The Defective Doll That Actually Ate Meggie's Hair

In 1996, Mattel introduced the Cabbage Patch Kids’ Snacktime Kid, a doll whose gimmick was its motorized mouth, which allowed it to “eat.” In some ways, you have to give Mattel credit: the Snacktime Kid countered the typical unrealistic body images that other dolls portrayed by being a chubby baby that showed kids it was fun to eat. On the other hand, you can’t give it too much credit because it turned out that the doll was dangerous and ate kids’ hair. This story was all over the media at the time, and after the indiscriminately masticating infants injured a handful of children, Mattel had no choice but to remove them from the shelves and offer refunds to everyone who had already purchased them.

By chance in 2003, I found a Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kid at a thrift store. For just a couple of dollars, I knew I needed to purchase it. Firstly, it might be quite valuable – since the doll was recalled, it had to at least be a rare collector’s item. Secondly, I always figured that the media reports on the doll were exaggerated to make an amusing story or win lawsuits, and this would give me the opportunity to see if the doll really did have the taste for human flesh. Content to be a new father, I named the doll “Baby Gray Davis,” its namesake the (then recently) similarly recalled Governor of California, which led to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s takeover via special election.

Immediately, I wanted to test out the doll’s risk factor, but my hair wasn’t long enough and none of my friends were dumb enough to volunteer. Instead, we fed Baby Gray Davis crumpled up pieces of paper, which the doll would chew, then “poop” out into a backpack that was attached. Once that got boring, we let it nibble on our fingers, which unfortunately didn’t hurt much. Still not satisfied, we stripped it naked (let’s just say that its representation of the digestive system is not the only part that’s not anatomically correct) and watched it gag as we fed Baby Gray Davis its own underwear. Interestingly, inside the underwear we actually found a plastic pretzel, a piece of “food” that had come with the doll in its original packaging. The previous owner must have thought it’d be funny to stuff the doll’s crotch with a pretzel rod… and they were right.

Baby Gray Davis merrily munched on the pretzel, but it was no fun watching it eat something it was designed to devour, so the next day, I decided to execute a real hair-eating experiment. I chose my friend Meggie as the test subject because she had beautiful, long, thick hair. The only problem was that she didn’t see it coming – literally. As she walked down the hall, I crept up behind an unsuspecting Meggie, grabbed a few strands of her hair, and placed them into the doll’s mouth. The doll start chewing on Meggie’s locks before she could even react.

“What are you doing?” Meggie yelled, so I jumped back, letting go of the doll. Alas, the doll had already successfully chomped down on Meggie’s hair, so the ten-pound baby dangled from her head. All the while, Baby Gray Davis kept on chewing more and more hair while Meggie struggled to remove it from the baby’s mouth without ripping it out of her scalp. Meanwhile, even as Meggie cried for help, I was laughing so hard that I had to hold on to the wall to regain my composure. Yeah, I’m an asshole.

Both the chewing and the weight of the baby hanging from her hair were so painful that Meggie had to lay down on the ground right where she was in an effort to make it stop. By this point, the screaming and laughter had attracted the crowd, so several people came to aid with the situation. Still, Baby Gray Davis had resolve and refused to let go of Meggie’s hair. Each time someone tried to yank the hair out, it seemed to only enable the doll to get a better grip on the strands and chew them down further, the hair entangled in the motor.

That is when we realized that the doll’s fatal flaw was that you couldn’t make it stop. The Snacktime Kid didn’t come with an off switch; as long as something was in its mouth, the motor kept on whirring, trying to eat whatever was in its path. Altogether, I think it took more than ten minutes after Meggie hit the ground for us to carefully extricate her hair from the doll’s mouth without ripping too much of it off.

The experiment was a success, if you’d like to call it that. Those dolls really are evil, and I am too, I guess. I swear that I did it in the name of science… or maybe just mischief. Meggie ultimately proved to be a good sport about the whole incident, though I can’t say I blame her for finding it more traumatizing and less hilarious than I did.

I never pulled that stunt again, though I did have another friend who (willingly) agreed to try breastfeeding the doll. She found the experience “pleasurable.” Click here to see the photo – WARNING - kind of NSFW.

Extras:
Here’s a dramatic video that shows another Snacktime Kid in action:


Oh, and in an ideal world in which dolls don’t turn evil and eat children, this commercial for the Snacktime Kid shows how the product was designed to be used: