On the occasion of the big release and commercial success of the film " Barbie ,” of Greta Gerwig's comedy based on the Mattel doll, theCommnSense? reprints an article from The Washington Post last May.
A new trailer for the Barbie movie shows her visiting the real world. In fact, the doll was based on a German sex toy called Lilli.
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It was 1956, when the Mattel co-founder and her teenage daughter stood outside a store in Switzerland, transfixed by the window: An 11.5-inch doll with a platinum ponytail, boldly designed eyes and pursed lips, sitting on a rope swing.
The doll, a German-made model marketed as Bild Lilli, was popular in this part of Europe at the time – generally considered a sex toy or prank gift for men.
It's not clear that Ruth Handler — the business executive vacationing from her California home — knew what Lilli was. It is not even clear among historians where the store was: the popular Franz Carl Weber toy store in Lucerne, a tobacconist or a bar.
Regardless, Lilli did what she was designed to do. It thrilled Handler, who took the doll back home and three years later introduced its Americanized counterpart: Barbie.
Barbie, of course, is now one of the most famous children's toys in the world. She is also being played by Margot Robbie in a highly anticipated live-action film. The trailers — a new one just released Thursday — suggest the film will explore existential themes as it travels from "Barbieland" to the "Real World." "Do you ever think about death?" she asks her friends in one scene.
She might even get into topics about her sexuality – or lack thereof.
"She's a plastic doll," Robbie told Vogue in one interview published this week. “Would she even feel sexual desire? No, I don't think she could… She's sexualized. But you never should to be sexy".
Tell Lilli.
Barbie's shameful European ancestor (how American!) began as a lewd cartoon, developed by and for men. Lilli was born as a post-war comic character in the Bild Zeitung, a downscale German newspaper, said MG Lord, author of “Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll,” in the Washington Post.
"It was a pornographic caricature," Lord said.
The character became so popular in Germany that Lilli evolved into a sort of 3D pinup. One of the writers of Barbie's first commercials told Lord about her book that men would hang the doll from their car mirrors or take her to bars, lifting her skirt or pulling down her pants with their minds on doing plate.
Lilli was "a bounty hunter, a show-off and a talker," Lord said. She had laid-back manners, a bit of a brain, and a diary-girl body in the comics, where she often wore skimpy clothes.
Lilli's first comic shows the young woman asking for the address of a "tall, handsome and rich man", according with Der Spiegel, a German newspaper.
In another, reported by Lord, Lilli shows up at a friend's apartment hiding her naked body with a newspaper. The caption: "We had a fight and he took back all the gifts he gave me."
As soon as Lilli met Handler she began to escape the male gaze.
She and her daughter Barbara returned to California in 1956 with the Lilli dolls in their luggage. Receipts at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University show that Handler purchased 11 Lilli dolls in 1956 and later ordered dozens more via airmail. Barbara kept a doll in her room. Handler took the others to Mattel – the toy company that founded with her husband, Elliot Handler and Harold Matson in 1945.
The most popular dolls of the time – Raggedy Ann, for example – all looked like children. Handler had wanted to create a detailed adult doll for children for years, but her ideas were shot down by her mostly male colleagues, who told her it would be too difficult to make.
"They were all horrified at the thought ... that they wanted to make a doll with breasts," Handler, who died in 2002, told Lord in the book.
That's what so beguiled Handler in the store window in Switzerland. "I didn't know who Lilli was then," he told Lord. "I only saw an adult-shaped body that I had been trying to describe for years."
But before Lilli could be marketed in the United States, it needed a redesign. Let's call it Barbie's first makeover.
Over the next few years, Handler and other Mattel designers loosened the doll's lips, softened her eyebrows, upgraded her plastic and whitened her skin. At one point the nipples and breasts of an early prototype were neatly removed. A delicate, detailed couture wardrobe was created.
But the real transformation was in the doll's personality. With the help of a market researcher, Mattel transformed the doll from a vaguely pornographic male fantasy — to "high heels away from the whore image," as Robin Gerber, the author of "Barbie and Ruth," put it to middle class, to the girl next door, fashion genius we know today.
Mattel eventually purchased all of Bild Lilli's patents and copyrights in 1964, completing the doll's transformation.
"Handler's genius was to invent the personality and project it into this sculpture that had been associated in Germany with illicit sex," Lord said.
No word yet on whether Barbie's real-world adventures will lead her to Germany when the movie comes out.
*Cover photo: A Bild Lilli doll from 1955 – the unknown ancestor of Mattel's “Barbie” doll – is shown at a convention in 2006. (Frank Hormann/AP)
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Source: washingtonpost