The Collection - pt 4 - MORE Sindy (and friends)

MOAR SINDY DOLLS!

lol.

Let's dive into this one shall we?

If you're coming in late, part 1 of the Sindy madness starts here https://flyingpurplemonkfish.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-collection-pt-3-sindy-and-friends.html




This is my 3rd? box of Sindy dolls.

this lot SHOULD be mostly Hasbro and later.

So like 1987 onward.

But it's isn't ALL Sindy.

I find the history of Sindy really facinating and that includes clones and rivals and such.

Now these three... i don't actually know how to refer to them. they aren't clones as such..
they're a bit odd.

Produced at some point in the70s or 80s,Victoria Jane, Geraldine and Sarah Louise all look unmistakably Sindy-like but are NOT Sindy dolls and seem to have been produced by a company other than Pedigree.
They were made exclusively for Debenhams (A bit uk department store) who Pedigree actually had a bit of a professional relationship with having made dolls for them before.

So I wonder if Pedigree was somehow involved in all this. but nobody really seems to know.

Victoria Jane is Sindy sized but fully articulated. Fancy.

They were all packaged as Ballerinas from what I can establish and seem to have even had fashions made for them.

All of them have the same construction to their bodies. Hinged joints that are quite fragile, the same hand mold, same head mold, the torso is elastic strung.

My Victoria Jane is suffering from some pretty bad blush job and pale lips, I really need to get some supplies out and fix her makeup, poor girl looks pretty ghastly.

Geraldine is an interesting one. I've only ever seen ONE other example of her and was told years ago by a collector that her name was Geraldine (someone recently confirmed this as they'd seen an in box one but couldn't provide a photo)
She would have been a ballerina too, she still has her ballet shoes and her tights underneath her pretty awesome outfit.

I assume it's a "mommy made" outfit but it's beautifully made. There's a petticoat and bloomers underneath which don't actually fit her very well and then this long jacket. I wonder if it was made for a bigger doll. The jacket has teensy little seed buttons sewn the WHOLE way down the front but it's missing quite a few of them.

Geraldine herself is a strange size, about 8 inches tall and not in keeping with ANY other doll that I can think of at the time (maybe Casey in the 80s?)
Maybe that's why she's so rare, she was such a strange size there were no clothes for her.

When I bought her I bought her thinking she was a Sarah Louise and expecting a tiny little 6 inch doll! I was pretty surprised to get this girl instead but delighted too because she's one of the few i've ever seen.

I'd love to know more about her.

 and finally Sarah Louise who's a teensy little 6 inch doll.
Sarah Louise also comes under other names including "Judy" (also a name attributed to the bigger Victoria Jane doll) and some are labelled "Zodiac" or "ocean" instead of the "made exclusively for Debenhams". Hah, so much for exclusive.
I can tell no obvious difference between these dolls, they all seem to be the same doll so it's very odd. Were Zodiac and Ocean actually the same company?
Who knows.

At 6 inches tall Sarah Louise is in keeping sizewise with dolls like Pippa and Dawn.

 Like her larger sisters she's fully jointed, which is quite impressive given how teensy tiny she is. She doesn't have the ankle and wrist joints though.
the other two do.

Another thing to note about these dolls, their hair is NOT heat resistant. It'll shrivel like crazy if you try to treat it with hot water so yeah, don't do that! I learned that the hard way with a blonde one. 

Also related to Sindy, these are Fleur dolls.

Fleur was effectively the Dutch Sindy, she had the same sort of status as "the" doll.

She has a lot in common with Sindy from the rooted lashes and big blue eyes to her body shape, though her hands are quite a different shape.

Apparently Fleur was born when Pedigree pulled the license for Sindy from the Dutch company. She was discontinued in 1988, A similar time to Pedigree Sindy.

She's often referred to in doll communities as "Sindy's Dutch Cousin" (kind of like how Tammy is Sindy's American Cousin) and I admit, I enjoy that.

She is one of the few european dolls Hasbro didn't buy up and incorperate into the Sindy universe when they relaunched Sindy.

She has a rather loyal following and a great many people collect Fleur dolls in the same way people collect Sindy, so she's very much equal to Sindy in terms of her popularity, just with a different nation's demographic. For the Netherlands, she was THEIR doll, like how for British kids Sindy was THEIRS.

They have rather sweet faces, somewhat crazy lashes and quite thickly rooted hair.
In fact, i'd go so far as to say their hair is far better rooted than a lot of Sindy dolls with this same hairstyle. It's done a LOT better on these two with no bald patches and minimal 5head.
Pedigree could have learned a thing or two from Otto Simon.

Redhead wears a modern doll dress while Brunette wears the outfit she probably originally came in (Basic Fleur) but missing her headscarf and boots.

Now these three are interesting. They're probably all 60s dolls.

I know 2 are for sure.

Patch is Sindy's little sister. This girl is in very nice condition,her hair is even still soft (and yes it's supposed to be choppy like that, I assume it was fashionable or something) but she's been in a box so her fringe/bangs need resetting.

She's a cheeky looking little doll for sure.

I actually found this one in a charity shop near where my mother lives. We walked in, I spotted this familiar doll on a shelf and was all "wait what!??"
She was £1.
BARGAIN.

She came wearing the purple dress I now have on one of my other vintage Sindy dolls, a dress that was waaaay too big for little Patch here.

She's a chunky doll but she's still short.

She's wearing a Liv outfit lol. 

I haven't a clue who this girl is beyond her seeming to be some sort of clone, presumably inspired by dolls like Poppet (another Sindy friend)

There were an awful lot of clone and knockoff and similar dolls back in the 60s and early 70s and unlike most modern clones, some of them are REALLY well made.

this girl for example is solid as heck. Her hair is dry but she's pretty well made which makes me wonder if she was maybe a proper store like a department store's own brand or something?
I don't know.

Anyone got a clue?

Her dress isn't original to hers, I think it's actually Tressy's sister Cricket's dress.

She came in the dress and while it doesn't fit her great, it's so dang cute i've never bothered to change her out of it.

And this girl was a mystery for YEARS.

She actually has a little patchwork hat and her other heel is somewhere in my boxes i'm sure.

She's a World's Fair doll.

This mystery was finally solved by Tumblr, someone posted a thing about them and I recognised her outfit immediately.

I bought this doll back when I first started doll collecting because I thought she was interesting and pretty.

She's an ok made doll, she's not cheap and hollow or anything but she's not perhaps as sturdy as say a sindy of the era, but she IS a 60s doll and a very interesting piece of history.

See these dolls were made specifically for the World Fair in Montreal in 1967.
They were dressed like the Hostesses, down to the tiny details like the bag and hat.

I really need to find her hat. It was only held on with a pin so that's why i removed it in the first place.

It looks like there was quite some variety in their hair styles and colours, i've seen a brunette and a few blondes with various hairdos which is curious.

She was a souviner, sold at the gift stands and she's absolutely fabulous.

Her outfit is showing its age, the elastic in her waistband is all but gone but she's held up remarkably well for such an old girl.

I treasure her with her sweet little face and really remarkably detailed hands lol.

Finally some Sindy dolls!

These are ALL 1987 Hasbro Sindys.

I LOVE 1987 Hasbros.
I think they're really cute in a very 80s sort of way.

 My two City girls (the ones with bangs) should have little beret hats but they've disappeared, I think theyr'e behind my damn dresser. I used to have them on display and the cleaner constantly knocked them over. Boo.
they're two of my all time favourite dolls. I LOVE them.

And yeah, the beach one is REALLY dark skinned.

These are all Hasbros... i think.

This uh.. pig-faced girl is Rainbow Hair Sindy from 1992. She uses the second Hasbro sculpt, once they ditched their 87 sculpt they moved to this one which is uh.. very Barbie-like.
So much so Mattel sued them and actually WON.

Yeouch.

I've never found it a very attractive sculpt at all.

Incidently, apparently that lawsuit is also why Hasbro Sindy dolls tend to have purple eyes instead of blue but i'm not sure how true that is given the 87 Sindy dolls often have purple eyes too.

But lemme tell you, if you sit an 88 sculpt Sindy like this alongside a late 80s/early 90s barbie doll... yeah.... it's easy to see why they're so often mistaken for one another.

This girl has a ROCK HARD HEAD but I rerooted her anyway because she was boring and bland and I was curious if I could.

Never... again...

rock hard heads suuuck to reroot.

She looks cool though.

And yes, yes she IS wearing a sock dress.

She might be a vivid doll.

This picture turned a wierd colour huh?

This is "Wild hair" sindy.
Hasbro did a few brunettes but they're pretty scarce.

She has green eyes too.

I always found it wierd that the brunette and blonde Sindy dolls often had totally different eye colours too but were both still Sindy, yet all the other dolls, even ones who used the same head sculpt, had unique names.

Wiiiierd.

This is my first Hasbro Sindy. This is the head sculpt I think most people my age recognise as "Sindy" as this was her face for most of the 90s.
Her face sculpt changed to this one at some point DURING 1992, meaning Rainbow hair up there is likely one of the last released to use that older face.

This however is Suprise Jeans Sindy from 1993.

Yeah okay so.. her gimmick was that she came with jeans with some colour trick where you soaked them and they changed colour perminantly to a mystery design, and it looks like there were a few different ones.
they're all pretty fugly.

She is supposed to have little charm things that dangle from her earrings but they're long lost.

I'm not sure why the turtle necklace, it's original to the doll.

Her outfit is mostly Liv though.

More Hasbros.

these girls are Crimp and bead from 1994.

Imani is an interesting one, now, Imani herself was made by a company called Olmec and what's really weird is that they appear to have licenced her to Hasbro or Hasbro helped them make her? She uses a Sindy body and a lot of her "imani" branded stuff has Hasbro assets like dogs and sleds and stuff so there looks to have been some cooperation between the two companies.
As a result, Imani exists both as her own line AND as a friend of Sindy (yeah what?) sold under the Sindy label.

It's all a bit weird.

These three dolls (and the dog which I also have but can't find atm) have this strange wool-like hair that holds position, like it can defy gravity. I dunno what it's made of but you can curl it around a finger and it'll stay like that, pull it sideways and it'll sit there. It's super weird.

Only Imani is in her original outfit because I don't think I actually HAVE all the bits of the other two's very uh.. crazy ensembles.

The brunette here is Tanya, one of the Sindy friends Hasbro aquired. Tanya was her own doll but apparently Hasbro bought the rights to her as well.

What's weird is that the Hasbro Tanya doesn't appear to actually USE Tanya's face sculpt.
Wierder yet, for the Greek market SINDY was produced with the Tanya face sculpt but as Sindy. It looks like they just took over the factories that made Tanya and kept churning out the same doll but with new boxes. Lol.
So Greek Sindy dolls are actually Tanya dolls and uh.. Tanya here is... uh... i'm not entirely sure.

She's on a jointed body (though the joints are pretty fragile at the wrists) and came with a mini dolly twister board with velcro patches. There's velcro on her feet and hands so she can actually play twisted. Cute.

In the middle we have Fairy Princess Sindy from 2003. She's a Vivid Imaginations Sindy but the ONLY one to use this face sculpt. Whaat?

Vivid took over from Hasbro in 1998 and their Sindy dolls look well, rather a lot like the Hasbro ones but slightly different. They tend to have bright blue eyes for a start, they're ALL blonde and they have a squarer head.

I think this is the second Sabrina Sindy they did in 2002. Yes, Sabrina as in Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

They got some odd licenses.

Paul and uh.. Paul.

Both are Hasbro.

Molded hair is what Paul looked like for much of the 90s, you know, WHEN he got a doll (which wasn't common).
Once Vivid took over he was replaced by Robbie, who I don't own a doll of, drat.

I wonder what happened.

80s drunk looking Paul is from 1987 and goes with the 87 Sindy dolls but yeeek, he's kinda... he looks like someone's seedy, drug addled, alchoholic uncle.

Vivid stopped producing Sindy in 2003 and New Moons took over. They elected to well... completely overhaul everything.

For some reason a large part of that overhaul was to make Sindy 6 inches tall instead of 10.
Why? Who the fuck knows, they thought it was a good idea.

They also youthed her making her look more like a teenager instead of a young woman and she was sold exclusive to specific stores, like Woolworths.

the year later in 2004 they started to produce the taller dolls as well, but these taller dolls are NOT the same size as a Sindy of any era. Pedigree, Hasbro, Vivid all their dolls could share clothing and shoes, but these new girls? Oh hell no.

they're a really strange in between size, closer to Barbie's sister Skipper or even Stacie than they are to Barbie or Sindy size. They're very very slender and petite and their feet are too narrow for older Sindy shoes.
It was a wierd decision as Sindy/Barbie sized stuff was SO readily available on the market, why do doll companies cripple themselves by opting for strange sizes like this?

M&S got an exclusive range of these as well. In fact, I believe the little brunette is the M&S exclusive "Amber"

These dolls didn't do great. A combination of not looking like sindy, being weird sizes and having well, honestly, pretty uninspiring outfits (pink tracksuits and sportswear for EVERYONE bletch. Okay a couple got boring shift dresses or okay jeans with needless bling on but generally? yeaaah) they just didn't really make any sort of splash.
then woolworths went under and took Sindy with them.

This lineup features Lili, one of Sindy's friends (She had 3 or 4. A brunette, a black haired girl who might have been ambiguously Asian, an ambiguously brown friend and a black friend) who I found in a charity shop only recently (the bigger New Moon Sindy dolls are really hard to find), a very interesting Sindy who according to someone who worked for New Moons at the time, is actually a TURKISH Sindy (yeah she has a bit turkish following, who'd a thunk it?), the Sindy in the style the Uk got with the blank looking face who I affectionately refer to as "corpse sindy" and Emma who came with her. They came with a sled too and the boots they're wearing. The sled is fun, it's on wheels so it slides across the floor amazing.

Note how much Turkish Sindy looks like Fairy Princess Sindy from Vivid?

New Moons also produced a British Airways doll and I ASSUME helped with the Hatchett partworks repros too because the repros use the SAME BODY.

Which is an odd choice.

The first doll here has the exact same body and head as the Hatchett partworks dolls but was sold on British Airlines flights in their skymall. They did a few different ones in British Airways uniforms and in both blonde and brunette.
The other outfit was a cute little "paper" dress (it's this thin plasticky stuff with palm trees on) which was actually a uniform they wore on certain routes back in the good ol' days.

I ended up with a few of these and the Hatchett ones because they were actually really cheap.

I believe the short haired brunette is ALSO a British Airlines repro with the bob hairstyle. Their outfits are really nicely made, but a strange size due to their tiny spindly bodies. I put her onto a Liv body instead and I love it.

The Hatchett ones were a partworks where you bought a magazine and got a doll with it. In this case the dolls were all dressed in "iconic" sindy reproduction outfits from various years.
The redhead came with a reproduction of the purple dress my Patch came in lol.
So I own the original AND the repro and yeaaaah the repro dress is like half the size of the original.
It's cute though.

But again, Liv body! because articulation y'all!

I gave her some face paint alterations too just to make her a bit different.

I know of 4 partworks dolls. A blonde in a red romper, a blonde in a cream dress, a redhead in the purple 60s dress and a brunette in a nurse outfit.
I don't know what happened with it, if that was all they planned to produce or what. From what i've been able to find they had intended to do more but it was only sold in very small markets.

The last doll here is the New Moons British Airways doll who was NOT Sold in the skymall... I .. think? Actually i'm not entirely sure WHERE she was sold. I think she was a mass market doll.

She has the same head sculpt as the New Moon Sindy dolls but painted muuuuch nicer and with an open mouth so.. yeah. Not sure why they didn't just make ALL the taller sindys like this one.

Wiiiierd.

And finally, THIS girl.

She isn't a Sindy, but she WAS made by Pedigree and has a Sindy body.

This is a Pedigree Fairy Tale Teen.

This is actually Cinderella wearing Alice's outfit.

Alice and Cinderella are basically the same damn doll but Alice has freckles and her hair is rooted slightly differently.
They also made a Snow White.
Yeah, just those three. A strange combo. 2 fairy tale princesses from at the time well known Disney movies (it was the 70s) and then a character from a children's book that's NOT a fairy tale... wiiiierd.

These dolls use the Sindy body but have a unique head sculpt shared by all three dolls in the line. It's big, it's hard as a rock and it has no pupils. I don't know why.

They are... a strange line that sort of appeared and disappeared almost as quickly.

They had really nice boxes but i'm not entirely sure why Pedigree didn't just dress Sindy up as a fairy tale princess.

Very random.


I also found some non Sindy boxes with vintage dolls in.

Lorafina and Tiffany Taylor, or rather Taylor Jones, the dark skinned varient.

Taylor Jones was made by Ideal (same company who made Tammy) back in the 70s. She's quite a large doll at 19 inches and has the same gimmick as the smaller Tuesday Taylor dolls. The scalp rotates so she can have black hair or reddish hair.

She's discoloured in places but she's super pretty.

She needs shoes.

But while I LOVED her when I bought her, I just dunno... she's too big I think, big dolls are a problem for me especially when they have no articulation. I'm trying to sell her.

And some modern dolls like Lorafina.

Lorafina is another doll i've always been a bit on the fence about. I think she's really pretty but I HATE that she has no wrist joints. WHY Hasbro? WHY!?? ?

Her lips look wierd in this photo.

My two Catwalk Kitties. I used to have a pink one and another grey one but I sold them years ago.

The heads for these show up on ebay every so often but I actually like their bodies. They have these bizarre paw hands and feet which is quite unique and weird.
I like weird.

Similarly, the Pinkie Cooper dolls also have weird paw hands.

What is it with toy companies and anthro dolls? they never seem to do well.

I kinda dig em though.

Technically not dolls, the tiny little Tea Bunnies are a 90s toy and I have a few of them scattered around the place. They're super cute with like... flower ears which is wiiiierd.

La la Loopsy girl with a mini version of herself heh. I liked the concept of La La Loopsy but never understood why they were hard plastic. I prefer the ragdoll versions they did.
these were super weird though, rag doll inspired fashion dolls with plastic hair. Wth?

Novi Stars too.

God I loved Novi Stars.

They were bizarre, they were fragile, they were hugely overpriced but damn they were creative.

I wanted a boy one so Ina Firna became Cole Fyre haha.

I think he's cute.

the novi head works quite well as either gender I think.

Baggy clothing hides the female body. The shoes hide the heeled feet  but not so well unfortunately.

Eh, good enough.

I also found my Zelfs.

Another line I loved. Moose make some really fun nostelgic toys.

And some action figures which create the wierdest crossover ever.

Gargoyles meets LOSH meets Ben 10 with mlp? ahahaha, yessss.