The MyScene Barbies That Tried to Make Barbie Cool Again

It’s Barbie Week at The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, celebrating the doll’s pop-culture history, our favorite Barbie memories, and a certain major movie. Read all of our coverage here!

Despite years of fervent online chatter and a massive marketing campaign, we know very few plot details about Greta Gerwig’s inevitable summer blockbuster Barbie. However, in a Vogue cover story for the film’s star Margot Robbie, the director noted that the main protagonist’s arc would mimic the emotional journey of many modern American teenage girls, who are burdened by societal pressures and crippled with self-doubt. “They’re funny and brash and confident, and then they just—stop,” she told the magazine in May.

Barbie’s main trailer teases this storyline, too, when the doll leaves her ultra-pink, prelapsarian home, Barbie Land, for the “real world.” There, she encounters her supposed consumer base, which has clearly outgrown her. “We haven’t played with Barbie since we were 5 years old,” an adolescent girl tells Barbie, as her school-aged peers stare with distaste. The life-sized toy becomes flustered by the knowledge of her irrelevance.

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