Appologies for the delay. We had a massive heat wave which made doing anything extra hard, then I put my back out.
So it's been a "fun" few weeks. *sigh*
Anyway, this time we're tackling the 70s. Now, the 70s era is the one with the most pricey dolls, they're the ones most people seem to remember fondly and as a result have the biggest collector market. And i get it, they have gorgeous high colour faces, but it's annoying when you're poor and stingy like I am hahah.
That means there's several dolls missing from my timeline here, and i'm unlikely to obtain them any time soon as prices keep just going up and up and up.
Booo!
Maybe i'll get lucky some day.
But hey, let's get into this.
The 70s
Last time we covered 1963-1970, Sindy's "early years" which saw a lot of changes to her design as Pedigree tinkered with the idea.
But there was still a lot of changes to come.
Unlike Barbie who used the same body from 1959 to 1999 with only minor alterations, Sindy took a lot longer to hit her stride and gain some consistency in her design. When most people think of Sindy they think of the 70s and 80s dolls, not those early years.
But we're not quite there yet.
1971 saw the introduction of "Trendy girl", the first step in Sindy's more iconic look. This doll ditched the fragile integral neck situation in favor of a ball and socket. The head now can be removed and put back on again without breaking anything and the doll can now tilt her head.
this connector is far far more robust, with the neck and ball being part of the torso and made of hard plastic.
Their hands are now also of firmer vinyl and less prone to broken fingers which is another big bonus.
the head is also completely new. Smaller than previously, she has rooted lashes that are shorter than the previous year's centerpart girl and her hard head means the lashes tend to stay in place rather than slipping back into her head with play.
Unfortunately, while there's a lot of improvements made here, Pedigree are still using the fragile crappy hair from the previous few years which dries out and turns wooly over time.
The torso looks to be predominantly the same as the center and side part body, just with the new neck. Her hips are narrower but I believe that's more due to the shape of her legs and how they fix into the body. The arms look the same as well.
Trendy Girls are one of the popular Sindys, and i'm fortunate to have one because i've never been able to justify their price on the secondhand market. Mine came from a charity shop, she was like £1 or something. Absolute lucky bargain find and it makes her quite precious to me. She even has the much rarer "titan" (read: reddish) hair colour.
Apparently Trendy came with a huge number of hair colours, 2 blondes, 2 reddish tones and 2 brunettes.
From what i've been able to glean, Pedigree were bought out by a new company around this time as well (Conglomerate "Dunbee-combex-marx") which resulted in a bit of a cash injection into their brands. Pedigree's parent company, Line Brothers, collapsed in 1971 taking all the subsidiaries with it. Thankfully, Sindy's value was such that other British manufacturers were keen to add her to their portfolio.
Sindy even won "toy of the year" with this model. Go Sindy!
Trendy Girl was made for a good 4 years, which isn't bad at all.
Looking into Dunbee-Combex-Marx takes you down a little rabbit hole. Marx themselves some American collectors might recognise, they're the company Sindy was sold under the label of in the USA in the late 70s.
Dunbee-Combex themselves were a merger of two companies and only absorbed Marx's British side initially in 1967. Marx US continued to operate independently til the founder retired in 1972, selling the company to, of all things, Quaker Oats.
Does anyone else find it bewildering that Quaker Oats owned several toy companies at one point? They ALSO owned Fisher Price until 1991 which is just.. .wtf?
Quaker couldn't make the Marx thing work for them, so they sold on the company which was grabbed up by Dunbee-Combex in 1976, reuniting the two halves of the company. This is likely why Sindy didn't reach the US til the late 70s, the purchase of the US side of Marx gave D-C-M a foothold into a previously untapped market.
Anyway, i'm getting ahead of myself.
Can you tell I find all this history really interesting? Lol.
The Line Brothers Era has ended, but Pedigree still exists and their girl Sindy is still selling like mad.
The next "revolution" for Sindy's design are commonly referred to as "gauntlet" dolls due to the design of their arms. I don't own one because they're crazy expensive.
So instead here's a photo from an auction:
Gauntlet was typically sold as "lovely Lively" and frustratingly, I DO own a Lovely Lively Sindy... she's just NOT a Gauntlet because Pedigree is just like that.
Gauntlet has a completely new body, she's extremely skinny with an "active" style body that's elasticated through the torso and again through the arms giving her a fair bit of mobility. She has clicky knees but I don't believe her hips are elastic. I can't find any confirmation of this but I can also find no photos of her with her legs splayed outward so I have to assume it's not something she can do.
Her hair seems to survive a little better than Trendy's, but i'm not sure why.
I also don't own the next doll along, the "chubby leg" funtime. But I DO have a "skinny leg" one.
1974's "Funtime" Sindy is pretty similar to the previous year's, but with new legs. The "chubby leg" girl uses Trendy Girl legs which are lovely and shapely, while the "skinny leg" girl has these little twig legs.
"Chubby leg" didn't have a twisting waist either apparently, meaning her whole torso is one piece like the early 60s dolls. Curious.
74 Funtime however has a waist joint again.
Her body is slimmer than previous dolls and looking far more like the body Pedigree will use from this point on.
Gone are the wide splayed hands in favor of slender highly detailed hands made of hard plastic.
She may have gained more detailed hands, but she's also lost her toes! The new Sindy feet have the faintest hint of toes rather than the sculpted toes of previous dolls.
Her legs DO NOT bend, they're extremely hard like her arms.
She also has very narrow hips and like... no arse. Poor Sindy's lost all the junk in her trunk right here.
Like previous dolls, her hair is dry and prone to going wooly.
"Funtime" Sindy was the "basic" Sindy for the 70s and was available only in blonde because uh... I dunno, the 70s was big on blonde hair and fuck all the other hair colours?
This is the point where "blondification" starts to become quite prevalant in doll lines. While Sindy had previously been available in at least 3 hair colours with a relatively decent distribution of each, the 70s saw a lot of releases that were ONLY available in blonde and a lot more blonde dolls in general produced over the brunettes and redheads.
in fact, redheaded 70s and 80s dolls are ridiculously rare. They didn't seem to make many of them at all.
Thankfully the brunettes are still fairly easy to find, but there really does seem to be a disproportionate predominance of blonde Sindys out there. Hmmm.
As 1977 "Weekender" demonstrates.
They aren't hinged, they're just on a little ball meaning they can swivel but not bend. They often break off and what you see here is a reproduction hand made by the extremely talented SevenTurquoise on Etsy.
This is currently the only way to obtain replacement hands for these old dolls, so many of the originals are lost to time, vaccuum cleaners and dogs.
Meanwhile the later ballerina arms have a hinged wrist which ages substantially better.
This particular Ballerina has bendy rubbery arms but also has bending ankles. The bending ankles came in 1975, the previous few ballerinas lacking them and using standard bendy knee legs instead.
But here's what makes this girl a bit odd.
See, 1975 Ballerinas had rivet arms, but she doesn't. The non rivet arms came in 1977. Pedigree used up older bodies, older heads, older limbs... basically whatever fit they'd cobble together. Which can make dating these dolls a little tricky.
The double cup waist allows this Sindy to have some really great mobility though.
Meanwhile the blonde has the rivet arms, but a standard active waist and the legs without bending ankles. Also notice how she has no neck joint like the other ballerina? Yeah, this is I THINK the "Lovely Lively" body, which uses ballerina arms and a torso that's a hybrid between the ballerina's elasticated waist (as opposed to the twist waist of standard dolls) and the normal body.
so yeah....
The other blonde has non rivet arms, non bending ankles and uses the "Lovely Lively" torso too.
I think that means they're 1976 Lovely Livelys? I don't bloody know. They have different heads too.
Pedigree man... they don't make things easy.
She can't pose nearly as well, she just looks like she's flailing. The waist joint doesn't really move much at all and because of the elastic it tends to snap back to straight anyway. her legs also don't bend as much.
by 1976 we now have a pretty standard shape for Sindy. In fact, this torso and limb shape would be used until 1986 with only minor tweaks to the active parts.
Both of these dolls are called "weekender" which I find rather delightful. 1977 girl also showcases one of the unusual late 70s exclusive hair colours. For whatever reason, while most Sindys of this era are a somewhat platinum blonde and a lot of releases come in ONLY blonde, some of the dolls came with a variety of quite unusual tones. This one is referred to as "bronze" or sometimes "whiskey" and it's a sort of dull brownish coppery colour. There's nothing quite like it, in fact speaking to The Doll Hair Emporium, there's no currently available doll hair that exactly matches this strange tone. Which is a pain because my girl is missing a few plugs and could do with some replacement hair.
The other unusual colours are an ash blonde which looks almost grey and what's described as "firey red"which I think is actually more of an auburn sort of tone. I couldn't find any images unfortunately.
The 70s has pretty much settled at this point on a look for Sindy. And we're finally seeing a return of Saran hair which ages a lot better than whatever the hell the late 60s and early 70s girls used.
The harder heads of the 70s girls also mean they tend to keep their rooted lashes a lot better than later dolls and tend to also retain a lot of colour to their cheeks which are often over blushed.
I couldn't find my 1976 Funtime, but the only big difference with her is that she has short hair.
As I mentioned earlier, Marx US was incorperated into Pedigree's parent company in 1976 and in 1978 "Marx Sindy" was released in North America.
She came in blonde only (SIGH) and was released alongside a black doll named Gayle (who really is the exact same doll, just in darker vinyl). Another doll I would love to own but refuse to pay the going rate. Because OOF she's painfully expensive.
They pushed a lot out quite fast, focusing more on furniture and "scene setters" than dolls, tapping an area of the market Mattel still hadn't quite yet embraced with their Barbie line. Sindy always had more furniture than Barbie lol, take that Babs!
Unfortunately the American Sindy didn't last long as the parent company D-C-M went bankrupt in 1980.
Meanwhile over in the UK 1978 saw someone lose their mind at Pedigree with the release of... this poor girl:
THIS is "Sweet Dreams" Sindy, and I feel she's far more likely to haunt your nightmares.
She's got a sleep eye mechanism which means her eyes are inset and uh... wobble.... giving her a rather disturbing look. Her lack of painted lashes certainly doesn't help matters. She just looks "off". Her head is soft and squishy and her lashes a strange rectangle that juts out unnaturally from the eye.
Like a baby doll, when she's layed down her eyes close. Or well... they don't really. They half close, leaving little bits of blue to glare into your soul.
They also get stuck a lot, resulting in more nightmare fuel.
The mechanism for these eyes are held in with big bulging tumours. The actual eye itself is a painted plastic piece set into a weighted metal cradle. These are then inserted into these vinyl "pouches" moulded into her head.
to accomidate this, her neck knob had to be modified. This means that Sweet Dreams Sindy has a unique head connector. Now, a normal neck knob WILL fit, and in my experience, doesn't do much to change the ability of the damn eyes to move (or not, as they usually decide to stick regardless) and a regular head fits on this knob just fine so i'm not really sure why they bothered. Whatever the case, Sweet Dreams was, bizarrely enough, sold for a couple of years. Who the fuck was buying this abomination!?
I've often wondered if she'd have been less terrifying with proper inset eyes rather than these strange wobbly painted things but let's be real here, she's always going to be a bloody strange looking doll.
For some reason the european release actually had painted lashes, because someone saw some sense before they unleashed this thing outside the UK.
It doesn't help much, but it's something.
this year saw at least one change to the standard body. Her arms are now squishy, with a flatter and less defined hand.
1979 saw a new head too but of course, Pedigree used old stock too.
this new head is wider, squishier and marked "2nd gen". She tends to have less makeup than earlier dolls, no heavy blush and soft pink or pale coral lips. She's also more pink toned and often paler than the earlier 70s girls.
This particular girl has had a hair cut.
Now, one big problem I have at this point is that this is where my heat wave and painkiller fog kick in and I can't for the life of me remember which Sindy this one IS.
I think she's a 79 or 80 "basic" but i'm just not sure anymore.
You can see that her legs don't quite fit into the hip sockets while if you scroll up, the earlier dolls sit flush. I'm not sure why this is. But it's a characteristic of the later dolls and it's a bit random.
The new arms on the other hand, sit a lot better without a little "lip" at the shoulder.
Go figure.
the fact I took this photo makes me think she's gotta be 79 or 80 to round out the decade.
A huge transformation in her 16-17 years don't you think?
I will say though, one fun thing about this is that despite being such clearly different body shapes and styles, these two dolls can still for the most part share clothing pieces. Yes, 60s stuff is a bit big on 70s sindy, particularly around the waist, but it's doable. Likewise they can mostly share shoes. Again, 60s shoes are wider but not by too much. I've gotten 60s doll feet into later sindy shoes without issue so yeah...
1969-70 Sindy in a 1981 dress. (incidentally, the same dress the 1978 Marx Sindy was sold in)
it's a bit tight around the waist but it works.
I really do need more vintage sindy clothes <_< heh.
Sindy "if I win the lotto" wishlist- 70s edition:
- Gauntlet Sindy
- Chubby leg Funtime
- Gayle
- more clothes! Bwhahaha.
Next time we'll tackle the 80s, which gets a little turbulant.
Hopefully i'll be in less pain by then. Oof.
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