It was an own-goal to rank alongside the pronouncements of 1968′s Talking Barbie: “Math class is hard,” “I can’t wait to plan my wedding”, and “Will we ever have enough clothes?” In 1997, Share-a-Smile Becky, one of Barbie’s friends with a wheelchair, sold 6,000 units within days of release, only for children to discover that the wheelchair couldn’t fit through the doors of Barbie’s Dream House.
The nail in Barbie’s curvaceous coffin has been greatly exaggerated, but the early years of this century were a tumultuous time for Mattel’s most famous creation. How do you bond with something that looks like a taffy pull with a face?” They scalp them and dismember them and burn them and microwave them. The writer, who used the iconic doll as a sword during childhood duels, noted that: “The nail in Barbie’s grotesquely proportioned coffin is last winter’s study by a British university about how ferociously little girls mutilate their Barbies, just for fun. In 2005, the PBS broadcaster and journalist Patt Morrison penned a perfectly sound argument titled “Kill Barbie” for the Los Angeles Times.
