Who's that clone? It's Sandy!

Looks like I have an ID on the clone dolls: Sandy! Or, one of the Sandys.

Flickr has been weird lately and won't show me the BBcode or HTML for sharing photos, and it's not because people have it disabled: I can't even see the option on my own photos when I'm logged in. Apparently they moved the button to a secret location just to annoy me and make me feel stupid when I stumble upon it by accident in a few weeks or so. But since I'm not entirely sure people have explicitly made sharing available on their pics, I feel a bit weird downloading and sharing them, so you're getting beautiful and fascinating text links instead.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilavati112/4463214068/ - this is obviously the same doll as the one I found with the cut-off blonde hair. Also, I would recongnize those shoulders anywhere.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/54076701@N05/8005772326/ - in this photo you can see the makeup better. There's also a link to an article on Sandy dolls on Barbieplanet.ru with photos of different bodies etc. Here's the google translated version for anyone interested to take a guess as to why a cheap hollow clone doll is known as a "pectoral sandpiper" in Russian:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fbarbieplanet.ru%2Fother-16%2Fsandy-doll

So that looks like a match, at least for the blonde. I haven't found any pics of the bubble cut dolls yet - at first I thought this Japanese Sindy clone (who's also named Sandy) might be it, but this one has different, if similar, headmold, and I'm pretty sure that the blonde and the bubble cut dolls are identical after all. The body is described as slightly bigger than Barbie, and it doesn't look right either. I'm thinking the girls with bubble cuts may just be older versions (or were bubble cuts in at some point during the '80s? I can't remember). There's also the fact that none of my dolls have any markings, and the Barbieplanet article has photos of the markings on different Sandy dolls. I'm not sure what to make of that, actually. Maybe clones of clones?


Come to think of it, the definition of a clone doll seems pretty unclear to me. For example: Barbie started out as a clone of Bild-Lili, then got clones of her own (many of which are listed at this page). Then came Sindy, who doesn't look a bit like Barbie (at least not the early version) but nevertheless probably wouldn't have existed without her - and then there are dolls like Licca and Betty Teen, who clearly borrow their looks from Sindy. And then there are clones of Licca and Betty! Maybe it's a bit like that saying about how a language is just a dialect with an army: once it's a recognizable brand in its own right it graduates from clone to competitor? I don't know, but at least now I'm pretty sure of the origin of the headmold.

Well, it's a big internet to google through. The search continues! (I feel like the host of an old-timey radio show when I write that... :D)