Baby All Gone

Baby All Gone arrived from Kenner in the early 1990s—collector listings date it to 1991, while some museum records say 1992—riding the popularity of the company's Baby Alive line into a cleaner, tidier feeding fantasy. There was no food passing through to a diaper here; the whole appeal was disappearance. She came with a bottle, a spoon, and a jar of cherries, and the magic was mechanical, hidden in the utensils: the food slid out of sight as you tipped the spoon into her mouth, and the bottle's contents receded into a concealed inner chamber, so it looked like she was really eating and drinking.

The soft-bodied doll with plastic arms and legs was pitched on that endless-loop promise—feed her, watch it all vanish, then load up and feed her again. It was a short-lived early-'90s product rather than a decade-spanning staple; Kenner's brand was later folded into Hasbro, and the eating-doll idea lived on through Baby Alive. But for the kids who had one, the memory is precise: tipping the spoon, watching the cherries shrink to nothing, and immediately going back for another bite.