Saturday, January 15, 2011

Prongs aka Harpoon Connectors on Mattel Fashion Dolls

Below is a photo illustrating what I meant by "a prong on top of a blob." Usually, Barbie's necks are topped by a small tapering knob. With the Flavas girls and some other fashion dolls, the neck ends and instead of just a knob, there is a blob of "flesh" on which a brown harpoon-looking device is fixed. So fitting a new head to the body is that much more trickier since the new head has to cover both the prong AND the flesh blob.

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4 comments:

  1. AilanthusAltissimaJanuary 17, 2011 at 3:59 PM

    Thanks for this visual reference. Do you have any idea why they put a hook on top of the knob? Does it seem to serve a structural purpose of any kind? Does the hook latch on to anything inside of the head?

    I seldom do body swaps and I have a very hard time decapitating dolls and then getting the head back on.

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  2. D7anaJanuary 22, 2011 at 2:21 PM

    Hi Kim! I have no idea why Mattel attached the head like that. Bizarre, bizzare, bizzare, LOL. I can't see a structural reason for it.

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  3. AnonymousApril 11, 2015 at 3:07 AM

    It's meant to do exactly that-make head swaps harder, presumably to cut down on the possibility of little kids chewing/potentially choking on?/making pencil toppers out of the heads.

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  4. D7anaApril 11, 2015 at 10:48 AM

    Hi amystika18n! I had not considered that the to-me-annoying device was intended to protect young doll owners. Hmmm ... I'll have more tolerance for it henceforth.

    (Did you imagine you'd read "henceforth" in a sentence online today? Never know what I'll say ;-D)

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