I never played with Polly Pocket that I can remember, though I do recognize the look of the earliest little houses shown in your post. I’m really, seriously, deeply disturbed by how even tiny Polly has been thin-ified and sexy-ified over the years – this trend in culture is been something that has been bothering me for a while now, though I didn’t know it extended to toys. Mostly I see it in tv and movies (the most massively consumed culture, I suppose) and usually sum up by complaining that everything is so ‘shiny’ right now. The actresses with their perfectly shiny (and absolutely identical) hair, their shiny-shiny skin, the perfectly shiny locations with everything glitzing in the perfect-perfect sunshine. Nothing is remotely real anymore – the way people are portrayed phyiscally, the way they live, the things they are able to have and consume.

And now even Polly Pocket is too shiny. As you said above, she doesn’t have a sweet, semi-realistic, homey house anymore, she has a shiny, glitzy cruise ship?! When did this happen, that children are taught to want to be perfect, blond, unnaturally skinny, and to have mountains of meaningless, commercial junk? And why aren’t people more angry about it?

Thank you for this series – bumping into things like this makes me just a tiny bit less crazy for feeling this way.