All this talk about Barbie movies makes me feel hella nostalgic. Let me share what I used to play with my Barbies.
Okay so, I fully admit to being a really spoiled kid who, essentially, ended up getting all the toys she wanted one way or another (”another” being my beloved grandparents to whom I was the first, and thus far at the time, only grandchild. Read: Spoiled rotten). So I had... a literal trunk full of Barbies and Barbie dresses.
But I only had one setting. Like, I didn’t play out different stories every time, it was always set in the same universe with continuing “episodes” (I have always been a TV kinda gal).
My most favorite doll growing up was a ballet Barbie, because she had joints - she could bend her knees and elbows and even twirl her hands and get on her toe-tips. So, she could actually move. My second favorite doll was a Stacie who came with her own bike, meaning she too had joints and could fully move. Now, of course were they sisters.
But they were also secret agent spies.
Their organization worked under the cover of fairy tale characters. Barbie, due to her origins as a ballet doll, was the Swan Princess (wearing the absolutely gorgeous white dress from the Sailor Moon Serenity doll).
Stacie was Golden Marie, because I had an off-brand doll that was relatively ugly but had a really pretty really golden dress so like that was a good fit.
The two lived in a house (built by my grandpa and dad because they are the fucking best. It even had running electricity so I could use little light switches in each room to turn on the tiny lightbulbs??). But the house had three stories and they only lived in one of them, which means they had nosy neighbors who couldn’t learn that the two were actually secret spies.
(Also they had three talking dogs and four talking cats because of course they did.)
Anyway, so the leader of their secret spy organization was Sleeping Beauty, because Sleeping Beauty had always been my favorite fairy tale princess and also I had this gorgeous purple dress with a rose at the tip of the cleavage.
And Barbie’s partner was Prince Charming. A dark-haired Shaving Ken doll I had, the ones where the beard was some special kinda color that when you used hot water would disappear from his face. He was an always dressed in dark, broody biker who always wore his leather-jacket.
It was basically a spy buddy cop thing.
Occasionally they teamed up with Mulan (whose codename was Snow White because she was like my only black-haired Barbie doll?? All others were blonde aside from one whose hair I dyed pink with nail-polish) and John Smith (you know, from Pocahontas, though he also went by the codename Prince Charming. The dudes just did not get names in those fairy tales...), who were also partners (and shared clothes because I had that one awesome three-piece suit that looked rad on both of them??).
Also, looking back at it now, I think I put a hell of a lot of gay subtext into John Smith and Prince Charming and their constant bickering about how Charming should dress more gentlemanly and how John needed to stop being so stuck up. Huh.
So, together, they had to solve crimes and track down high profile criminals all while looking like Totally Normal People to their downstairs neighbors.
