What's Wrong With the Doll on Rudolph's Island of Misfit Toys?
For years I've wondered.
What's wrong with the doll?
Growing up as a kid in the 70s, we ate Rankin & Bass TV Christmas specials like candy. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is probably the most popular (though I have to admit Year Without a Santa Claus was my personal fave due to the Miser brothers).
In Rudolph, when the red-nosed reindeer travels with Hermey the excommunicated dentist elf via iceberg and accompanied by none other than Yukon Cornelius to the Island of Misfit Toys, the 'challenges' of the playthings are all obvious.
The train has square wheels. The cowboy rides an ostrich. The toy gun shoots jelly (though doesn't seem like a problem at all to me). The Charlie-in-the-Box isn't named Jack.
But the doll? I never could tell what was wrong with her. Thank God for the internet, am I right?
Wikipedia offers an answer to the age-old television mystery:
"A Dolly for Sue (as she calls herself) is a seemingly normal girl rag doll with red hair and a red gingham (checkered) dress. Her misfit problem is never explained on the special, but was revealed on NPR's Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! news quiz show (broadcast December 8, 2007). The show revealed that Rudolph's producer, Arthur Rankin Jr., says Dolly's problem was psychological, caused from being abandoned by her mistress and suffering depression from feeling unloved."
