Candy was a short-lived weekly children's magazine that began in 1967 and featured, as described by this 2024 CNN article "two life-sized mannequin children and their 'parents' — a pair of humanoid pandas." (The pandas are Mr. and Mrs. Bearanda.) If the mannequins look familar to some of us from Generation X, that's because they're from Century 21, one of the companies under the umbrella of Gerry Anderson, who gave us the heroic marionettes of Thunderbirds.
Candy and Andy was the hardcover annual tied to the Candy magazine — an end-of-year volume designed for Christmas gift-giving in the UK. The one featured in this blog post is the 1968 annual.
Much has been written about these blond siblings, because lifelike dolls are unsettling and stick in the memory, even if the magazine and annuals were mostly failed ventures back in their day.
Writing for Four Corners Books, Val Williams stated of the Andy and Candy photos: "These are mysterious photo tableaux, some of which adapt a simulacrum of the everyday – eating, playing doing small tasks – others of which make no sense at all and some which give a sense of impending crisis and danger. While bright colours and cheerful settings appear throughout, Candy and Andy’s bleak stares and awkward gestures conjure up a macabre puppet theatre, while the Bearandas plod and fuddle and struggle to comprehend it all.
"Bleak stares and awkward gestures" is putting it nicely. In an article on It's Nice That, Alan Dein states: “They dressed in with-it 1960s fashion lines and inhabited a familiar landscape of every-day Britain, but they also looked like the spooky alien children from the film Village of the Damned, based on John Wyndham’s terrifying sci-fi book The Midwich Cuckoos."
Here are some additional photos (some cropped for dramatic effect) from the 1968 annual. It's Candy that I find most disturbing; she seems like the one you would never want to cross.
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