When should you buy a Talking Barbie?

This is a typically question that comes up every now and then when you talk with other collector about the topic.

The Talking Barbies I talk about here were first introduced into the market in 1967/1968. They have a pullstring mechanism that makes a record spin inside the doll in miniature format.

One of my Talking dolls ( no Barbie but a normal Walking -Talking doll from around 1990) also had these little records. More abilities to do something leads to less space inside the doll. Maybe I’m a little bit old school here but I like these dolls. Maybe that’s why Talking Barbie began to fascinate me later.

Almost every collector I know likes them but not all of them are aware what to look for and what not. I for example have another look on Talking Barbie than someone who just wants to have one in his or her collection.

I want to repair them when I buy them. I’ve only bought one Talking Barbie just for fun. The other ones were bought to be repaired.

When you buy a Talking Barbie there are several things you should look for. The main thing to do is to check if you see an offer if the doll is complete or not. I don’t recommend to buy incomplete dolls because you will get problems to find the missing parts. Keep in mind here that these dolls are popular. They are sought after. If you are unsure if the doll you are interested in or not, ask another collector. Some of them are friendly and willing to help.

One of the weakest constuctions of Talking Barbies are her legs. They tend to fall of all the time. In my opinion this is a construction problem. Maybe body and the rubber of her legs did not like each other? I’m not chemist but I can assume.

Some daddies came up with solutions for the fallen of legs. Some used screws to fix the legs but inside the body they damaged the mechanism so that the doll won’t be able to talk anymore. Practically it looks like this inside:

The real eyelashes of Mod Barbie

Have you been wondering how they did these real eyelashes of the Mod Barbie dolls starting in 1967 with the Twist n Turn Barbie?

Well, originally this was done by a sewing machine. I really admire everyone being able to do this with a sewing machine. I’m not able to do this but I found my own way how to do this without a sewing machine but by hand. From my experience I can tell you it’s a lot of work and it’s time consuming to get these little lashes back it.

It is possible to repair missing or damaged lashes without a doubt. However you need some skills, the right needle and a lot of patience.

I will give you a short video instruction below.

Like mentioned above it’s possible to repair but it’s a lot of work and I think this was stopped after several years due to costs. In the late 90s some collector dolls like the ones from the Great Eras serie suddendly had them again but the had much more lashes in the end than the late 60s and early 70s Barbie dolls. For reasons of comparison I will give you some pics below.

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Twist n Turn Julia 1967
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French Lady from the Great Eras series, 1997 made for collector market

No blog posts for more than 2 months?

I know I neglected my blog in the last months a bit because of holiday, visitors and time consuming video projects. I’m really sorry for that but sometimes this is life.

You can’t predict what the next day will bring you and you don’t know what kind of surprises to expect the next day. I hope to have a bit more time to blog in the next weeks and I hope that I can at least write one blog post a week. Sometimes that’s a challenge but nothing about a good challenge.

Now it seems that Corona is getting back we probably have more time that we expect to have it now when we will have the next lockdown. I don’t want to predict here anything but in Austria they started another lockdown from today on.

This is not really funny anymore because the measurements don’t seem to work here vaccinated or not.

Anyway I don’t want to complain but I want to write here more than in the last weeks. I hope that’s at least a start here.