THE HAMSTER!?

Everyone's crazy over McKenna's hamster! Until AG offers it up as its own item (or at least a replacement part), the only way your dolls are getting a hamster is if you spend some bank on McKenna's bed.

Err, except not.

Follow me back to a magical land called "The Mid 1990s." They haven't made a historical doll about it yet, so you'll just have to use your imagination. During this time, there were toys called Littlest Pet Shops.

"Oh! But Bean! I have some of those," you say! No you don't. You're thinking of the horrifying bobbleheaded genetic abominations they try to claim are Littlest Pet Shop toys today. In the 1990s, Littlest Pet Shop toys:

• Actually looked like animals
• "did something" -- the big hook was that every toy could do an action, like chase a toy or wag their tail or something.

Now, some of these toys are scaled perfectly to AG size. Some aren't, but such is life. But! They actually released several hamster sets that, drumroll please, look strikingly similar to McKenna's.

Don't feel limited. They also had a gerbil set that would stomp McKenna's hamster set into the ground. That cage in the picture is modular. It came with different pipes so that you could come up with a huge variety of configurations, and a magnetic wand so that you could guide the gerbils through the cage.

Actually, both those pictures come from a really good Flickr set if you're interested in seeing more of the old toys. There were literally hundreds of them, way more than pictured there.

If you decide you want to pick up some of the old 90s Littlest Pet Shops, sadly, your only source (that I know of?) is eBay.