Dimension X: Perigis Wonderful Dolls (George Lefferts)

[james_davis_nicoll]

Perigis Wonderful Dolls

A young girl talks her mother into renting a marvelous talking doll whose first statements to them includes this song:

"You are big and tall
(something indistinct)
When men begin to fall
The doll will rule them all"

Contrary to what the narrator claims, I think there were signs the dolls were bad news. Also, that's one creepy sounding doll.

The dad seems awfully eager to believe his daughter is a pet-killing, national-security-violating monster.

Comments

Quick, Maestro!

[leecetheartist]

Cue: Jonathon Coulton's "Creepy Doll" song here.

[oh6]

For whatever reason, the audio recording at archive.org seems to end as the dad is trying to explain to the police what's going on.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Another "generation gap" story?

I wonder why US parents in the immediate postwar era had all this barely-sublimated fear of their young children, or at least why SF/horror writers felt compelled to poke at it so often.

Obviously, the monster baby or devil baby is a basic body-horror thing combined with the resentment first-time parents have about their lives being upended; and parents also naturally get anxious about bad influences making their kids grow up wrong. But this seems to be something a bit different, an anxiety about the whole rising generation of children in and of themselves. And I wonder how much of the history of the Boomers arises from it.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Projection of some kind, maybe? societal guilt over the horror of world war, concentration camps, nuclear weapons? Fear that there's something inherently terrible about people, even the most innocent-seeming?

I'm guessing, but shame/fear/projection is at the heart of a hell of a lot of stuff.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It may have just been that (for the growing white middle class, at least) these kids weren't growing up with the general material deprivation that their parents had known, and there was a feeling that that made them a fundamentally different kind of people.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...though, come to think of it, there were a lot of these stories in Britain too, where things were worse.

[(Anonymous)]

Google suggests that the poem goes 'Men are big and tall / Dolls are very small / When men begin to fall / The dolls will rule them all!