The Crazy 90s Recall That Made Us All A Little Afraid Of Our Dolls

There seems to be a lot of recalls of products because your kid might choke on a piece, but there are very few done because the toy may choke on you. There was a Cabbage Patch doll in the 90s that actually had to be recalled because it was chewing on children. It actually was pretty serious because it would actually rip out their hair and swallow it down!

The Snacktime Kid Cabbage Patch Doll looked like most other Cabbage Patch Kids but it had one very huge difference. The doll had a motorized mouth that you could feed in some plastic foods that would land in its backpack so you could do it again. What was the problem? When you little doll ran out of fake french fries to eat, it would turn on the humans.

The doll's mechanical jaws didn't have an off switch so as it would start to eat it would just keep going while there was something in there. The chewing motion would sometimes catch on kids' fingers, or even worse, their hair.

There were a lot of stories about little girls getting their hair caught in the doll's mouth and it was so bad that some girls would end up with huge bald patches. A mother named Tammy Mize had bought the doll for her three-year-old daughter Carly, but when she realized that the doll had snagged the toddler's hair she tried to pull it off, but it did not go as planned.

"It kept rolling her hair inside the head. It pulled her hair from the root. She is completely bald all the way down the back of her head," Mize said back in 1996.

This wasn't the only case of the doll turning into a tiny nightmare. The doll chewed many other kid's hair up, including a seven-year-old named Sarah Stevens whose family had to call 911 to come and dismantle the doll completely because they couldn't get the hair out. They say it took over 30 minutes to free the little girl.

Mattel issued a recall for the dolls with a $40 refund. They had already sold around 500,000 by the time they realized the problem. Apparently none of the safety tests had discovered this flaw, but according to Mattel's chief operating officer, Jill Barad, they were "deeply concerned with the satisfaction of all our consumers and in maintaining their longstanding confidence in the safety and value of our toys.''

Do you remember this doll? I remember watching the commercials and thinking they looked neat but I am very glad I never got one now!

Share if you remember!