The Toys That Made Us (2017) s01e02 Episode Script
Barbie
1 - [RUTH.]
Where's the prototype, Jack? - [JACK.]
I just got in from Japan, Ruth.
My assistant is rushing it over.
- [ASSISTANT.]
Coming! - Ah.
Here we Here we go.
[CHUCKLES.]
Are those nipples? [CHUCKLES NERVOUSLY.]
Uh, hold on.
Hold on.
There.
What a doll, eh, Ruth? Yeah.
[CHUCKLES.]
Get ready, America.
Here comes Barbie.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie.
This ground-breaking blonde bombshell She's so beautiful to me.
[NARRATOR.]
is the most popular and highest-grossing doll of all time.
It grew into a billion-dollar franchise.
There hadn't been a sex object like that handed to a little girl.
[NARRATOR.]
She was the first doll for girls that showed them life beyond the home.
She has had 180 careers to date.
[NARRATOR.]
She's worked with the world's biggest fashion designers, and remains an ever-changing reflection of the times to this day.
Working at Mattel was like working in a fantasy land.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie's controversial.
This is a lightning-rod brand.
We would do anything to protect our golden girl.
[NARRATOR.]
And her creators were controversial too.
I admire Ruth, but she was a significant white-collar felon.
[NARRATOR.]
From her swimsuit debut to beyond, these are The Toys that Made Us.
It's an eight-part documentary series About the toys that we all know Plastic creations That last for generations And we still cannot let go Little molded figures That gave us big dreams We'll go back in time And behind the scenes - It's The Toys that Made Us - Toys that Made Us The Toys that Made Us is here Barbie, you're beautiful [NARRATOR.]
Barbie.
Beautiful, fashionable.
She's been inspiring and empowering children for decades.
Also, this isn't her.
This is the doll Barbie was based on, and Well, it was based on a cartoon character who did nothing but have sex with men for money.
[NARRATOR.]
This is Barbie.
We'll come back to her risqué heritage soon.
The point is Barbie's complicated, just like her creator, Ruth Handler, who defied the 1950s' status quo and willed Barbie into existence.
Oh, and, in the process, creating what would ultimately become the world's most successful toy company.
[ANNOUNCER.]
You can tell it's Mattel.
It's swell.
[NARRATOR.]
But Ruth didn't change the world all by herself.
When she moved to Los Angeles with her husband, Elliot, in the late 1930s, a partnership began that was more than just husband and wife.
Ruth and Elliot were the yin and yang and it was the reversal of normal things.
She was the business and marketing, and he was the creative.
But they were equal.
[NARRATOR.]
They may have been equal, but it was Ruth who steered them into the toy business, creating Mattel toys in the process.
Ruth and Elliot Handler invented obviously amazing products.
They pioneered the idea of having a cap gun with a roll of caps in it, so it wasn't just a single bang, it was like a machine gun.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Pull the bolt again, you're reloaded.
[GABLE.]
It was all about doing what boys loved, and those were the kinds of products that were very successful.
[NARRATOR.]
So, boys' toys were easy.
But it was girls' toys that Ruth had her sights on.
She saw her daughter, Barbara, having limited choices of toys to play with, unlike her son, Ken.
When Ken played with toys, he could imagine himself as a firefighter, an astronaut, a cowboy, a surgeon [NARRATOR.]
While the boys had toys that inspired limitless imagination, girls were playing with mostly bits of cardboard, in the form of popular one-dimensional fashion dolls with cutout outfits that attached with little tabs.
If you're lucky.
At the time, that was really the only way that fashion play was expressed.
[NARRATOR.]
The other popular option for girls was far from fashionable, and more centered around the homely duties.
[MCKNIGHT.]
Barbara only had baby dolls to play with, so she could imagine herself as a mom, a caregiver.
[ANNOUNCER.]
You can play Mommy right now with Ideal's Betsy Wetsy.
[JILL BARAD.]
With a baby doll, little girls have no ability to really dress and do things that girls love doing.
Ruth was looking at this and she would think to herself, "Why isn't there a three-dimensional doll that my daughter can dress?" [NARRATOR.]
Pondering the state of three-dimensional dolls that girls can dress, the Handler family took a vacation in Switzerland, where Ruth found inspiration in an unlikely place.
[BARAD.]
Well, Ruth saw a doll very beautiful Curvaceous, 11.
5-inch doll.
[NARRATOR.]
Who also happened to be a call girl from a racy comic strip, designed to inject a little pep into the step of post-war German men.
[LORD.]
The doll was based on a single-panel cartoon character that appeared in the Bild Zeitung, a downscale German newspaper that was very much like our National Enquirer.
[NARRATOR.]
Lilli was far from being an appropriate female role model for children.
It was used by men.
When they went out with a girl, they'd give her the Bild Lilli and then she knew what they were after.
[LORD.]
She was not the girl next door.
But that didn't stop Ruth Handler, visionary that she was, from saying, "We could turn this slutty plastic object into something that would model adult behavior for middle-class girls in America.
" That was Ruth's extraordinary breakthrough.
So, she bought some and she brought them back.
Then she gave them to my boss, a guy called Jack Ryan.
[NARRATOR.]
If Ruth Handler was Barbie's mother, that would probably make Jack Ryan Barbie's father.
Jack Ryan joined Mattel in 1955 as head of research and development.
But before that, the Yale-educated Jack had helped design the Hawk guided missile for US defense contractor Raytheon.
Unable to pay Jack a rocket scientist's wage, Ruth and Elliot did something unprecedented for the time, agreeing to give Jack a small royalty of any toy he created.
The deal would ultimately blow up in the Handlers' faces, so to speak.
But before that, Jack was designing bombshells of the blonde kind.
He loved the idea of creating this perfect woman.
And he believed that kids would really like something like that.
[NARRATOR.]
After Jack thoroughly reworked the body and face of Lilli, engineering new plastic and joint articulation [MAN LAUGHS.]
She's beautiful! [NARRATOR.]
he and Ruth finally settled on a doll that hadn't really changed.
They copied her exactly like the German one, you know.
So she had a little waist and great big, pointy tits.
Well, they could have been pointier.
Ruth named her after her daughter, whose name is Barbara.
My father always said that Barbie was called Barbie because my mother is Barbie.
[NARRATOR.]
Hmm, a bit awkward.
One way or the other, Barbie had her name.
Now, all Ruth had to do was convince her husband and the rest of the company she'd helped create.
But they said no.
They didn't like the idea of a doll with boobs.
There was a lot of pushback from Mattel overall about bringing Barbie to market.
[BARAD.]
It was mostly men and they didn't understand the play pattern.
The women designers, of course, loved and embraced the idea.
Of course, Ruth Handler persuaded the male executives that it needed to be made.
They grudgingly allowed it to come to Toy Fair in 1959.
[NARRATOR.]
Toy Fair has been held in New York City every year since 1903.
And if you can make it there, you can make it everywhere.
The product line fell flat.
The salesmen were men, the retail buyers were men.
The owners of the retailers were men.
They were all men.
[LAUGHS.]
The men didn't know what to do with her.
It was very polarizing and very uncomfortable to see this womanly-figured toy for children.
Why was it important to you that this doll have breasts? The whole idea was that a little girl could dream dreams of growing up, and every grown-up that she saw had breasts.
But Ruth knew that girls didn't see the doll the way men did.
Great big pointy tits.
Ruth knew that when it got into the girl's hands, she would see this as a platform for imaginative play.
[NARRATOR.]
After the Toy Fair flop, Ruth's hopes for getting Barbie to market were fading fast.
But Ruth pressed on, and I think Jack Ryan was also sympathetic, for whatever reason, to make this little 11.
5-inch hooker.
[NARRATOR.]
But things got worse when market research showed that it wasn't just the men.
Moms weren't keen on Barbie, either.
Often, they were competitive with the doll.
They referred to the Barbie dolls as "daddy dolls.
" [NARRATOR.]
In a desperate final move to prove Barbie's potential, Ruth brought in Viennese psychoanalyst Dr.
Ernest Dichter.
Critics likened Dichter's research to the chilling world of George Orwell, and his marketing techniques had earned him a nickname.
The Manipulator.
He did market research and focus groups.
But then there was a turning point in his research, a pivot.
One woman who initially did not like Barbie changed her mind Oh, I like that one.
when she overheard her roughneck daughter say, "Mommy, Barbie is so well-groomed.
" And immediately, the light went off over Dichter's head.
And it was obvious that was the way in.
Perhaps a greater fear for mothers than having your daughter be too sexually available was to have your daughter unable to snare a husband, because in the 1950s, husbands were meal tickets.
And if this swaggering, oafish daughter could learn grooming from a Barbie doll, well, she'd just overlook those breasts and buy it for her child.
[NARRATOR.]
With Dichter's help, Ruth had found a way to win over the men of Mattel, and the mothers who'd be buying Barbie.
But what about the little girls themselves? [ANNOUNCER.]
And the toys are sent on their way to hundreds of stores everywhere.
[NARRATOR.]
As boxes of Barbies were rolled out, Mattel's ad campaign took to the airwaves.
And sure enough, the very first Barbie commercial culminates in Barbie in a wedding gown, to remind all those worried mothers exactly what the point of Barbie is.
I'll make believe that I am you [NARRATOR.]
Ruth's belief in Barbie paid off.
Lo and behold, when girls saw this Barbie commercial, the demand went through the roof to the point where the manufacturing couldn't keep up with the demands.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Look for Barbie wherever dolls are sold.
Barbie brought in a whole other kind of play.
She lives and breathes through a child's hand.
A little girl could project her adult identity onto this adult figure doll and imagine herself in the adult world.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie broke the mold.
But to make the mold, they went here.
Jack was originally sent to Japan to help usher in the Barbie doll.
And in order to make these, a process called rotation molding was necessary to spin the model so that the little fingers could actually be filled with plastic.
He also went to Japan with someone who had far more impact on how the original Barbie was packaged, and that was her first dress designer, Charlotte Johnson.
I met Charlotte Johnson when I started working at Mattel in 1963.
And she was a very tall, elegant lady.
She'd been a former fashion model as well as a designer.
She was the one Barbie's hands were molded after, because she wanted them to be graceful and to be posed like a fashion model.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie didn't just need clothes that looked good.
Really, the line's entire financial success lay in Charlotte's graceful hands.
The emphasis of the whole strategy of Barbie was, honestly, this razor-razorblade theory that you sell the razor cheap and then the blades are expensive, and you really can't use the razor unless you have blades.
So you have to keep buying blades and keep buying blades.
[NARRATOR.]
That's easy enough for Gillette.
But making high-quality garments for an 11.
5-inch fashion doll had never been done before.
There's no such thing as miniature looms where we're gonna weave tiny Barbie No, it's all the same looms that they make human fabric on.
Thread is like a rope to her.
[NARRATOR SCOFFS.]
Barbie could pull that off.
When you have a doll and you dress her in fabric clothes, well, then the thickness of the fabric will put her outfits under her chin.
So she needs a long neck, and same thing with the waistline.
Clothing looks good on a human being with certain dimensions.
Now, none of us would necessarily want to have those dimensions.
But she was designed just like a mannequin.
[SHACKELFORD.]
It was three heads to the waist rather than the normal two and a half heads that a person has.
[NARRATOR.]
But it wasn't Barbie's oversized head that had mothers in a tizzy.
[JESS WEINER.]
Because it's in a realistic form, you get swept up in the complicated history of body image.
If she'd been a real woman and measured her waist, it was probably about eight inches.
For years, we had talked about having different sizes of Barbie, different shapes.
But the timing was not right.
People would extrapolate that to say if she couldn't stand up, she wouldn't have any room for her organs, her waist was too small, her boobs are too big.
She's not a human.
She's a doll.
[CHUCKLES.]
She was never meant to have human proportions.
By the time you put her clothes on her, her proportions aren't nearly as outlandish.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie's impossible body may be defendable for reasons of fashion.
But Mattel didn't do themselves any favors with 1965's Slumber Party playset complete with nightgown and a scale set permanently to 110 pounds.
And then there's this extraordinary little book that also came with the Slumber Party set.
On the front, it says, "How to Lose Weight.
" On the back, it says "Don't eat!" [LAUGHS.]
It's arguably a teaching tool for anorexia.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie's body image controversies will follow her endlessly over the next 50 years, as will the other constant in her life.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Then it happened.
She met Ken.
[SPENCER.]
Children wrote into the company and said Barbie needs a boyfriend.
So here's Barbie's boyfriend, named Ken.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Think of the fun you'll have taking Barbie and Ken on dates.
Ken came out in 1961, and he was sold in red swim trunks.
This is his outfit, Victory Dance, to escort Barbie out.
Very preppy, but very appropriate for Ken.
The faces were intelligent-looking on these dolls.
It was only later in the '90s the brow sank and the neck got really thick.
[KEN.]
Oh, hey, guys.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Get both Barbie and Ken, and see where the romance will lead.
It could lead to this.
And [NARRATOR.]
Oh, no, it can't.
Barbie can't get married because Barbie can't have a baby.
And the reason Barbie can't have a baby is because Barbie can't get married.
Barbie was about the period in a young woman's life before she was weighed down by a family.
[BARAD.]
If we did it as the brand keepers, they would think that she was married forever, and it would take away from the open-ended play.
[NARRATOR.]
Even though Barbie would never have a baby bump, the same couldn't be said for Ken.
Mrs.
Handler and Charlotte Johnson, Barbie's top dress designer, did not want the boyfriend doll to look exactly like Barbie in the crotch.
The sculptors made three versions.
One looked exactly like Barbie in the crotch.
One, which horrified the male executives [MAN.]
Oh, my God! It's huge! was explicit male genitalia.
They compromised on this.
[NARRATOR.]
At least his clothes were well-hung.
[ANNOUNCER.]
You'll find all styles for Ken and Barbie on this fashion bar.
[NARRATOR.]
As the '60s swung, Barbie was growing up.
She gained a sister called Skipper, a friend called Midge, a dream house and a career.
In fact, several careers.
By the mid-'60s alone, Barbie had worked professionally as a teenage fashion model, fashion editor, ballerina, nurse, flight attendant, tennis pro, singer, business woman, student, teacher and oh, yeah, an astronaut.
This is called Miss Astronaut.
It came out in 1965.
I think it's very empowering.
The idea of inspiring girls to imagine all these things they can become at a time when careers were quite limiting for women.
[ANNOUNCER.]
This frail creature strikes her typewriter keys about 40,000 times a day.
Barbie, right from the get-go, has demonstrated to girls that they can be anything they wanna be and do anything they wanna do.
[NARRATOR.]
Hang on.
Not so fast.
It's worth noting Ken's careers during the same period.
Or should I say Dr.
Ken? Barbie loved a man in uniform.
She loved a man in a doctor costume.
When Ken was the astronaut, she had to have an astronaut costume too.
So there was a male and a female version of the astronaut.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie's careers weren't so much an early sign of female empowerment, but more an accessory for Ken's professional dabblings.
I never dreamed of trying to change the world.
I wanted to show the world as it is.
And at that time, there were no women doctors.
[NARRATOR.]
Well, it was the '60s, and as Bob had said, the Barbies, they are a'changing.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Barbie's changed! Barbie's new and different! [JANICE VARNEY-HAMLIN.]
We changed the sculpt of Barbie to make her look more contemporary, more modern, and move further away from the '50s look, which was the runway fashion look, 'cause Barbie's all about glamour, but glamour of the day.
[GREENING.]
They resculpted her face entirely to capture what was going on in the '60s, the youth movement.
So she has a sweeter face, little more innocent expression.
[ANNOUNCER.]
And Barbie's lashes are really for real.
They gave her rooted eyelashes, because so many young women were wearing false eyelashes at the time.
That was part of the beauty.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Best of all, the biggest news of all is the way Barbie moves.
[GREENING.]
She also included a waist that twisted and turned.
It was at an angle to the axis of the doll.
So when the doll turned the doll had sort of a model-like contrapposto.
That was Ryan's contribution.
What a doll, eh, Ruth? [NARRATOR.]
Remember Jack Ryan? Barbie's twist-and-turn waist was only one of the many innovations that Jack had cooked up since he engineered the first Barbie back in 1959.
I have here a patent from 1966.
It's about the knee joint in Barbie.
I think a lot of people that played with Barbie remember that click-click.
[CLICKING.]
I can't think of anybody else who was more responsible for Mattel's success than my father.
[NARRATOR.]
But Mattel's success was also Jack's success, thanks to that 1.
5% royalty agreement he'd made with the Handlers years before.
He got a percentage of every single thing that he did there.
That's unheard of in today's market.
[NARRATOR.]
That unique situation had suddenly made him an extremely wealthy toy designer.
And he soon found himself splitting his time between the plaything life and the playboy life.
[ANN RYAN.]
He had a history of throwing big Hollywood parties.
He had his own fire engine.
His house was pretty amazing.
[ANN RYAN.]
It was the second-oldest home in Bel-Air, but he decided he wanted to turn it into a castle, complete with moat.
I mean, it was crazy.
Imagine, this is my boss.
It was like living in some kind of fantasy land.
[LAUGHS.]
[NARRATOR.]
And as one might expect, King Jack's excesses weren't just limited to cars, houses and parties.
My father was married five times.
[LORD.]
I think Jack had, what today we would term, a sexual addiction issue.
His former wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, wrote about the dungeon that he kept in his house for the many women who had the pleasure of experiencing his torture devices.
There were certain things about Jack that were great, and some things weren't so great.
My relationship with my father was difficult, at best.
He was an alcoholic, and he also used cocaine, and it made him paranoid.
Sometimes his mood swings would be so dramatic that I didn't know what to expect.
[NARRATOR.]
So, yeah, the women in Jack Ryan's life had to put up with a lot.
That is, except for one woman.
My father sometimes called Ruth Handler "Ruthless Ruth.
" Kids love to wear a hat that blows bubbles.
It's magical.
She had a tremendous ego.
My father had a very big ego, so there were always a lot of fireworks.
She and Elliot, I think, were envious of all the attention that my father got, but also disapproving.
But I think mainly the thing that she was most upset about was that they had agreed to pay him so much.
So, Ruth and Elliot were going, I'm sure, "Oh, my gosh, what have we done here? We should've bought him out or given him a salary.
" That's when the things started to fall apart a bit.
[NARRATOR.]
In 1974, Jack Ryan sued for non-payment of royalties, effectively ending his 20-year relationship at Mattel.
[ANN RYAN.]
The lawsuit went on for about five years.
It was really hard on my father, and he drank and used more during that period.
He had fallen from living in this astonishing castle to living in a $400-a-month apartment in Westwood.
But eventually, he won and they paid him.
But it took a tremendous toll on him.
[NARRATOR.]
Jack Ryan continued to invent, but the father of Barbie would never work in the toy industry again.
Lovely long hair Lovely blonde swirl you can make Some people call the '70s the sports era.
We came out with some dolls that played tennis, golf, and then had sports clothes on.
And when it came to the life of leisure, there was one Barbie in particular who made the biggest [CLEARS THROAT.]
splash.
The clean gal with the long, straight hair, who came out of the water at the Malibu beach.
Malibu Barbie [ANNOUNCER.]
She's Mattel's super new suntanned Barbie.
Anybody that played with Barbie in the early '70s probably had a Malibu Barbie.
She was one of the most successful Barbies, and ran a very long time.
When Malibu Barbie came out, it was all about the beach.
[ANNOUNCER.]
All with that suntanned skin that makes them look great wherever they go.
Everyone had to have a suntan.
Being tan was seen as very healthy, an outdoor lifestyle.
And it was after that that we discovered that the sun is harmful to your skin.
[WOMAN SCREAMING.]
But the kids in the early '70s would take dune buggies, and they would soup up the VWs.
And of course Mattel had the dune buggy, and they had the camper, and everything that was in vogue then.
[NARRATOR.]
And for those of you keeping score at home, yes, Malibu Barbie marked the second time Barbie went under the knife.
But the most interesting thing about her new look was well, her new look.
And I think Malibu Barbie occupies the same place in the Barbie canon as Manet's Olympia in the world of art history.
One of the conventions in 19th-century pornography was always that the female depicted in an image never looked directly at the viewer.
There was always a sidelong glance, the same sidelong glance we see in the Bild Lilli doll and we see in the early Barbie dolls.
But Manet's Olympia was shocking because she looked directly at the viewer.
She didn't modestly avert her gaze.
That's a big moment in art history.
And I think Malibu Barbie should be regarded as a similar big moment.
The fact that the doll could look directly at the viewer and have that body, I think, was a reflection of the sexual revolution, of just how things had changed since 1959, when Barbie was originally introduced.
[NARRATOR.]
But the one thing that Barbie never took her eye off was fashion.
Something that in the '70s was changing a lot.
Glamour came back.
That's when we get into Superstar Barbie.
This is the era of Charlie's Angels and Saturday Night Fever, about looking glam.
[NARRATOR.]
Superstar Barbie was stayin' alive with her new disco look.
And with a new glam makeover came you guessed it.
She featured a new face sculpt, so she even has a bigger, brighter smile now.
[NARRATOR.]
For those keeping score at home, this makes facelift number three.
And she came with the bent arm, so the doll could pose in those kind of glamorous, fashion poses.
My cousin got this doll.
I cried because it was so beautiful.
[LAUGHS.]
[NARRATOR.]
But not everything was super in the '70s.
Barbie sales were flat and we were looking at ourselves, scratching our heads, "What is going on here?" [NARRATOR.]
After reporting sudden quarter losses that caught Wall Street off-guard, rumors of false earnings on Mattel's part began to swirl.
And those rumors pointed to one person Ruth Handler.
We weren't making the numbers, I guess.
So she started putting Hot Wheels cars on 18-wheelers, and driving them over to the City of Industry, and backing them into a parking lot, and unhooking the tractor, and coming back and getting another trailer.
The minute they left Plant One, they went on the books as accounts receivable.
Out the door There weren't any orders.
And so she manufactured the orders.
She sat with the people in charge of all that stuff at Mattel.
And the bottom line is, she told them just to lie.
And she got caught.
[NARRATOR.]
In October 1975, as federal investigators began looking into Mattel's books, and stockholders began filing class action lawsuits, Ruth and Elliot Handler were forced to resign from the company they had founded three decades earlier.
What she was alleged to have done was not insignificant, her cooking of the books.
[NARRATOR.]
Handler was indicted by a grand jury on charges of fraud and false reportings.
She was fined and sentenced to community service.
After Ruth was gone, the ship was rudderless.
Men were running the Barbie line, and they designed things that were completely grotesque.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Meet new Growing Up Skipper.
She's two dolls in one.
[LORD.]
This amazing product, with a twist of her arm, goes from prepubescent and now she has breasts.
And then you move the arm, and she goes back down again.
This was not a popular toy.
I think the men were just so keen on mechanical toys.
That was Steve Lewis' idea.
Steve was the head over design at the time.
And his daughter was growing up, and she was getting into a starter bra, and he thought it was wonderful.
And my sample makers, two ladies, eight children between them took one look at that doll and they said, "Absolutely not.
" They would not buy it.
They would not work on it.
[NARRATOR.]
Well, that was weird.
But things were about to get weirder.
Welcome to the 1980s, an outrageous decade where the cars were fast, and the fast food tasted even more plasticky than it does today.
But Barbie's biggest threat wasn't cholesterol, it was a truly outrageous impostor named - Jem! - Jem is truly outrageous! [NARRATOR.]
And Mattel's vice president of Barbie, Judy Shackelford, was truly, truly, truly outraged.
So she assembled her best operatives, and called them The Pink Berets.
And it was because marketing warfare was really the key.
In marketing, what you want to do is, you want to flank your brand, right? So there's very few areas of access for competitors.
[CHUCKLING.]
And God knows we faced competition.
For example, we found out that Hasbro was gonna launch a fashion doll against us.
So, I didn't like that.
About a week later, I got a call and it was from one of the sales guys.
And he said, "Judy, I know what it is.
" I said, "What?" And he says, "She's a rock star.
" I said, "That's all I need to know.
" We called it a war council.
"We're gonna do something about this.
We're gonna have a rock star.
" And I said, "We're gonna beat them to market.
" Okay.
It always takes us about 18 months to develop one single Barbie.
We're gonna do this in four months.
I said, "I want you to find every guitar, every musical instrument, - every piano, every keyboard - [BARAD.]
We took fabrics that we knew - [SHACKELFORD.]
every outfit.
- we had existing, and we took tools that we'd had from other products, and literally, within 16 hours we had developed Barbie and the Rockers Solid gold and zooming up the charts We had that thing put together and we shipped earlier than they did.
The whole world thought they copied us.
[LAUGHING.]
It was wonderful.
[SCREAMS.]
We girls can do anything [NARRATOR.]
Judy's Pink Berets had taken Barbie's sales into the stratosphere.
Judy was a visionary.
She was a major driving force in taking Barbie from a doll line that had four, five successful new dolls every year, into a multi-faceted business.
[BARAD.]
The average American girl went from owning one single Barbie to owning eight Barbies.
Some owning 30, some owning 40.
We girls can do anything [GIRLS.]
Like Barbie! The trend at that moment was that women could do anything.
It goes back to the "I can do it," when they were riveting the bolts in the planes in the war.
And so it was just fantastic.
It was really counter to what was happening corporately in the rest of the world.
[NARRATOR.]
The women who ran Barbie had turned Mattel into a Fortune 500 company.
And when Jill Barad became CEO in 1997, there's one particular lady, that she felt really deserved the credit.
And when I took over as CEO, the first thing I did was bring her back.
In a symbolic gesture of healing, Jill Barad invited Ruth Handler back to visit Mattel for the first time since her ousting over 15 years before.
Ruth, you are my hero.
People were so thrilled to see the founder of what we all were there for in our midst.
[NARRATOR.]
With time healing all wounds, the Handlers found their legacy at Mattel restored.
Unfortunately, there'd be no such redemption for Jack Ryan.
Despondent after suffering a debilitating stroke, Jack took his own life in 1991.
And with Jack gone, he was becoming increasingly forgotten.
It wasn't until after he died that Ruth started strutting her stuff and saying, "No, no, I'm the inventor of the Barbie doll" and never mentioned his name, as if he never existed.
[CHUCKLING.]
No, she did not want to talk about Jack Ryan.
[INTERVIEWER.]
She didn't like him? Um, no.
There was a lot of disagreement as to who was responsible for what.
But he was very influential in the development, for sure.
[NARRATOR.]
But after all those years, why couldn't Ruth just let bygones be bygones? What reason would there be to deny Jack his due credit? You probably don't necessarily want your products linked with a high-profile sex addict with a pharmaceutical problem.
[NARRATOR.]
Okay, fair enough.
Barbie had owned the '80s.
But how would she cope as the '80s glamour turned into '90s grunge, and all that big hair and all that color went limp and gray? And whatever color this is.
But Barbie stayed out of the mosh pit.
She had other plans.
You've got the longest hair ever.
Totally hot, totally cool Totally Hair Barbie The best-selling Barbie of all time still is Totally Hair Barbie.
She had hair that went virtually to her feet.
[SPENCER.]
And she is one of my designs.
We gave crimped hair, a hairbrush, and we gave a little bit of gel to put onto the hair, because using gel on your hair was quite fashionable.
[NARRATOR.]
And not just fashionable with the ladies.
Every 1990s heartthrob was worth his weight in Dep.
And we had Totally Hair Ken.
When we did the commercial, I had to groom his hair with hair gel to get it up, to get it into something like this hairdo.
[NARRATOR.]
Oh, hey, if you're getting a new hairdo, how about one of these? In 1992, Barbie went under the knife for the fourth time.
Or, as designer Bob Mackie calls it She had a do-over.
[NARRATOR.]
When designing Neptune Barbie for the collector line, Mackie decided that the Superstar face, in use since the '70s, was getting a little long in the tooth.
Barbie had this little silly grin with these little mouse teeth that showed.
And I said, "Couldn't we have her mouth shut, so she doesn't look quite so willing and able?" They said, "Oh, sure.
Why not?" [NARRATOR.]
The new Mackie face was an instant hit and became the signature Barbie visage for Mattel's upscale collector line through the '90s.
But things didn't always go so well.
Around the same time, Barbie's swimming pool was awash with hot water, and her worst controversy was [BARBIE.]
Math class is tough! [REPORTER.]
"Math class is tough.
" That has drawn fire from those who think Barbie's remark reinforces a stereotype about girls and math.
I mean, there had to be hundreds of empowering statements.
- [BARBIE.]
I love barbecues.
- I love Barbie dolls.
- [BARBIE.]
Which outfit is your favorite? - The one you're wearing.
I still get people saying, "Math class is tough.
" [BARBIE.]
Do you have a crush on anyone? [NARRATOR.]
Between the controversies and missteps, Barbie made it through the '90s by the skin of her now-hidden teeth.
As Mattel reported their first sales downturn in over a decade, the era of Judy Shackelford and Jill Barad's fierce leadership was now over, leaving Barbie to face the noughties alone.
Barbie, historically, has been a brand people don't want to go up against because Barbie will take them down.
She will use all her efforts to get that competition off the market, successfully.
Up until Bratz.
Passion for fashion [FINK.]
In early 2000s, she had major competition from a company called MGA.
And within four years of the launch of those dolls, they took 40% market share of the fashion doll business.
That was huge.
- Passion for fashion - Bratz It left Mattel a little bit shaking in their shoes.
Teacher Barbie and her students Love classroom fun [FINK.]
When Bratz came out, it started making Barbie seem like she was for the younger girl, where Bratz seemed like it was for the older girl.
Oh The other thing about Bratz was that they were always ethnically ambiguous and Barbie was kind of primarily white.
There were African-American Barbies since 1970, but Barbie was really seen as a blonde, Malibu beach girl.
So at first, Barbie responded by launching a couple of different brands that were going after the older girl.
One was called Flavas.
What's your flava? Tell me what's your flava But it didn't work.
You know it.
Bratz dolls were the ones that the kids identified with, and Barbie was like a parent.
OMFG, guys, we killed somebody's grandma! Bratz dolls fell off the roof of the dollhouse, and they brought in Dr.
Barbie and they referred snidely to her as Mrs.
Smarty Pants.
[NARRATOR.]
That's Dr.
Smarty Pants, thank you very much.
It had taken Barbie nearly 30 years to earn that title.
Barbie's gonna listen To her little heartbeat [NARRATOR.]
After suffering a public dressing-down at the hands of Bratz manufacturer MGA, Mattel decided that if they couldn't beat them in the toy store, they'd beat them up in court.
And now the title for the world's most popular fashion doll was on the line.
[FINK.]
The designer of Bratz, Carter Bryant, was an employee of Mattel when he licensed the concept for Bratz to MGA.
And so because of that, they feel they had ownership of the Bratz brand.
[NARRATOR.]
But the legal battle was long and dirty, with the rights to Bratz reverting back and forth between Mattel and MGA for the next eight years.
In 2013, the courts finally decided in MGA's favor once and for all.
But between the lawsuit and new competition, Bratz went down for the count in 2016.
And at least for now, Barbie and Mattel had won the battle.
[MAN.]
Beauty Queen Barbie wins the crown.
If my team and I had been at Mattel when Bratz happened, we would've killed them.
[GIRLS.]
We knew that.
[CHUCKLE.]
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie has always changed with the times.
But in 2016, due to popular demand, Barbie had one of her biggest changes ever.
[JACKIE BREYER.]
Barbie introduced Fashionistas in February 2016.
There's taller Barbies, shorter Barbies, curvy Barbies, new skin tones.
And consumers were thrilled.
And the media went wild and said, "Female empowerment," and "This is what we've been asking for, for all of these years.
Yes, we want Barbie to have a million careers.
Yes, Barbie can do anything and girls can do anything, but we need her to look like all of us.
" [NARRATOR.]
For all the fanfare the new Barbie body types received with the release of Fashionistas, by the end of 2017, sales figures began to slump again.
Could it be that after half a century, has Barbie finally become inoffensive? I think Mattel should do something, among other things, to expose more of its racy original history, to inflame a little controversy again around the doll.
[NARRATOR.]
Is this controversial enough? The 2017 Fashionistas line did give Ken a man bun after all, but they could go further.
Let's embrace our squalid ancestor, Lilli.
What could be more quintessentially American than having an embarrassing forebear in Europe? I mean, we're a country of immigrants.
[NARRATOR.]
Well, we did say that Barbie was complicated.
Whether she offends or inspires, Barbie's here to stay.
And that's a testament to the vision of Ruth Handler.
She passed away in 2002, followed by Elliot nine years later.
Ruth? She was a genius.
She was on to something that literally changed how children play forever.
[NARRATOR.]
But Ruth didn't do it alone.
Barbie's legacy has been forged by the tireless effort of the women at Mattel over the decades.
[SPENCER.]
It's very gratifying to think that I designed so many dolls for all these years, and I think of every child who played with the Barbie doll as my child.
[PERKINS.]
It's very important for little black girls to have a doll that looked like them.
They can visualize themselves being anything they want to be.
Being able to create that impetus for that child to dream about something that maybe she would not have before was such a motivating factor for me.
[GIRL 1.]
What do you like best about Barbie? - [GIRL 2.]
Her wonderful wardrobe.
- [GIRL 3.]
She's got some bendable legs.
- [GIRL 4.]
Ooh, that's pretty.
- [GIRL 5.]
All her clothes are neat.
[SHACKELFORD.]
I think when little girls played with Barbie over the years, they were given the opportunity to pretend to be doing things that were quite empowering.
We opened a door where kids could imagine doing all sorts of things.
Little girls today, they can be anything if they believe in themselves and try.
[THEME SONG PLAYING.]
Where's the prototype, Jack? - [JACK.]
I just got in from Japan, Ruth.
My assistant is rushing it over.
- [ASSISTANT.]
Coming! - Ah.
Here we Here we go.
[CHUCKLES.]
Are those nipples? [CHUCKLES NERVOUSLY.]
Uh, hold on.
Hold on.
There.
What a doll, eh, Ruth? Yeah.
[CHUCKLES.]
Get ready, America.
Here comes Barbie.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie.
This ground-breaking blonde bombshell She's so beautiful to me.
[NARRATOR.]
is the most popular and highest-grossing doll of all time.
It grew into a billion-dollar franchise.
There hadn't been a sex object like that handed to a little girl.
[NARRATOR.]
She was the first doll for girls that showed them life beyond the home.
She has had 180 careers to date.
[NARRATOR.]
She's worked with the world's biggest fashion designers, and remains an ever-changing reflection of the times to this day.
Working at Mattel was like working in a fantasy land.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie's controversial.
This is a lightning-rod brand.
We would do anything to protect our golden girl.
[NARRATOR.]
And her creators were controversial too.
I admire Ruth, but she was a significant white-collar felon.
[NARRATOR.]
From her swimsuit debut to beyond, these are The Toys that Made Us.
It's an eight-part documentary series About the toys that we all know Plastic creations That last for generations And we still cannot let go Little molded figures That gave us big dreams We'll go back in time And behind the scenes - It's The Toys that Made Us - Toys that Made Us The Toys that Made Us is here Barbie, you're beautiful [NARRATOR.]
Barbie.
Beautiful, fashionable.
She's been inspiring and empowering children for decades.
Also, this isn't her.
This is the doll Barbie was based on, and Well, it was based on a cartoon character who did nothing but have sex with men for money.
[NARRATOR.]
This is Barbie.
We'll come back to her risqué heritage soon.
The point is Barbie's complicated, just like her creator, Ruth Handler, who defied the 1950s' status quo and willed Barbie into existence.
Oh, and, in the process, creating what would ultimately become the world's most successful toy company.
[ANNOUNCER.]
You can tell it's Mattel.
It's swell.
[NARRATOR.]
But Ruth didn't change the world all by herself.
When she moved to Los Angeles with her husband, Elliot, in the late 1930s, a partnership began that was more than just husband and wife.
Ruth and Elliot were the yin and yang and it was the reversal of normal things.
She was the business and marketing, and he was the creative.
But they were equal.
[NARRATOR.]
They may have been equal, but it was Ruth who steered them into the toy business, creating Mattel toys in the process.
Ruth and Elliot Handler invented obviously amazing products.
They pioneered the idea of having a cap gun with a roll of caps in it, so it wasn't just a single bang, it was like a machine gun.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Pull the bolt again, you're reloaded.
[GABLE.]
It was all about doing what boys loved, and those were the kinds of products that were very successful.
[NARRATOR.]
So, boys' toys were easy.
But it was girls' toys that Ruth had her sights on.
She saw her daughter, Barbara, having limited choices of toys to play with, unlike her son, Ken.
When Ken played with toys, he could imagine himself as a firefighter, an astronaut, a cowboy, a surgeon [NARRATOR.]
While the boys had toys that inspired limitless imagination, girls were playing with mostly bits of cardboard, in the form of popular one-dimensional fashion dolls with cutout outfits that attached with little tabs.
If you're lucky.
At the time, that was really the only way that fashion play was expressed.
[NARRATOR.]
The other popular option for girls was far from fashionable, and more centered around the homely duties.
[MCKNIGHT.]
Barbara only had baby dolls to play with, so she could imagine herself as a mom, a caregiver.
[ANNOUNCER.]
You can play Mommy right now with Ideal's Betsy Wetsy.
[JILL BARAD.]
With a baby doll, little girls have no ability to really dress and do things that girls love doing.
Ruth was looking at this and she would think to herself, "Why isn't there a three-dimensional doll that my daughter can dress?" [NARRATOR.]
Pondering the state of three-dimensional dolls that girls can dress, the Handler family took a vacation in Switzerland, where Ruth found inspiration in an unlikely place.
[BARAD.]
Well, Ruth saw a doll very beautiful Curvaceous, 11.
5-inch doll.
[NARRATOR.]
Who also happened to be a call girl from a racy comic strip, designed to inject a little pep into the step of post-war German men.
[LORD.]
The doll was based on a single-panel cartoon character that appeared in the Bild Zeitung, a downscale German newspaper that was very much like our National Enquirer.
[NARRATOR.]
Lilli was far from being an appropriate female role model for children.
It was used by men.
When they went out with a girl, they'd give her the Bild Lilli and then she knew what they were after.
[LORD.]
She was not the girl next door.
But that didn't stop Ruth Handler, visionary that she was, from saying, "We could turn this slutty plastic object into something that would model adult behavior for middle-class girls in America.
" That was Ruth's extraordinary breakthrough.
So, she bought some and she brought them back.
Then she gave them to my boss, a guy called Jack Ryan.
[NARRATOR.]
If Ruth Handler was Barbie's mother, that would probably make Jack Ryan Barbie's father.
Jack Ryan joined Mattel in 1955 as head of research and development.
But before that, the Yale-educated Jack had helped design the Hawk guided missile for US defense contractor Raytheon.
Unable to pay Jack a rocket scientist's wage, Ruth and Elliot did something unprecedented for the time, agreeing to give Jack a small royalty of any toy he created.
The deal would ultimately blow up in the Handlers' faces, so to speak.
But before that, Jack was designing bombshells of the blonde kind.
He loved the idea of creating this perfect woman.
And he believed that kids would really like something like that.
[NARRATOR.]
After Jack thoroughly reworked the body and face of Lilli, engineering new plastic and joint articulation [MAN LAUGHS.]
She's beautiful! [NARRATOR.]
he and Ruth finally settled on a doll that hadn't really changed.
They copied her exactly like the German one, you know.
So she had a little waist and great big, pointy tits.
Well, they could have been pointier.
Ruth named her after her daughter, whose name is Barbara.
My father always said that Barbie was called Barbie because my mother is Barbie.
[NARRATOR.]
Hmm, a bit awkward.
One way or the other, Barbie had her name.
Now, all Ruth had to do was convince her husband and the rest of the company she'd helped create.
But they said no.
They didn't like the idea of a doll with boobs.
There was a lot of pushback from Mattel overall about bringing Barbie to market.
[BARAD.]
It was mostly men and they didn't understand the play pattern.
The women designers, of course, loved and embraced the idea.
Of course, Ruth Handler persuaded the male executives that it needed to be made.
They grudgingly allowed it to come to Toy Fair in 1959.
[NARRATOR.]
Toy Fair has been held in New York City every year since 1903.
And if you can make it there, you can make it everywhere.
The product line fell flat.
The salesmen were men, the retail buyers were men.
The owners of the retailers were men.
They were all men.
[LAUGHS.]
The men didn't know what to do with her.
It was very polarizing and very uncomfortable to see this womanly-figured toy for children.
Why was it important to you that this doll have breasts? The whole idea was that a little girl could dream dreams of growing up, and every grown-up that she saw had breasts.
But Ruth knew that girls didn't see the doll the way men did.
Great big pointy tits.
Ruth knew that when it got into the girl's hands, she would see this as a platform for imaginative play.
[NARRATOR.]
After the Toy Fair flop, Ruth's hopes for getting Barbie to market were fading fast.
But Ruth pressed on, and I think Jack Ryan was also sympathetic, for whatever reason, to make this little 11.
5-inch hooker.
[NARRATOR.]
But things got worse when market research showed that it wasn't just the men.
Moms weren't keen on Barbie, either.
Often, they were competitive with the doll.
They referred to the Barbie dolls as "daddy dolls.
" [NARRATOR.]
In a desperate final move to prove Barbie's potential, Ruth brought in Viennese psychoanalyst Dr.
Ernest Dichter.
Critics likened Dichter's research to the chilling world of George Orwell, and his marketing techniques had earned him a nickname.
The Manipulator.
He did market research and focus groups.
But then there was a turning point in his research, a pivot.
One woman who initially did not like Barbie changed her mind Oh, I like that one.
when she overheard her roughneck daughter say, "Mommy, Barbie is so well-groomed.
" And immediately, the light went off over Dichter's head.
And it was obvious that was the way in.
Perhaps a greater fear for mothers than having your daughter be too sexually available was to have your daughter unable to snare a husband, because in the 1950s, husbands were meal tickets.
And if this swaggering, oafish daughter could learn grooming from a Barbie doll, well, she'd just overlook those breasts and buy it for her child.
[NARRATOR.]
With Dichter's help, Ruth had found a way to win over the men of Mattel, and the mothers who'd be buying Barbie.
But what about the little girls themselves? [ANNOUNCER.]
And the toys are sent on their way to hundreds of stores everywhere.
[NARRATOR.]
As boxes of Barbies were rolled out, Mattel's ad campaign took to the airwaves.
And sure enough, the very first Barbie commercial culminates in Barbie in a wedding gown, to remind all those worried mothers exactly what the point of Barbie is.
I'll make believe that I am you [NARRATOR.]
Ruth's belief in Barbie paid off.
Lo and behold, when girls saw this Barbie commercial, the demand went through the roof to the point where the manufacturing couldn't keep up with the demands.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Look for Barbie wherever dolls are sold.
Barbie brought in a whole other kind of play.
She lives and breathes through a child's hand.
A little girl could project her adult identity onto this adult figure doll and imagine herself in the adult world.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie broke the mold.
But to make the mold, they went here.
Jack was originally sent to Japan to help usher in the Barbie doll.
And in order to make these, a process called rotation molding was necessary to spin the model so that the little fingers could actually be filled with plastic.
He also went to Japan with someone who had far more impact on how the original Barbie was packaged, and that was her first dress designer, Charlotte Johnson.
I met Charlotte Johnson when I started working at Mattel in 1963.
And she was a very tall, elegant lady.
She'd been a former fashion model as well as a designer.
She was the one Barbie's hands were molded after, because she wanted them to be graceful and to be posed like a fashion model.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie didn't just need clothes that looked good.
Really, the line's entire financial success lay in Charlotte's graceful hands.
The emphasis of the whole strategy of Barbie was, honestly, this razor-razorblade theory that you sell the razor cheap and then the blades are expensive, and you really can't use the razor unless you have blades.
So you have to keep buying blades and keep buying blades.
[NARRATOR.]
That's easy enough for Gillette.
But making high-quality garments for an 11.
5-inch fashion doll had never been done before.
There's no such thing as miniature looms where we're gonna weave tiny Barbie No, it's all the same looms that they make human fabric on.
Thread is like a rope to her.
[NARRATOR SCOFFS.]
Barbie could pull that off.
When you have a doll and you dress her in fabric clothes, well, then the thickness of the fabric will put her outfits under her chin.
So she needs a long neck, and same thing with the waistline.
Clothing looks good on a human being with certain dimensions.
Now, none of us would necessarily want to have those dimensions.
But she was designed just like a mannequin.
[SHACKELFORD.]
It was three heads to the waist rather than the normal two and a half heads that a person has.
[NARRATOR.]
But it wasn't Barbie's oversized head that had mothers in a tizzy.
[JESS WEINER.]
Because it's in a realistic form, you get swept up in the complicated history of body image.
If she'd been a real woman and measured her waist, it was probably about eight inches.
For years, we had talked about having different sizes of Barbie, different shapes.
But the timing was not right.
People would extrapolate that to say if she couldn't stand up, she wouldn't have any room for her organs, her waist was too small, her boobs are too big.
She's not a human.
She's a doll.
[CHUCKLES.]
She was never meant to have human proportions.
By the time you put her clothes on her, her proportions aren't nearly as outlandish.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie's impossible body may be defendable for reasons of fashion.
But Mattel didn't do themselves any favors with 1965's Slumber Party playset complete with nightgown and a scale set permanently to 110 pounds.
And then there's this extraordinary little book that also came with the Slumber Party set.
On the front, it says, "How to Lose Weight.
" On the back, it says "Don't eat!" [LAUGHS.]
It's arguably a teaching tool for anorexia.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie's body image controversies will follow her endlessly over the next 50 years, as will the other constant in her life.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Then it happened.
She met Ken.
[SPENCER.]
Children wrote into the company and said Barbie needs a boyfriend.
So here's Barbie's boyfriend, named Ken.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Think of the fun you'll have taking Barbie and Ken on dates.
Ken came out in 1961, and he was sold in red swim trunks.
This is his outfit, Victory Dance, to escort Barbie out.
Very preppy, but very appropriate for Ken.
The faces were intelligent-looking on these dolls.
It was only later in the '90s the brow sank and the neck got really thick.
[KEN.]
Oh, hey, guys.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Get both Barbie and Ken, and see where the romance will lead.
It could lead to this.
And [NARRATOR.]
Oh, no, it can't.
Barbie can't get married because Barbie can't have a baby.
And the reason Barbie can't have a baby is because Barbie can't get married.
Barbie was about the period in a young woman's life before she was weighed down by a family.
[BARAD.]
If we did it as the brand keepers, they would think that she was married forever, and it would take away from the open-ended play.
[NARRATOR.]
Even though Barbie would never have a baby bump, the same couldn't be said for Ken.
Mrs.
Handler and Charlotte Johnson, Barbie's top dress designer, did not want the boyfriend doll to look exactly like Barbie in the crotch.
The sculptors made three versions.
One looked exactly like Barbie in the crotch.
One, which horrified the male executives [MAN.]
Oh, my God! It's huge! was explicit male genitalia.
They compromised on this.
[NARRATOR.]
At least his clothes were well-hung.
[ANNOUNCER.]
You'll find all styles for Ken and Barbie on this fashion bar.
[NARRATOR.]
As the '60s swung, Barbie was growing up.
She gained a sister called Skipper, a friend called Midge, a dream house and a career.
In fact, several careers.
By the mid-'60s alone, Barbie had worked professionally as a teenage fashion model, fashion editor, ballerina, nurse, flight attendant, tennis pro, singer, business woman, student, teacher and oh, yeah, an astronaut.
This is called Miss Astronaut.
It came out in 1965.
I think it's very empowering.
The idea of inspiring girls to imagine all these things they can become at a time when careers were quite limiting for women.
[ANNOUNCER.]
This frail creature strikes her typewriter keys about 40,000 times a day.
Barbie, right from the get-go, has demonstrated to girls that they can be anything they wanna be and do anything they wanna do.
[NARRATOR.]
Hang on.
Not so fast.
It's worth noting Ken's careers during the same period.
Or should I say Dr.
Ken? Barbie loved a man in uniform.
She loved a man in a doctor costume.
When Ken was the astronaut, she had to have an astronaut costume too.
So there was a male and a female version of the astronaut.
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie's careers weren't so much an early sign of female empowerment, but more an accessory for Ken's professional dabblings.
I never dreamed of trying to change the world.
I wanted to show the world as it is.
And at that time, there were no women doctors.
[NARRATOR.]
Well, it was the '60s, and as Bob had said, the Barbies, they are a'changing.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Barbie's changed! Barbie's new and different! [JANICE VARNEY-HAMLIN.]
We changed the sculpt of Barbie to make her look more contemporary, more modern, and move further away from the '50s look, which was the runway fashion look, 'cause Barbie's all about glamour, but glamour of the day.
[GREENING.]
They resculpted her face entirely to capture what was going on in the '60s, the youth movement.
So she has a sweeter face, little more innocent expression.
[ANNOUNCER.]
And Barbie's lashes are really for real.
They gave her rooted eyelashes, because so many young women were wearing false eyelashes at the time.
That was part of the beauty.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Best of all, the biggest news of all is the way Barbie moves.
[GREENING.]
She also included a waist that twisted and turned.
It was at an angle to the axis of the doll.
So when the doll turned the doll had sort of a model-like contrapposto.
That was Ryan's contribution.
What a doll, eh, Ruth? [NARRATOR.]
Remember Jack Ryan? Barbie's twist-and-turn waist was only one of the many innovations that Jack had cooked up since he engineered the first Barbie back in 1959.
I have here a patent from 1966.
It's about the knee joint in Barbie.
I think a lot of people that played with Barbie remember that click-click.
[CLICKING.]
I can't think of anybody else who was more responsible for Mattel's success than my father.
[NARRATOR.]
But Mattel's success was also Jack's success, thanks to that 1.
5% royalty agreement he'd made with the Handlers years before.
He got a percentage of every single thing that he did there.
That's unheard of in today's market.
[NARRATOR.]
That unique situation had suddenly made him an extremely wealthy toy designer.
And he soon found himself splitting his time between the plaything life and the playboy life.
[ANN RYAN.]
He had a history of throwing big Hollywood parties.
He had his own fire engine.
His house was pretty amazing.
[ANN RYAN.]
It was the second-oldest home in Bel-Air, but he decided he wanted to turn it into a castle, complete with moat.
I mean, it was crazy.
Imagine, this is my boss.
It was like living in some kind of fantasy land.
[LAUGHS.]
[NARRATOR.]
And as one might expect, King Jack's excesses weren't just limited to cars, houses and parties.
My father was married five times.
[LORD.]
I think Jack had, what today we would term, a sexual addiction issue.
His former wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, wrote about the dungeon that he kept in his house for the many women who had the pleasure of experiencing his torture devices.
There were certain things about Jack that were great, and some things weren't so great.
My relationship with my father was difficult, at best.
He was an alcoholic, and he also used cocaine, and it made him paranoid.
Sometimes his mood swings would be so dramatic that I didn't know what to expect.
[NARRATOR.]
So, yeah, the women in Jack Ryan's life had to put up with a lot.
That is, except for one woman.
My father sometimes called Ruth Handler "Ruthless Ruth.
" Kids love to wear a hat that blows bubbles.
It's magical.
She had a tremendous ego.
My father had a very big ego, so there were always a lot of fireworks.
She and Elliot, I think, were envious of all the attention that my father got, but also disapproving.
But I think mainly the thing that she was most upset about was that they had agreed to pay him so much.
So, Ruth and Elliot were going, I'm sure, "Oh, my gosh, what have we done here? We should've bought him out or given him a salary.
" That's when the things started to fall apart a bit.
[NARRATOR.]
In 1974, Jack Ryan sued for non-payment of royalties, effectively ending his 20-year relationship at Mattel.
[ANN RYAN.]
The lawsuit went on for about five years.
It was really hard on my father, and he drank and used more during that period.
He had fallen from living in this astonishing castle to living in a $400-a-month apartment in Westwood.
But eventually, he won and they paid him.
But it took a tremendous toll on him.
[NARRATOR.]
Jack Ryan continued to invent, but the father of Barbie would never work in the toy industry again.
Lovely long hair Lovely blonde swirl you can make Some people call the '70s the sports era.
We came out with some dolls that played tennis, golf, and then had sports clothes on.
And when it came to the life of leisure, there was one Barbie in particular who made the biggest [CLEARS THROAT.]
splash.
The clean gal with the long, straight hair, who came out of the water at the Malibu beach.
Malibu Barbie [ANNOUNCER.]
She's Mattel's super new suntanned Barbie.
Anybody that played with Barbie in the early '70s probably had a Malibu Barbie.
She was one of the most successful Barbies, and ran a very long time.
When Malibu Barbie came out, it was all about the beach.
[ANNOUNCER.]
All with that suntanned skin that makes them look great wherever they go.
Everyone had to have a suntan.
Being tan was seen as very healthy, an outdoor lifestyle.
And it was after that that we discovered that the sun is harmful to your skin.
[WOMAN SCREAMING.]
But the kids in the early '70s would take dune buggies, and they would soup up the VWs.
And of course Mattel had the dune buggy, and they had the camper, and everything that was in vogue then.
[NARRATOR.]
And for those of you keeping score at home, yes, Malibu Barbie marked the second time Barbie went under the knife.
But the most interesting thing about her new look was well, her new look.
And I think Malibu Barbie occupies the same place in the Barbie canon as Manet's Olympia in the world of art history.
One of the conventions in 19th-century pornography was always that the female depicted in an image never looked directly at the viewer.
There was always a sidelong glance, the same sidelong glance we see in the Bild Lilli doll and we see in the early Barbie dolls.
But Manet's Olympia was shocking because she looked directly at the viewer.
She didn't modestly avert her gaze.
That's a big moment in art history.
And I think Malibu Barbie should be regarded as a similar big moment.
The fact that the doll could look directly at the viewer and have that body, I think, was a reflection of the sexual revolution, of just how things had changed since 1959, when Barbie was originally introduced.
[NARRATOR.]
But the one thing that Barbie never took her eye off was fashion.
Something that in the '70s was changing a lot.
Glamour came back.
That's when we get into Superstar Barbie.
This is the era of Charlie's Angels and Saturday Night Fever, about looking glam.
[NARRATOR.]
Superstar Barbie was stayin' alive with her new disco look.
And with a new glam makeover came you guessed it.
She featured a new face sculpt, so she even has a bigger, brighter smile now.
[NARRATOR.]
For those keeping score at home, this makes facelift number three.
And she came with the bent arm, so the doll could pose in those kind of glamorous, fashion poses.
My cousin got this doll.
I cried because it was so beautiful.
[LAUGHS.]
[NARRATOR.]
But not everything was super in the '70s.
Barbie sales were flat and we were looking at ourselves, scratching our heads, "What is going on here?" [NARRATOR.]
After reporting sudden quarter losses that caught Wall Street off-guard, rumors of false earnings on Mattel's part began to swirl.
And those rumors pointed to one person Ruth Handler.
We weren't making the numbers, I guess.
So she started putting Hot Wheels cars on 18-wheelers, and driving them over to the City of Industry, and backing them into a parking lot, and unhooking the tractor, and coming back and getting another trailer.
The minute they left Plant One, they went on the books as accounts receivable.
Out the door There weren't any orders.
And so she manufactured the orders.
She sat with the people in charge of all that stuff at Mattel.
And the bottom line is, she told them just to lie.
And she got caught.
[NARRATOR.]
In October 1975, as federal investigators began looking into Mattel's books, and stockholders began filing class action lawsuits, Ruth and Elliot Handler were forced to resign from the company they had founded three decades earlier.
What she was alleged to have done was not insignificant, her cooking of the books.
[NARRATOR.]
Handler was indicted by a grand jury on charges of fraud and false reportings.
She was fined and sentenced to community service.
After Ruth was gone, the ship was rudderless.
Men were running the Barbie line, and they designed things that were completely grotesque.
[ANNOUNCER.]
Meet new Growing Up Skipper.
She's two dolls in one.
[LORD.]
This amazing product, with a twist of her arm, goes from prepubescent and now she has breasts.
And then you move the arm, and she goes back down again.
This was not a popular toy.
I think the men were just so keen on mechanical toys.
That was Steve Lewis' idea.
Steve was the head over design at the time.
And his daughter was growing up, and she was getting into a starter bra, and he thought it was wonderful.
And my sample makers, two ladies, eight children between them took one look at that doll and they said, "Absolutely not.
" They would not buy it.
They would not work on it.
[NARRATOR.]
Well, that was weird.
But things were about to get weirder.
Welcome to the 1980s, an outrageous decade where the cars were fast, and the fast food tasted even more plasticky than it does today.
But Barbie's biggest threat wasn't cholesterol, it was a truly outrageous impostor named - Jem! - Jem is truly outrageous! [NARRATOR.]
And Mattel's vice president of Barbie, Judy Shackelford, was truly, truly, truly outraged.
So she assembled her best operatives, and called them The Pink Berets.
And it was because marketing warfare was really the key.
In marketing, what you want to do is, you want to flank your brand, right? So there's very few areas of access for competitors.
[CHUCKLING.]
And God knows we faced competition.
For example, we found out that Hasbro was gonna launch a fashion doll against us.
So, I didn't like that.
About a week later, I got a call and it was from one of the sales guys.
And he said, "Judy, I know what it is.
" I said, "What?" And he says, "She's a rock star.
" I said, "That's all I need to know.
" We called it a war council.
"We're gonna do something about this.
We're gonna have a rock star.
" And I said, "We're gonna beat them to market.
" Okay.
It always takes us about 18 months to develop one single Barbie.
We're gonna do this in four months.
I said, "I want you to find every guitar, every musical instrument, - every piano, every keyboard - [BARAD.]
We took fabrics that we knew - [SHACKELFORD.]
every outfit.
- we had existing, and we took tools that we'd had from other products, and literally, within 16 hours we had developed Barbie and the Rockers Solid gold and zooming up the charts We had that thing put together and we shipped earlier than they did.
The whole world thought they copied us.
[LAUGHING.]
It was wonderful.
[SCREAMS.]
We girls can do anything [NARRATOR.]
Judy's Pink Berets had taken Barbie's sales into the stratosphere.
Judy was a visionary.
She was a major driving force in taking Barbie from a doll line that had four, five successful new dolls every year, into a multi-faceted business.
[BARAD.]
The average American girl went from owning one single Barbie to owning eight Barbies.
Some owning 30, some owning 40.
We girls can do anything [GIRLS.]
Like Barbie! The trend at that moment was that women could do anything.
It goes back to the "I can do it," when they were riveting the bolts in the planes in the war.
And so it was just fantastic.
It was really counter to what was happening corporately in the rest of the world.
[NARRATOR.]
The women who ran Barbie had turned Mattel into a Fortune 500 company.
And when Jill Barad became CEO in 1997, there's one particular lady, that she felt really deserved the credit.
And when I took over as CEO, the first thing I did was bring her back.
In a symbolic gesture of healing, Jill Barad invited Ruth Handler back to visit Mattel for the first time since her ousting over 15 years before.
Ruth, you are my hero.
People were so thrilled to see the founder of what we all were there for in our midst.
[NARRATOR.]
With time healing all wounds, the Handlers found their legacy at Mattel restored.
Unfortunately, there'd be no such redemption for Jack Ryan.
Despondent after suffering a debilitating stroke, Jack took his own life in 1991.
And with Jack gone, he was becoming increasingly forgotten.
It wasn't until after he died that Ruth started strutting her stuff and saying, "No, no, I'm the inventor of the Barbie doll" and never mentioned his name, as if he never existed.
[CHUCKLING.]
No, she did not want to talk about Jack Ryan.
[INTERVIEWER.]
She didn't like him? Um, no.
There was a lot of disagreement as to who was responsible for what.
But he was very influential in the development, for sure.
[NARRATOR.]
But after all those years, why couldn't Ruth just let bygones be bygones? What reason would there be to deny Jack his due credit? You probably don't necessarily want your products linked with a high-profile sex addict with a pharmaceutical problem.
[NARRATOR.]
Okay, fair enough.
Barbie had owned the '80s.
But how would she cope as the '80s glamour turned into '90s grunge, and all that big hair and all that color went limp and gray? And whatever color this is.
But Barbie stayed out of the mosh pit.
She had other plans.
You've got the longest hair ever.
Totally hot, totally cool Totally Hair Barbie The best-selling Barbie of all time still is Totally Hair Barbie.
She had hair that went virtually to her feet.
[SPENCER.]
And she is one of my designs.
We gave crimped hair, a hairbrush, and we gave a little bit of gel to put onto the hair, because using gel on your hair was quite fashionable.
[NARRATOR.]
And not just fashionable with the ladies.
Every 1990s heartthrob was worth his weight in Dep.
And we had Totally Hair Ken.
When we did the commercial, I had to groom his hair with hair gel to get it up, to get it into something like this hairdo.
[NARRATOR.]
Oh, hey, if you're getting a new hairdo, how about one of these? In 1992, Barbie went under the knife for the fourth time.
Or, as designer Bob Mackie calls it She had a do-over.
[NARRATOR.]
When designing Neptune Barbie for the collector line, Mackie decided that the Superstar face, in use since the '70s, was getting a little long in the tooth.
Barbie had this little silly grin with these little mouse teeth that showed.
And I said, "Couldn't we have her mouth shut, so she doesn't look quite so willing and able?" They said, "Oh, sure.
Why not?" [NARRATOR.]
The new Mackie face was an instant hit and became the signature Barbie visage for Mattel's upscale collector line through the '90s.
But things didn't always go so well.
Around the same time, Barbie's swimming pool was awash with hot water, and her worst controversy was [BARBIE.]
Math class is tough! [REPORTER.]
"Math class is tough.
" That has drawn fire from those who think Barbie's remark reinforces a stereotype about girls and math.
I mean, there had to be hundreds of empowering statements.
- [BARBIE.]
I love barbecues.
- I love Barbie dolls.
- [BARBIE.]
Which outfit is your favorite? - The one you're wearing.
I still get people saying, "Math class is tough.
" [BARBIE.]
Do you have a crush on anyone? [NARRATOR.]
Between the controversies and missteps, Barbie made it through the '90s by the skin of her now-hidden teeth.
As Mattel reported their first sales downturn in over a decade, the era of Judy Shackelford and Jill Barad's fierce leadership was now over, leaving Barbie to face the noughties alone.
Barbie, historically, has been a brand people don't want to go up against because Barbie will take them down.
She will use all her efforts to get that competition off the market, successfully.
Up until Bratz.
Passion for fashion [FINK.]
In early 2000s, she had major competition from a company called MGA.
And within four years of the launch of those dolls, they took 40% market share of the fashion doll business.
That was huge.
- Passion for fashion - Bratz It left Mattel a little bit shaking in their shoes.
Teacher Barbie and her students Love classroom fun [FINK.]
When Bratz came out, it started making Barbie seem like she was for the younger girl, where Bratz seemed like it was for the older girl.
Oh The other thing about Bratz was that they were always ethnically ambiguous and Barbie was kind of primarily white.
There were African-American Barbies since 1970, but Barbie was really seen as a blonde, Malibu beach girl.
So at first, Barbie responded by launching a couple of different brands that were going after the older girl.
One was called Flavas.
What's your flava? Tell me what's your flava But it didn't work.
You know it.
Bratz dolls were the ones that the kids identified with, and Barbie was like a parent.
OMFG, guys, we killed somebody's grandma! Bratz dolls fell off the roof of the dollhouse, and they brought in Dr.
Barbie and they referred snidely to her as Mrs.
Smarty Pants.
[NARRATOR.]
That's Dr.
Smarty Pants, thank you very much.
It had taken Barbie nearly 30 years to earn that title.
Barbie's gonna listen To her little heartbeat [NARRATOR.]
After suffering a public dressing-down at the hands of Bratz manufacturer MGA, Mattel decided that if they couldn't beat them in the toy store, they'd beat them up in court.
And now the title for the world's most popular fashion doll was on the line.
[FINK.]
The designer of Bratz, Carter Bryant, was an employee of Mattel when he licensed the concept for Bratz to MGA.
And so because of that, they feel they had ownership of the Bratz brand.
[NARRATOR.]
But the legal battle was long and dirty, with the rights to Bratz reverting back and forth between Mattel and MGA for the next eight years.
In 2013, the courts finally decided in MGA's favor once and for all.
But between the lawsuit and new competition, Bratz went down for the count in 2016.
And at least for now, Barbie and Mattel had won the battle.
[MAN.]
Beauty Queen Barbie wins the crown.
If my team and I had been at Mattel when Bratz happened, we would've killed them.
[GIRLS.]
We knew that.
[CHUCKLE.]
[NARRATOR.]
Barbie has always changed with the times.
But in 2016, due to popular demand, Barbie had one of her biggest changes ever.
[JACKIE BREYER.]
Barbie introduced Fashionistas in February 2016.
There's taller Barbies, shorter Barbies, curvy Barbies, new skin tones.
And consumers were thrilled.
And the media went wild and said, "Female empowerment," and "This is what we've been asking for, for all of these years.
Yes, we want Barbie to have a million careers.
Yes, Barbie can do anything and girls can do anything, but we need her to look like all of us.
" [NARRATOR.]
For all the fanfare the new Barbie body types received with the release of Fashionistas, by the end of 2017, sales figures began to slump again.
Could it be that after half a century, has Barbie finally become inoffensive? I think Mattel should do something, among other things, to expose more of its racy original history, to inflame a little controversy again around the doll.
[NARRATOR.]
Is this controversial enough? The 2017 Fashionistas line did give Ken a man bun after all, but they could go further.
Let's embrace our squalid ancestor, Lilli.
What could be more quintessentially American than having an embarrassing forebear in Europe? I mean, we're a country of immigrants.
[NARRATOR.]
Well, we did say that Barbie was complicated.
Whether she offends or inspires, Barbie's here to stay.
And that's a testament to the vision of Ruth Handler.
She passed away in 2002, followed by Elliot nine years later.
Ruth? She was a genius.
She was on to something that literally changed how children play forever.
[NARRATOR.]
But Ruth didn't do it alone.
Barbie's legacy has been forged by the tireless effort of the women at Mattel over the decades.
[SPENCER.]
It's very gratifying to think that I designed so many dolls for all these years, and I think of every child who played with the Barbie doll as my child.
[PERKINS.]
It's very important for little black girls to have a doll that looked like them.
They can visualize themselves being anything they want to be.
Being able to create that impetus for that child to dream about something that maybe she would not have before was such a motivating factor for me.
[GIRL 1.]
What do you like best about Barbie? - [GIRL 2.]
Her wonderful wardrobe.
- [GIRL 3.]
She's got some bendable legs.
- [GIRL 4.]
Ooh, that's pretty.
- [GIRL 5.]
All her clothes are neat.
[SHACKELFORD.]
I think when little girls played with Barbie over the years, they were given the opportunity to pretend to be doing things that were quite empowering.
We opened a door where kids could imagine doing all sorts of things.
Little girls today, they can be anything if they believe in themselves and try.
[THEME SONG PLAYING.]