We keep hearing about how Barbie is a bad example to women
and such, but would critics still say such things if the ad for Barbie, Ken,
and Barbie’s Dream House was based upon the Henrik Ibsen play A Doll’s House? Why, surely then all the
upper-crust intellectual snobs would buy Barbies for their kids, and whenever
anyone claimed Barbie is sexist, they’d defend Barbie against such slander like
how the TV news defends President Obama against any responsibility for all of
his administration’s embarrassingly numerous scandals.
Some people might think this is a silly idea, but what better
characters are there to play in A Doll’s
House than dolls? (After all, it is called A Doll’s House! So
Ibsen must have been thinking of Barbie all along.* {It certainly wasn’t Bratz dolls!}) And what better way to
bring this drama classic to a new generation than to transplant it to Barbie’s
Malibu Dream Home, itself a doll’s house? And if you think the play is a bit
too staid and dated for such a locale, then merely pepper the dialog with a
bunch of ‘like’s and ‘yeah’s, and perhaps a few ‘awesome’s, and it will work
like clockwork; surely no one will ever notice it wasn’t written by Mattel
specifically for Barbie and Ken!
This is Henrik Ibsen’s A
Doll’s House:
* BTW: I heard that Ibsen wanted Barbie to play the lead in all his plays, but she turned them down
(because she didn’t exist yet), and that’s why all his plays are so depressing:
they mirror his own feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness and rejection.
