Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [52]
Barad was not, however, permitted to realize her vision immediately. Slime was still an important product at Mattel, and Barad's first assignment was to sell it in its then-current incarnation, A Bad Case of Worms, which featured, besides the popular green glop, brown vinyl crawlers. The modified Slime also functioned as an activity toy. If you threw it against a wall, it would stick and wriggle down. Barad rose to the occasion but ultimately confronted her boss, Tom Kalinske, and asked for greater responsibility on an aspect of girls' toys. He assigned her to work with Shackelford on Barbie. While she was pregnant with her second child she was promoted to marketing director, and what can be described as the doll's golden era began.
A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything."
The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.
Although the ad, and, by extension, the whole career Barbie series, is not without problematic and contradictory content, it is such a departure from the doll's fatuous, disco positioning in the seventies that one's jaw tends to drop. And one wonders: How on earth did it happen?
One factor was the Barbie group at Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency that had, in the seventies, acquired Carson/Roberts. By 1984—a year after Sally Ride's landmark space flight, the same year as Geraldine Ferraro's historic bid for the U.S. vice presidency—Mattel urged O&M creative director Elaine Haller and writer Barbara Lui to, in Lui's words, "express where women were and where they wanted their daughters to be at the time." Upon hearing that, Lui told me last year, she remembered her own childhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "My mother's words came to me," she said. "My name is Barbara—I was called Bobbie at home—and my mother used to say, 'Bobbie, you can do anything,' " which, with a few revisions, became the doll's new slogan: "We girls can do anything, right, Barbie?"
And in 1985, it seemed "we girls" actually could. For the first time since the sixties, Barbie, in her Day-to-Night incarnation, was positioned