Now this guy I bought, at a fairly decent price on eBay. See, I decided that maybe, just maybe, Kenneth and Allan—my first two Little People—needed a special friend.
And if I going to find them a friend, instead of that buddy being a modern Ken doll (all pretty and looking barely 21), that I should look back at the vintage dolls. Afterall, my Ken is probably circa 1962 and the Allan is from 1964, the year he was released (the original Ken had flocked hair that tended to come off, so they stopped doing that and painted the hair on instead).
SO….
This Ken doll that was posted on eBay as “Vintage Mattel 1968 Ken Doll Blonde Blue Eyes Made In Taiwan.” Any experts out there can tell me if this is true or not. He does appear to have bendable legs. Was there a year that Ken started getting bendable legs?
A new sweet Facebook friend I have met because of dolls, Zoe, told me that Mattel used the same parts for 30 years, so on eBay when people post vintage Barbies as 1960s, they might actually be 80/90s dolls with an earlier copyright date. His guess is that this Ken is Malibu Ken ’71, and certainly falls in the ‘71-74 range. That makes him not as old as my first Ken and Allan, but within ten or eleven years of when they were released.
UPDATE: Thanks to Jared Rackler, another Barbie collector extraordinaire, this particular Ken’s face-sculpt debuted in 1968 for New Good-Lookin’ Ken, however, even though he has the same face, he’s blonde like Sunset Malibu Ken, and as Zoe suggested, he was probably released in 1971.
Funny, he looks a little older than my Ken and Allan, as far as his face goes.
SO….
As far as I am concerned, my Little Person is a little older than the couple and quite suddenly, as I type this, I know that he was Kenneth’s first—something very “Call Me By Your Name”—but before he ever got involved sexually with Barbara. I still haven’t discovered if he married her, but the romance writer in me is saying that Allan might just have jumped up during Kenneth’s wedding at the point where the minister says, “Should anyone present know of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace,” he jumped up and proclaimed his love, and begged Kenneth to run away with him. They’ve been together ever since.
The couple in their younger years weren’t strictly monogamous, but certainly as Dan Savage would say, they are “monogamish.” And it has been a long time since they’ve done even that. They’re settled and pretty happy about it, even if things are a little…routine.
Will the couple take things to a different level with this new doll? I know the new doll wants to!
And what DO I call him? He is officially a Ken doll, and I love the idea of the name somehow referring to the early days of Mattel. I will decide soon…. Wanna help?
#kendoll #KenDoll #LittlePeople #BensLittlePeople #NameTheDoll
B G Thomas - writer 