Barbie
| Fandom | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Barbie |
| Abbreviation(s): | N/A |
| Creator: | Ruth Handler |
| Date(s): | March 9, 1959 - present |
| Medium: | dolls, books, movies, animated shows |
| Country of Origin: | United States |
| External Links: | Official Website, Barbie |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
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Barbie is a fashion doll manufactured by the American toy company Mattel, Inc. created by Ruth Handler she made her debut on March 9, 1959 and would eventually become the best selling doll of all time. Various books, games, animated films and television series have been produced set in or around Barbie and her family and friends.
Mediums
TV
Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse (2012-2015)
Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse was a 3D-animated web series first released on Barbie.com[1] in 2012. It is also available through Netflix,[2] and highlights are featured on the Barbie official YouTube channel, though the Netflix release of the show collects webisodes as 23-minute "Best Of" segments instead of the two- to three-minute episodes from the official Barbie website. 75 episodes of the webseries were released, with the show ending in 2015. A half-hour special aired on Nickelodeon on Sunday, September 1st, 2013[3].
Barbie Dreamtopia (2016-Ongoing)
Initially an exclusive to the YouTube Kids app, Barbie Dreamtopia is a 3D-animated property that has seen success both in serial content on and off conventional television and in a TV-length film. The Dreamtopia arm of the Barbie franchise began with a string of small shorts published to YouTube in 2016, all between two to four minutes in length. A film aired on terrestrial television in June 2016, and a series has been ongoing on the KidsClick programming block, as well as other channels internationally, since 2017.
Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures (2018-2020)
Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures is an animated TV series that aired on Netflix on May 3, 2018. It features characters from the original series, and new characters as well. The show is animated to mimic a vlog and is mostly shorts of what happens in the new Dreamhouse. Fans are called Dreamhousers and this series as well as Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse. There is a following for this show on Tumblr. Fans often create video edits on YouTube for this series.
Barbie Vlogger (2015-ongoing)
Barbie Vlogger features Barbie as a teenager who creates YouTube videos. In these shorts, she does YouTube Challenges, has fun with her friends, and talks about current issues. Her signature catchphrase to end videos with is “PACE”, meaning Positive Attitude Changes Everything. The series has over 75 episodes and can be found on Barbie.com, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video. A noteworthy episode is Barbie and Nikki Discuss Racism. This episode went viral on YouTube and was praised for the way it handled the subject of racism.
Direct-to-Consumer and Web-Exclusive Serial Content
My Scene Webisodes
Kelly Dream Club
Movies
In the 1980s two animated TV movies were released: Barbie and the Rockers: Out of This World and Barbie and the Sensations: Rockin' Back To Earth based on the Barbie and the Rockers" doll line, which was seen as many as a response to "Jem", the "rock star" doll line created by Mattel's rival Hasbro (which was outselling Barbie at the time) and it's animated TV series adaptation.
Barbie Movies were released semi-annually beginning in 2001. The early films, from 2001 - 2009, focused on traditional fairy tales and are referred to as the Fairytale Era, it is also not unusual to see fans call them the classic or retro Barbie films. The films released after 2009 are categorized as the Post-Fairytale Era mostly because Barbie took on a larger variety of roles.
Video Games
Fandom
This article or section needs expansion. |
Before the increased presence of Barbie on social networks thanks to the 2023 movie and Barbenheimer, Barbie saw a Renaissance of some kind as adult fans looked back at the animated movies and enjoyed how silly they were. Preminger, from Barbie in the Princess and the Pauper, saw a particularly prolific fandom be born, with notably a huge amount of fan vids thanks to his very campy persona.
Example Fanworks
Fan art
Fanfiction
- The Best Part of Breaking Up by girl_wonder.
- la petite mort by howlingmoonrise, a Dracula crossover
Meta
- Overanalyzing the Barbie Movies with Queer Marxist Theory (Jan 2022) by Alexander Avila, a video essay about the queerness of Barbie films through a Marxist lens.
- The Short Yet Fabulous Life of Earring Magic Ken on /r/hobbydrama
Other
- Dolls buzz - an Austrian X-Files Fan that builds 1:6 scale dioramas for the X-Files Ken & Barbie dolls
Zines
Archives & Fannish Links
The nature of the Barbie franchise makes it difficult to organize in fan archives that aren't edited by fans in-the-know. Because of this, there are two archives for the Barbie franchise on FanFiction.net: Barbie (Movies) and Barbie (Cartoons). There are no real differences in the content of these archives, though, as FanFiction.net's sorting system is entirely user-driven. For example, both archives collect transformative works about Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses.
Organization issues persist across other archives as well, with the Archive of Our Own having constant misclassification problems with Barbie characters. As a fairly small example, the tag Teresa (Barbie) collects works tagged for Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse as well as works tagged for Barbie: Spy Squad. Ideally, these would be manually wrangled as different canonical tags. In addition, while all four works tagged Hadley/Isla (Barbie: Princess Charm School) are tagged with the character names, only two fics are wrangled as the canonical tag for Isla (Barbie: Princess Charm School). The other two fics are collected under the generic Isla tag.
- Barbie (Toys) works at AO3
- Barbie (Movies) works at FanFiction.net
- Barbie (Cartoons) works at FanFiction.net