Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [77]
"I always thought about doing a sitcom on Shindana—called Making It to the Top in the Dark," Edwards told me. "Playing on the idea of dark skin and also 'in the dark'—as in not knowing what you're doing." Listening to Edwards, whose comic timing is a cross between Eddie Murphy's and Jay Leno's, the idea sounded plausible. It might, however, have been too volatile for seventies television. Take the time Shindana had to come up with a name for its "Little Friends"—a rainbow of Hispanic, Asian-American, Native-American, African-American, and European-American toddlers. "A white person may buy a black doll for their kid, but they didn't want to buy a black baby doll," Edwards said. "Because a baby doll would give the kid the idea that they could have a black baby. And white parents did not want their kids with the idea of having a black baby. So we started playing with the idea of 'Little Friends'—like your kids would play with other ethnic groups in preschool. And tried to get that 'baby' thing out of their brains."
Then there was Shindana's outrageous cast of characters. Smith and Hall were militant, civil-rights types, Edwards said. "Other blacks were at the other end of the spectrum—where if you talked to them, you thought they were white. Then you'd have another guy with a 'street' kind of personality." And if this olla podrida weren't spicy enough, there were Shindana's assorted investors—not just Mattel, its initial backer, but "the president of Chase Manhattan bank, here in South Central, talking to all these personalities."
Ironically, the largest purchasers of Shindana products weren't African-American. December is the key sales month for toys, but because black parents tended to do their Christmas shopping later than white parents, Shindana's merchandise was often sold out by the time they went into the stores. Nor did toy buyers—almost entirely white and male at the time— take Shindana seriously enough to reorder. Because of its relationship to Mattel, Bobo said, "There was a lot of token buying." But no real commitment to the toys: "Nobody took them on as a real product that they could make money on," Edwards told me. "You'd go in there and they'd say, 'What do you jungle bunnies want? We gave last year.' "
By the mid-seventies, domestic production had become so expensive that Shindana was forced to move most of its manufacturing to the Orient. "We had little places called Shindanatown in Hong Kong and Taiwan," Edwards told me. But the move was not uncontested. "I can't even begin to tell you how much arguing there was against that," Shindana plant manager Ralph Riggins said. "One of the things Bootstrap wanted to do—and did—was put the unemployable to work," Bobo told me. But financial realities left Shindana no choice: either build overseas or go broke.
The deemphasis on Shindana's local factory depressed company morale, as did the death in 1976 of Smith and his school-age daughter in a car accident while they were on vacation. Shindana's optimism and hope began to be poisoned by cynicism and distrust, reflected in a board game that it brought out in 1980: "Manipulation: The Mammoth Corporation Game." A sort of "Monopoly" for minority businessmen, it details not only "the mechanics of borrowing money from a bank for business purposes," but also how to stay out of jail if you can't pay it back.
"Well, you know, they didn't have much use for the white man's 'manipulation,' " Cliff Jacobs told me. " 'Anybody can