If 2023 was the year of Barbie, inspiring grown women to dust off their old Barbie dolls in a pink wave of nostalgia – it took until now for the phenomenon to finally free me to confess a long-held childhood secret.
As a collector of mid-century toys its no surprise that dozens of Barbie Dolls in all configurations and vintages line my shelves and are carefully stored in boxes. But they were not a part of my childhood. They were all purchased by me as an adult. The truth is I never owned a brand-new Mattel Barbie Doll as a child.
It took until 2024 to finally reveal what shamed me for years. My childhood was filled with a bunch of Bogus Barbies.
Brand X
Never settle for less than a genuine Barbie. Booklet 1962
It always surprised me growing up that my mid-century mother so loyal to the consumer industrial complex of General Mills, General Motors, and Proctor and Gamble sometimes veered off into uncharted territory with the Brand X choice.
Mom never dared wash our clothes in “Wave” when only Tide would do or surprise us at breakfast with “Sparkle Flakes” in lieu of “Sugar Frosted” ones. That said, cookies could be compromised so a Keebler Pecan Sandy look-alike from the kitchen of A&P’s Anne Page often accompanied my after-school milk and cookies,
As a long-time enthusiast of Orbachs Department Store in N.Y.C. where knock-off Parisian fashion could be had for a song, she apparently applied the same fashion frugality to my fashion dolls.
When it came to some toys -off brand was okay. Somehow, she assumed I’d never notice the difference in dolls, despite the hours I spent gorging on TV commercials. fine-tuning my baby boomer consumer sensibility. As the first generation to have products directly marketed to us from the cradle onward, we were surrounded by products created especially for us.
Didn’t we learn even before we were of school age that “you could tell it’s Mattel, it’s swell?” Barbie commercials flooded children’s TV debuting on the Mickey Mouse Club in 1959. Along with learning how to spell M-I-C-K-E-Y we also learned B-A-R-B-I-E!
Accept No Imitation
Mitzi by Ideal a clone of Barbie
Mattel was very firm insisting “Don’t accept imitations. Only those dolls with the wrist tag identifying them as an authentic Barbie could be counted on.
But success breeds imitation. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, imitation also spelled a share of a huge profitable market.
As Barbie sales soared it didn’t take long for a slew of 11-inch teenage high-heeled fashion dolls that were clones of Barbie to appear.
So when Mom bought me a fashion doll Barbie look a like she thought I wouldn’t notice. Grateful for the gift, I pretended not to. So what if my Barbie look a like was really a Mitzi Doll made by Ideal. This 11.5 fashion doll with a ponytail was the spitting image of Barbie.
The doll always went by “Barbie” in my house never once calling her by her given name Mitzi. Careful to keep her fully clothed, I feared a friend would see the fake name stamped on her neck and not printed on the plastic tush like a real Barbie doll.
Babette made by Eegee Toys, Brooklyn
Soon I added Babs, Tammy, and fetching Babette made by Eegee, rounding out my bogus Barbie collection that was growing. I may have lacked for a genuine Barbie, but these Barbie wanna-bees filled my bedroom with their knockoff outfits.
Barbie in The Snow
Today my genuine Barbie sits on my authentic Underwood Typewriter
It took a snowstorm to change that.
I got my first real Barbie thanks to a winter blizzard in 1962. Like a new shade of Revlon lipstick, she was christened by me as Barbie in the Snow.
As the January snow was slowly melting I spied a flesh arm poking up from a mound of snow. I dug deeper and there was a Barbie doll dressed in a lovely spring frock, one I recognized from the catalogue as Suburban Shopper a lovely striped number. A 100% cotton suntop dress. The Cartwheel straw hat with blue ribbons and fruit-filled tote bag was missing as was the pink telephone and white pumps. But the faux pearl necklace was intact.
A gen-u-ine don’t accept imitations Barbie dropped by some heartbroken neighborhood girl
I supposed I could have tacked a note “Missing Barbie” on the nearby telephone pole as neighbors did for a runaway dog or cat, but this was a finders-keeper situation. I felt for the poor little girl whose blue Plastic Barbie Doll case now lacked a key element. However, this little miss had not treated her Barbie well- the fashion doll’s blonde hair had been shorn drastically revealing a large hole in the head.
Mattel would be happy to know that their Barbie would be treated better in my own home, where she would join my collection of Barbie Knocks offs.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.