dolls

A few months ago I visited a toy museum in Deer Lodge, Montana.

Whether a person is old enough to be nostalgic for it from the '70s or simply fell in love with it in the pages of Twisted ToyFare Theatre, for a lot of toy fans the 8" tall MEGO Spider-Man is more or less a must-have. Until now obtaining one has meant shelling out for pricey vintage toys of varying states of disrepair (mine, for example, has half its bare foot sticking out of its jumpsuit),

To Dan Knowlton, his Cabbage Patch Kids are his children. "They're easier to cope with." True -- they never grow or die or have to maintain necessary life functions, but that doesn't mean you need 600 of them.

Toys in the '70s sure were awesome, but let's face it -- they weren't always well-thought-out. In that spirit, we present 'Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces,' a large plastic doll that surely qualifies as one of the most disturbing toys of all time. If you owned one, you have our sympathy.

As a 16-year-old, Galia Slayen made a life-size Barbie out of wood, chicken wire, paper-mache and -- of course -- two big balloons as way to deal with her anorexia. Now, four years later, Slayen is a sophomore at Hamilton College and is using the massive (but freakishly slim) doll she built to start a conversation about eating disorders and body image issues.