Talking Barbie and her leg problem

When you have a Talking Barbie from the late 60s you probably know the problem. Her legs fall off. Without a word, without any explanations. I don’t know how many of them were produced but I think up to 80% have this problem.

The fallen off legs were treated in different ways by different persons. Some re-glued the legs back to the body, some repaired the legs with screws. Be careful here when you want to repair the mechanism. When the screws are too deep in the body the Talking Barbie will never be able to talk again.

I admit I have seen some really creative solutions to the problem but seen from the point of view of harming a doll or not I got different answers to the problem. A lot of you emailed me about your experiences with Talking Barbie and the leg problem. Some told me they bought Talking Barbie legs and the legs fell off again a while. The ones glued back with Gorilla glue had the biggest problems. I have no idea in which decade it was done but now the arm and leg knobs seem literally to crumble away.

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Here’s what I’m talking about. See an intact leg knob here ( in one piece again)

I can give you the advice to be careful when buying used Talking Barbie dolls. It’s often the easiest way to buy them from first owners who never reglued them to the body. You can be sure to fix them properly and you even have a chance to repair the mechanism ( if you are as crazy as I am).

Since I got so much feedback I wanted to make another Video about Barbie and how to fix her legs. It’s not really hard. You only need to have her broken leg knob piece, some MEK, a paintbrush and some patience. In my latest video you can see an instruction how to reattach the legs.

When you ask my about the cause of leg problem I can only assume that it could be a material weakness. The forces having impact on the leg knobs must be huge. We have two different materials here that have an impact on the leg. It’s the rubber of the leg and the Barbie body. I think they don’t like each other and that might be the reason for the reaction. Maybe you can imagine it like a magnet and the two don’t like each other. I hope this explains Talking Barbie and her leg problem a bit better to you.

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Here’s our Stacey after the repair

The top repairs of 2021

Well, this year is over and it’s time to have a look back what happened in 2021. We had a lot of projects in 2021. Some of the projects were bigger and some of the projects were smaller. We had for example the problem with sticky legs. Sticky legs occur from time to time and especially when you store your dolls in different climatic conditions. Sometimes it’s just a matter of the production.

In February we covered the reroot of a Ponytail Swirl Barbie and repaired a Suburban Shopper with a big hole.

We also did some repaint work at a Spanish Barbie doll.

The last big project was the creation of a No Bangs Francie. Francie had no hair and we completely restored her hair including her legendary curl.