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

[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.