Barbie
That’s right, I went to go see Barbie and I did it all by myself. Gary & Oswaldo recommended it, but the real reason I went had nothing to do with the recommendation, or all the chatter or any sense that I would somehow be left behind at social gatherings where it would be discussed. I went mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to do today, and that’s a bit of a sorry state. I plan to take a nice motorcycle ride tomorrow, but since I had to see G&O off after breakfast, today was not going to be a travel day for me. I can’t think of any pressing yard work that needs doing that I can’t do over the rest of the week a few hours at a time. And that left me with going to the movies. I actually looked at other movie options at the Angelika, but I had either seen the other movies or had not interest in them, so Barbie it was.
I was five years old when the Barbie doll was first introduced by Ruth Handler and her new start-up toy company, Mattel. That means my sisters were in the prime Barbie doll zone at ages seven and eight. We were in Costa Rica in 1959, so I’m guessing we didn’t really know about Barbie dolls in our household until we moved to Madison, Wisconsin in 1961. By then, over a million Barbie dolls had been sold at the price of $3 per doll. But just like with the business model made famous by King Gillette, Mattel figured that the real money to be made in Barbie was less in the basic doll and much more in the accessories and costumes that every little girl who owned a Barbie would want to expand on their natural imagination about who their Barbie was and what she did and how she dressed.
I got an acute object lesson in that business model in 1962 when I was eight. My mother took us out for an evening of shopping at the local discount store called Treasure Island. Ny bother was off with my older sister while my other sister, Barbara and I were left to do some shopping on our own. We probably had two dollars in our pockets taken together and were busing small items. As we walked out of the store we were stopped by a security guard for a routine bag and receipt check. I didn’t have a bag, but my sister did, so he looked through it. He matched off the items against the receipts and found one item for which there was no receipt, which was a Barbie doll accessory outfit that probably cost about $1. My sister was no hardened criminal, so rather than try to feign innocence, she cracked like and egg and wailed to the guard that she was sorry and could he please just forget about it. The guard hauled us both into the store office. Now mind you, this was an eight-year-old boy and nine-year-old girl being taken into custody. I guess they figured me for her accomplice or look-out. My mother was called to the office on the loudspeaker and the matter was quickly resolved with a warning. But here I am 62 years later and I can say that two things have stayed with me since that time: first, I never want to be involved with or part of anything having to do with taking something that’s not mine, and I remember how impactful the whole Barbie craze was that it would drive my otherwise very honest sister to slip something in her shopping bag that she had not paid for. For many years, Barbara worked as a retail store manager, so I am sure that day at Treasure Island passed through her thoughts more than once. We all live and learn and toy retailers are no exception.
While I noticed Barbie and her presence in our household in the early 1960s, I don’t recall if I was old enough to care what was under those various outfits she was always being changed into. But I bet I snuck a peek or two only to find some very smooth flesh-colored plastic. I must admit that I didn’t completely understand what was so special about dressing and redressing a lifelike Barbie doll, or, for that matter, a Ken doll. I guess I knew enough about life to know that where there was a sexually come-hither Barbie doll, there was probably a blandly handsome Ken doll not far behind. Sure enough, in 1961, Mattel launched the Kenneth Sean Carson “Ken” doll. Technically, Barbie was Barbara Millicent Roberts. The two names came from the names of the children of the founder, Ruth Handler and they were supposedly from Willow, Wisconsin, a fictitious and presumably all-American Midwest town. It has occurred to me that my first interaction with Barbie and Ken was while I was growing up in the middle of Wisconsin, where the pair were supposedly raised and went to high school. I’m not sure Mattel ever told us where Barbie went to college, but she did attend college after high school. Meanwhile, my mother was busy gettin her Ph.D. in that same state.
And then, in 1964, a company called Hasbro rocked my childhood world by introducing G.I. Joe. Say what you want, where Ken did little to motivate me to play with dolls, G.I. Joe was an entirely different story. I was ten when I got my first G.I. Joe and as I recall, I really only played with him for about two years since by twelve I was much more focused on more athletic or scientific playing and far less on toys per se. By twelve, I was into Gilbert Chemlab and stuff like golf and skiing, but G.I. Joe had his day in the sun for those two prior years. Instead of different fashion ensembles, Hasbro was selling different military outfits like a frogman set, a pilot flight suit or a special forces camouflage set. But who are we kidding, this was just a boy’s version of a doll with outfits. It’s interesting that a male doll in a military version with articulated arms and legs versus a stiff-armed and stiff-legged Ken was much more interesting to me and lots of other boys. I actually think it was a blend of the neat military gear AND the more athletic, articulated limbs that all made it much more interesting for 1960’s boy’s play. I had an anti-gun mother who was particularly non-military in her orientation, but not so her son. While today I too am VERY anti-gun and not at all military-oriented (I never served), in the 60s my favorite TV show was probably Combat (ABC – 1962-1967)and to this day I am still very intrigued by WWII movies and series, whether in the European Theater or the War in the Pacific. I’m not sure what that says about the depths of my soul and I certainly never got to play out those military obsessions through real military activity, but whether it was me and my psyche or just a sign of the times, the boy version of Barbie was more G.I. Joe than Ken.
Greta Gerwig wrote and directed Barbie and she may well get an Oscar for her efforts. It is an intelligent social depiction of the 1960s gender roles that were imposed on the youth of America through the commercial toy industry. Given that Greta was born more than twenty years after the Barbie timeframe began, her view of 1960s social-psychology can be challenged, but overall, her perspective of the harshness of both female and male gender pigeonholing makes for an interesting movie theme. The production value of the movie is very high and cute with it holding true to 1960’s toyland form more than any other movie since Toy Story. My ultimate benchmark for movie quality is how often I can rewatch it and still enjoy it and I suspect Barbie doesn’t clear that bar. But to prove Greta’s main point, it took the movie industry 64 years to make Barbie, but G.I. Joe hit the small and big screens in multiple forms in only 20 years. Like most women would agree, it is typical that the more impactful Barbie waited in the wings while G.I. Joe got to strut his stuff.