Small girls play with some strange dolls these days. There are still traditional baby dolls, of course, but there are also whole series of odd-looking dolls with overlarge heads and unusually huge eyes, often associated with some anime film or series or other.
Barbie (born in 1959) was oddly proportioned but she was, I suppose, like somebody’s (whose? I wonder!) idea of what an ideal woman would be: long, long legs and big boobs, as in the comic song Bette Middler sang about “long, long legs and great big knockers - that’s what gets results!”. These large headed dolls, such as Bratz dolls, seem to have been in existence since around 2000. Like Barbie, they’re still described as “fashion dolls” but they look more like teenage or even pre-teen girls.
Anyway, Granddaughter Number Four, six and a half years old, brought one of these creations with when the family came round yesterday afternoon. At some point one of the doll’s leg came off. She asked her big sister, Granddaughter Number One, if she could fix it but apparently the ball joint was broken and there was no way of simply slotting the leg back in. There was a moment of sadness. We all moved on to other things. We had dinner. We sang happy birthday to Grandson Number One, one day late but that’s how it goes, and ate birthday cake.
After dinner Granddaughter Number Four asked for paper and scissors and began snipping and shaping. She asked for glue. She asked for a little help in holding things in place while she glued. And then, lo and behold, she showed us a wheelchair she had concocted for her one-legged doll. Then she had to accept, somewhat reluctantly, that the wheelchair was rather too flimsy to hold her poor doll. Had she consulted me beforehand I could have found her card rather than drawing paper.
Still she was quite pleased with the results. The grown-ups around the table, including Granddaughter Number One, were most impressed. It was a well-proportioned model of a wheelchair. Okay, the wheels could not turn and it would be crushed fall apart if the doll, even though only about 6 inches tall, was placed in it, but but it looked good. The child is clearly destined to be an engineer or an artist!
I came across an article about Steven Spielberg where he talked about why old films should not be re-edited to match modern sensitivities. He made ET in 1982. (By the way, after watching it our daughter, Ellen, decided we should call her Elliott from now on as that was the name of the small boy who befriended the small, lost extraterrestrial. Back than nobody suggested that maybe she had gender problems, thank goodness!) It seems that a 20th anniversary edition of the film was released in which the guns that agents carried in the original film were replaced with walkie-talkies!
Spielberg said: “I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anyone do that. All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there.”
Spielberg was also asked about the controversial editing of Roald Dahl’s work, which has included changing words like “fat” to “enormous” and “ugly and beastly” to just “beastly”.
Initially he joked that “Nobody should ever attempt to take the chocolate out of Willy Wonka! Ever!” before adding “For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history, it’s our cultural heritage. I do not believe in censorship in that way.”
Quite so!
More recently, this weekend in fact, he was in the news again, having dinner in a Barcelona restaurant with Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama. When we saw The Boss and the E-Street band in Santiago de Compostela, years ago now, we joked about the possibility of running into Bruce and Patty strolling through the streets of the Spanish town. No chance! You need to be rich and famous! But I love the fact that the trio asked if they could take a photo with the staff of the restaurant, who had all been sworn to secrecy and asked by the management to be discreet. Bruce Springsteen, Steven Spielberg and Barack Obama might be rich and famous but they seem to be nice people.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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