New podcast miniseries is packed with little-known Barbie history

Transcript

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

She's a pilot. She's an astronaut. She's a doctor. She's Barbie. Since the 1950s, Mattel's iconic Barbie doll has been and done almost everything. What started as one doll turned into a universe of characters, movies, TV shows and lunchboxes. And after all of that, Barbie seems to be having a distinct cultural moment right now with the much-anticipated Greta Gerwig movie. To join us now to talk about all things Barbie, including a frank discussion about the sexualized origins of the doll, we have M.G. Lord, who wrote the book "Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography Of A Real Doll," and Antonia Cereijido, a host at LAist Studios. Together, they host the new podcast miniseries "LA Made: The Barbie Tapes." Welcome to you both.

ANTONIA CEREIJIDO: Thanks so much for having us.

M G LORD: Yeah. Hi, Scott.

DETROW: The podcast is called "The Barbie Tapes." And the tapes in question are, M.G., the archival tapes of interviews you did with seemingly all of the major players at the creation of Barbie. You had this trove of tapes for a long time. And in the very beginning of the first episode, Antonia, you describe coming in and kind of, you know, digging them out of a safe, like it was gold bullion or something.

CEREIJIDO: Yeah, exactly.

LORD: Well, it was also because, you know, I hadn't touched them since 1993 or '94, and I lost the key to the fireproof lockbox.

DETROW: Oh, man.

LORD: It presented more of a challenge.

CEREIJIDO: And I like this idea of, like, introducing Barbie as, like, an ancient artifact that we're sort of gathering material around because even though Barbie has only been around for a little over 60 years, she's sort of been coded into our DNA and does feel like if an archaeologist a hundred years from now were to unearth items from today, Barbie would help explain a lot of U.S. culture.

LORD: Yeah. I think it's not just her trendy clothes, though. I mean, I've always thought of Barbie as a space-age recasting of a Stone Age fertility goddess - you know? - a Neolithic fertility totem, like those Venuses of Willendorf. And she does have a lot - you know, I rest this argument on her itty-bitty arched feet or the relative lack of them because, you know, those Venus figures were portable objects of veneration. And in order for them to stand up, they had to be shoved into the earth, which connected them with Mother Earth, the chthonian or dark underworld source of their power. I think these dolls have incredibly trendy clothes but an underlying mythic resonance.

DETROW: Can you tell me about, though, the actual origin story of Barbie, though? Because I knew none of the details until I listened to this podcast and especially the connection to this - I don't even know how to describe it - this German doll, Lilli, which comes from a very different background and had a very different target audience than Barbie did.

LORD: Well, as pieces of sculpture, the Barbie doll and the Lilli doll are almost indistinguishable. But they have very different invented personalities. Lilli was based on a comic character in the Bild-Zeitung, kind of a downscale German tabloid newspaper, like The National Enquirer. And in every one of the single panel comics, it's kind of - it's an ongoing joke, and it all takes this form of like, Lilli taking money from jowly fat cats for sexual favors. The emblematic cartoon, I think, is one of Lilli completely naked, holding up a newspaper - a tabloid, I think - to cover her naked body. And she's in the apartment of a female friend. And she says to the friend, we had a fight, and he took back all his presents. That gives you a sense of how Lilli operated in the world.

CEREIJIDO: And just to clarify, the Lilli doll was a doll that Ruth Handler, who was one of the co-founders of Mattel, had seen when she was traveling on vacation in the late '50s.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

RUTH HANDLER: We went to Europe. We went to Lucerne. We saw - passed a toy store window. And there were a bunch of these dolls dressed in these very European costumes, these European ski costumes. You know, and when we saw them, we just loved this doll in these windows. So I went in and bought Barbara one for her and one for me.

DETROW: So what is the streamlined path from that and that context to beloved children's doll in America? I mean, what is the initial step of - what was Ruth Handler going for as she thought of this idea and how to take that physical doll and turn it into something different?

LORD: It was kind of bumpy, but it began when she took this doll she had found in Germany and planted it in the briefcase of another major player, Jack Ryan, a Yale-educated engineer who worked on the Sparrow and Hawk missiles and whom Mattel had hired to do engineering work. Anyway, he took it to Japan, where he was to find someone to make a copy of it.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JACK RYAN: And each time I would get a half a dozen back, there were nipples on the breasts. And our marketing people were scared to put out a doll with nipples on the breasts. So every time the masters came from Japan, it was my duty to take my little fine Swiss file, which they used for working on watches. Swiss files are for watch work. And I very daintily filed the nipples off and returned them. And they kept coming back with nipples. So finally, after I'd filed them off several times, they got the idea that they were supposed to make it without nipples.

CEREIJIDO: And just hearing someone actually tell that story, you're like, wow, somebody did that. And now Barbie is so part of, like, all of our lives. It's incredible. Yeah.

LORD: Yeah. It was really extraordinary.

CEREIJIDO: And the other thing that really makes Ruth such an innovator is that prior to coming across the Lilli doll- like, the Lilli doll is the physical form of inspiration for Barbie. But she had seen that her daughter, named Barbara, was playing with paper dolls. And normally, Barbara would pick older dolls. She didn't pick girls who were her age. And prior to Barbie, basically every doll was a baby doll that little girls would pretend to be the mother of. And she had the idea of making a 3D doll that little girls could pretend to be when they grow up, to play out adult situations.

DETROW: You put it in such an interesting way in the podcast, that this was the very first aspirational doll that was created, something kids could look up to and see themselves as and see this very particular type of adulthood in instead of baby dolls.

CEREIJIDO: Yeah, that's totally true. And I think also another thing that was interesting for me putting this together with M.G. was that Barbie really was, like, a post-World War II product. There was a lot of - obviously, there was the baby boomers. So, like, toy companies were really taking off. But also there was, like, a new understanding that there was, like, a growing adolescence. There was a - more of a time between when kids were kids, and then they took on responsibilities of being parents. And it was that time period that's, like, glamorous time in your life where you're not a kid anymore. You maybe have a couple of dollars in your pocket, and you don't have that many responsibilities. And there was just a lot of products that were aimed at either teenagers or sort of idolizing teenagers. And that really was sort of a post-World War II phenomenon.

LORD: Yeah, the invention of the teenager as an entity to whom you could market stuff. And I suppose that was sort of also the message of Barbie. Again, the invented personalities - Barbie versus Lilli - were very different, but, you know, you had to be the wholesome milkshake-drinking girl next door and - I search for euphemisms - but have the body of a German sex worker.

CEREIJIDO: (Laughter).

DETROW: M.G., you are the best interview I've had today. I just want to say that right now. This is - hands down, you win. Congratulations. Antonia, what was the most interesting thing that you learned about these early days of Barbie doing this podcast?

CEREIJIDO: There are so many interesting things. I mean, one thing that, since the podcast has come out, my friends have been texting me about is just, like, they didn't realize that it was so crazy to have a doll with boobs. I mean, when you think about it, you're like, wow, that is really wild that there was a lot of controversy around that. And then the other thing that just really fascinates me - the sheer amount of market research that went into the doll. So I think everything was really thought out. And when you're looking at the doll and all the different iterations, like, it really is sort of a composite of, like, a lot of different children's desires at the time. So it's very reflective of whatever moment it's in, and that's because so much research went into making these dolls and figuring out what actually spoke to little girls.

DETROW: Well, did you see some long-lasting marks from that initial framing and marketing in terms of Barbie over the years? Because, you know, on one hand, you have the career-type outfits and things like that, but there has been a persistent criticism over the year that, you know, in the end, Barbie is teaching young girls to be homemakers.

CEREIJIDO: Well, we have an amazing quote from Derek Gable, who was a Barbie designer, where he talks about how, you know, Mattel, in a way, wanted to respond to all these criticisms and would do market research and brought in new careers.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DEREK GABLE: I mean, everything - doctors, any kind of career, anything outside of fashion. Whenever you did a test, 100% of the time, the ones that - the things that won the test were fashion, hair play, makeup. And so it really wasn't that Barbie was forcing that on the public. It was basically that that's what little girls wanted to play with. And you can - you know, you're in this business to make money, and there's no point having an office girl there or a doctor if girls - the kids want to play with boutique.

CEREIJIDO: Consistently, little girls wanted more hair play. They wanted to play boutique. That actually is so funny. In the third episode, you'll learn - and we can give this little tidbit away - that the most - the highest selling Barbie of all time, still to this day, is Totally Hair Barbie (laughter) from the early '90s. It - just all kids really wanted was to cut more hair.

DETROW: You know.

CEREIJIDO: Like, OK, what if she's a pilot? They're like no, hair. Like, what if she's a teacher? No, actually, we just really want more hair.

DETROW: Since we're in the '90s now, the other area of this history I wanted to ask about is can you - you know, obviously, Barbie starts out in a very particular body type, a very particular look. And over the years, there have been lots of different Barbies - Barbies of color, Barbies with disabilities, Barbies modeled on famous women over the years - an Ida B. Wells Barbie, you know, and so on. Can you retrace some of the ways that these newer and more diverse Barbies made their way onto the scene - some of those initial decisions?

CEREIJIDO: In some ways, Barbie - the Barbie of the '90s was more inclusive than the Barbie of 1959, but not, like, in a crazy radical way. What I think is really cool about the '90s and what you can sense in reading M.G.'s book is that there was a whole new conversation that was happening about gender as a construct. And I think you see in the '90s - also, like, Earring Magic Ken, which a lot of people think is, like, clearly coded for gay Ken.

LORD: Oh, come on. He's wearing a lavender vest and has what the manufacturer describes as a ring around his neck. But the columnist Dan Savage suggested it was a different kind of ornament.

CEREIJIDO: By the '90s, Barbie was very much a gay icon that a lot of drag queens were using as inspiration. And her as, like, a camp figure and not to be taken so literally was definitely established and sort of as a way of exploring ideas of gender identity. And I think - that's sort of why I think Barbie's been able to have such broad appeal, is that, by the same token, that people who maybe do idolize certain exclusive ideas of beauty standards, other people can skewer them or play with them through using Barbie as, like, a tool or a toy.

DETROW: Yeah.

CEREIJIDO: And I think that she has this, like, sort of dual purpose.

DETROW: M.G., we mentioned at the beginning of this segment that it seems like there's a big cultural moment happening here, and I wonder if you've given any thought to what the people you were interviewing in the 1990s who were present at the creation would have thought about the idea of people still talking about Barbie and buying Barbies in 2023 and then going to the movie theater to see the big buzzy movie of the summer all about Barbie.

LORD: Well, I called my book "Forever Barbie" because I knew that this thing was not going to go away, if only because plastic's not going to degrade in the landfill, but...

DETROW: We have these Barbies for millennia.

LORD: Yeah. No, but - exactly. But I think what's so exciting about this is that the very first owners of the doll - I mean, what - the look of the movie is the look of the early '90s Barbies. That fuchsia color, that pink color - the early Barbies were not slathered with pink. This was definitely a '90s thing, and I think it has to do with, you know, Gerwig herself looking back to the period when she would have played with those dolls.

CEREIJIDO: We went to Barbie World, which is, like, an installation in Santa Monica, where we saw a bunch of, like, children today playing with the doll. And it's so interesting 'cause the film is PG-13, so it's aimed at adults. I think it's really tapping into a sense of nostalgia. But those kids are rediscovering Barbie and loving her in the same way previous generations did, so I think there's going to be more movies, more dolls. I don't think the Barbie obsession is going to end anytime soon.

DETROW: That is M.G. Lord and Antonia Cereijido, and their new podcast is "LA Made: The Barbie Tapes." Thank you so much for joining us.

LORD: Thank you for having us.

CEREIJIDO: Thanks so much.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BARBIE DREAMS (FEAT. KALIII)")

FIFTY FIFTY: (Singing) I can have it all, live my Barbie dreams. La-di-da-da-da, la-di-da-da-dee, la-di-da-da-da (ph), live my Barbie dreams. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.