Greater Long Island coverage is funded in part by Toresco & Simonelli, a boutique injury and family law firm in West Islip. They fight for their clients. Click here to learn more and to get in touch.
It’s true that no child would want to play with a boat that couldn’t stay afla-fla-float. And bringing a cowboy who rides an ostrich into first grade show-and-tell would surely draw jeers.
Most of the toys banished to the Island of Misfit Toys in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) TV special were there for understandable reasons.
You try giving your kid a train with square wheels on its caboose.
They’re all misfits!
But there’s always been that one toy, Dolly, a little doll on the island and the only character with speaking lines who doesn’t get to explain her, um, nonconformity, to the viewer.
Ever-obsessed with Christmas specials for reasons only intense psychotherapy would begin to explain, a few years back I located and reached out to a historian for Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment, for another column.
I believe I contacted him over Twitter and got right down to brass tacks with Rick Goldschmidt, author of “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Making Of The Rankin/Bass Holiday Classic” and other books.
“So what’s wrong with a Dolly for Sue? The thing talks and cries. That would have been some feat of technology back in 1964. The doll should have been sold-out everywhere.”
Goldschmidt’s candid response satisfied my decades-old curiosity, and something I believe all Americans needs to know this holiday season.
In short, Goldschmidt had discovered, Dolly’s got issues, is all:
“There is nothing in the scripts about the misfit doll,” Goldschmidt informed me back in 2013.
He explained that Dolly suddenly found herself with more lines and screen time after the producers — reacting to public outcry after the special’s first airing — added a final scene that included Santa going back to the island to rescue the misfit toys.
With the new scene, he said, “she became more significant.” Yet unlike with the other misfit toys, her “issue” remained unexplained.
Mr. Goldschmidt said he had once asked Arthur Rankin about Dolly.
The producer responded that Dolly’s problems were psychological and explained that she “was cast off by her mistress and was clinically depressed and Prozac did not exist in those days.”
Basically, the girl was struggling with mental health issues and so she got sent away to an island.
What a terrible time in history to be a sentient plaything.
One other misfit toy I now have to advocate for is the water pistol that shoots jelly. I watched Rudolph last week with my 6-year-old and he’s now telling me that’s what he wants for Christmas.
As long as he doesn’t shoot it in the house. Then he would find himself banished to some island.
PHOTO SOURCE: CBS
