Groovy Girls are back, and their hands are magnets

There is a box in your parents’ basement with a doll in it whose yarn hair has been brushed into a single felted clump, and you have thought about it exactly once in twenty years, which was the moment your own kid asked for a doll. Groovy Girls are back on shelves, $30 each, and the fix Manhattan Toy made is not the one you would guess.

The hands

Every doll in the new line has magnets in her palms. That sounds like a gimmick until you remember what the old ones were like: a soft doll with soft hands cannot hold anything, so every accessory ever made for them was a compromise involving elastic loops or a hole in a sleeve. Now she can hold a hairbrush, hold hands with another doll, or carry one of the magnetic pets, and it stays put on a car seat.

The rest is recognisably the same object, which is the point. Soft body, yarn hair with a streak of colour in it, clothes that come off and go back on, ages three and up. Five characters: Rose, Saige, Poppy, Iris and Daisy, at $30 each.

What it costs to keep going

The doll is the cheap part and everyone who owned one in 1999 already knows this. Outfits run $10 to $23, so Giggles in Gingham is $10 and Pajama Party is $23. Petal the Groovy Dog is $20, Blossom the Groovy Horse is $40. Furniture is small money by comparison: the Boppin’ Beanbag Chair is $13, the Super Duper Sleeping Bag $15, the Butterfly Lounger $19.99. None of it is required and all of it will be requested.

Where to find them

The line has been on manhattantoy.com and in specialty stores since the spring. The Toy Book reported this week that Amazon starts carrying them on October 1, which is the part that decides whether a doll from 1998 becomes a doll your kid’s friends also have.

The one we’d buy

Buy the doll and one outfit and stop there for now. At $30 it is a reasonable soft doll on its own terms, it goes through a washing machine and survives a car floor, and the magnetic hands are a genuine improvement on a design that is nearly thirty years old. If you are buying for a three-year-old, Daisy comes in overalls and rain boots and loses the fewest pieces. And if you are honestly buying this for yourself, look at the photographs first: the faces have been redrawn and they are not the dolls in the basement.

Manhattan Toy is in the club: 10% off for Cubbie Club members. See the Manhattan Toy offer →