Thursday, October 09, 2008

if you didn't know already..



barbie is based on a German sex doll.

xx

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

True enough...just not in the way you might think. ^_^

I read about this in the Public Library ages ago...In the late 1940s after World War II, one of the co-creators of Barbie was over in Berlin, and she spotted a rigid vinyl *novelty doll* in a really seedy bar, that she thought was cute.

Basically, it was the first doll she had seen of a *woman* with actual breasts and *mature proportions*, not baby-ish ones. Never mind the rigid, perpetual saucy pose or the suggestive facial features...Ruth Gordon (Sp?) saw some potential there.

Still...Barbie was born of the kind of raunchy novelty toy you might spot at a Spencer's at your mall. Meaning, kind of seedy and dirty and cheap.

^__^ Who knew, right?

--Bradley Poe

Anonymous said...

I like these living dolls :-)

http://www.youtube.com/my_favorites#

Anonymous said...

Hups wrong url

Here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wn0KIVomx0

Kacie said...

I do not know who that person is but, they need to get their facts straight.

Here are the facts;

Barbie is a best-selling fashion doll launched in 1959. The doll is produced by Mattel, Inc., and is a major source of revenue for the company. The American businesswoman Ruth Handler (1916-2002) is regarded as the creator of Barbie, and the doll's design was inspired by a German doll called Bild Lilli.

Barbie has been an important part of the toy fashion doll market for nearly fifty years, and has been the subject of numerous controversies and lawsuits, often involving parody of the doll and her lifestyle. In recent years, Barbie has faced increasing competition from the Bratz range of dolls. Source; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie_doll

Ruth Handler was the creator of the Barbie Doll but, she never owned Mattel. She was President of the company but, her husband and best friend owned the company and used parts of their names to form the name Mattel. There is a very interesting history about Ruth and Mattel at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Handler Mattel started out orignaly as a company that made picture frames. It was Ruth who pushed for the change to a toy company.

The Bild Lilli Doll was a German fashion doll produced from 1955 to 1964, based on the comic-strip character Lilli. She is the predecessor of Barbie.
In the beginning Lilli was a German cartoon character, created by Reinhard Beuthien for the tabloid Bild-Zeitung in Hamburg, Germany. In 1953 the Bild-Zeitung decided to market a Lilli doll and contacted Max Weissbrodt from the toy company O&M Hausser in Neustadt/Coburg, Germany. Following Beuthien's drawings Weissbrodt designed the prototype of the doll which was on sale from 1955 to 1964 when Mattel acquired the rights of the doll so the German production had to stop. Until then production numbers reached 130 000. Today Lilli is a collector's piece as Barbie is, and commands prices of several thousand Euros. Source; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild_Lilli_doll



With a little more online research, I found out that sex dolls really did not come out on the market as an item till the 1980s.

Its seems that this is one of those many false information pieces created by someone who thinks they have all the answers. People like the guy in the video really should do their research.

Anonymous said...

My apologies for getting Ruth Handler's name wrong. I was aware that I didn't quite have the last name correct.

As for the rest, like I said, *Novelty doll*, not sex toy. Seriously, I knew the video was off, ok?

Don't hate me...I just wrote what I did previously off-the-cuff, before the caffiene woke me up.

Just saying,

--Bradley Poe (who doesn't wish, mind you, to be sued over a small error or two, it's not worth the hassle)

Kacie said...

Get a grip, I was not talk about your comments, I was talking about the video that was posted that our comments are about. The person who posted that video said “barbie is based on a German sex doll”. And the person in the video even said the same thing. That was what I was commenting on.