon as a child.

Finally there's a baby in a plastic bag. And wow, they're a lot creepier in real life, than they are in the cartoon artwork! Here are the two I got.

I have to say, I much prefer the one in the ski goggles. Partly because the idea of going skiing in just a nappy, woollen hat, and goggles is just bizarre. I've never been skiing but I'm guessing that if it's cold enough to snow, you probably want to be wearing clothes. But I mostly prefer that one because the goggles cover the face.

All that was left, was to find out if they were girls or boys. The checklist says to dip them in cold water. Whenever anything says to dip something in cold water, I always try putting it in the freezer first. Usually works better and I'm less likely to spill anything. But the freezer didn't work on these two. At all. So I did dip them in cold water and surprise, surprise, they were both girls.

These babies are jointed at the arms and legs and neck. But the heads are difficult to turn and don't turn very far. And after bending and straightening the baby's leg a few times, it started to look like this. . .

I don't know if you can see the little crumbs around the joint of her left leg, but that's plastic, not paint. And given I had only worked that joint maybe three times, that's some pretty shoddy workmanship.

Overall, these dolls seem to me more like a product that would've been for sale in a two dollar shop twenty years ago, than something that would be sold now. They're not very cute at all, their paint is sloppy, their construction is shoddy and the overall impression that I get is that these have been thrown into the market in an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Li'l Outrageous Littles and Twosies. Except they completely lack the charm of the other two. And given that the company that makes these is actually the Australian distributor for a lot of MGA toys (including the LOLs), these would really annoy me if I was MGA. Surely developing a product that's in direct competition to a product that you distribute is at best a pretty jerky thing to do!

 It's toys like these that make me sick of blind bag toys.