These New 'Baby So Real' Cabbage Patch Dolls Are Not Like The Ones We Remember
New Cabbage Patch dolls are coming to a store near you and they’re totally different from the ones you grew up with.
If you wanted to get your child an old school Cabbage Patch doll like you used to have, go for it. But know that their friends might be tending to the new and advanced Baby So Real Cabbage Patch Kid. It’s the latest old-school toy to get a face-lift and it’s now super techy, kinda creepy, and totally different than the dolls we grew up with.
According to a first look at Mashable, the upgraded doll has LED eyes, multiple motion sensors in places like the doll’s forehead and feet, and its cheeks even glow red when the kid is “sick.” All these motion censors mean that the “baby” is smarter than many real babies and can actually tell when you’re trying to rock it to sleep. And no 21st-century toy would be complete without a corresponding app that allows you to watch the doll in the style of a baby monitor. If you give the doll a bottle, you can watch the avatar on the tablet drink the bottle. Or laugh when you tickle its feet. Or start to feel better once you give it medicine.
I can’t help but think like Obi-Wan Kenobi and say, “These are not the Cabbage Patch dolls you are looking for,” and mourn the loss of the dolls of yore.
Kids these days are getting it easy. They’ll know for sure if their baby is sick because of its glowing cheeks while children from the 80’s just had to make that shit up in their heads. They had to just pretend that 80’s baby was asleep despite its glassy-eyed blank stares boring into their souls. And they were stuck with the name given to their doll on the super official birth certificate that came with every doll which was the coolest thing ever. With this new version, kids can change the name of their baby to anything they want. Where’s the fun in that and why are we trusting micro-people who were just babies themselves to name a baby? There’s going to be a lot of dolls named “Ice Cream” and “Blue” in the Cabbage Patch Kid future.
It’s not necessary for technology to be so intertwined with a kids toy. If kids want to pretend like their baby is sick, they can draw green vomit coming out of the doll’s mouth like Generation X used to do. Sure, it meant our doll was “sick” until the doll found its way to a new home at the local Goodwill, but at least we were involved in the life of our baby.
And we all know that baby monitors at their core are one of the creepiest inventions ever. They may make it easier to see if your baby is actually sleeping or just staring at the ceiling, plotting its 2 a.m. wake up, but do we really want to subject our children to these parenting tactics so early in their own development?
There was nothing wrong with the dolls we grew up with. They didn’t have Bluetooth, but they had our hearts. And a lot of mystery stains from who knows what that never got washed out giving the baby the slightly foul odor of, well, motherhood. Don’t fix something that isn’t broken, or at the very least, make these new doll’s eyes less creepy because I’m seriously going to have nightmares tonight.
