“Haha, oh man. Barbie? What the hell?
Maybe you heard about this one. The book they’re pulling from the shelves because it depicts Barbie as being a computer engineer who is dependent on the help of men.
It’s a two-in-one, and the story of Barbie being in actress is ALSO terrible!
In the actress story, Barbie shows up to a play, the lead is sick, and she takes over. It’s the Princess and the Pea, and they figure Barbie can handle it with no rehearsal whatsoever.
Now, what’s weird, it would appear that Barbie is ALREADY an actress in this story. So what we’re talking about is a situation where Kathy Bates stumbles into a mall, they beg her to be the princess in a 10-minute play, she accepts, and everyone is blown away that she’s not horrible.
No fucking shit!
But the capper, Barbie’s final line:
“I guess I can be a great actressâeven without knowing my lines perfectly!”
Sure. I mean, why even do the one fucking thing actors and actresses are supposed to do?
Also, I just want to point out that this production looks to be about ten minutes long, takes place in the center of a mall, and yet there are multiple costume changes, a full lighting rig, and a hair and makeup crew.
What the fuck?
Okay, then we flip the book over (although I guess Barbie would be baffled by this because instead of flipping it over you could just have someone else read it) and get to the computer engineer story.
Now, to be fair, Barbie is in school to be a computer engineer. So maybe she still has some things to learn. But let’s look at the Occupation Outlook Handbook. The OOH.
O Mighty OOH, what does a computer engineer do?
Computer hardware engineers research, design, develop, and test computer systems and components such as processors, circuit boards, memory devices, networks, and routers. By creating new directions in computer hardware, these engineers create rapid advances in computer technology.
Interesting. So I guess when Barbie says she’s designing a game…that sounds a little off. Oh, but wait. She’s not designing the game!
Barbie: “I’m only creating the design ideas. I’ll need Steven’s and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game.”
So basically what we’ve learned is that Barbie, as a computer engineer, is drawing a doggy. It IS a robot doggy, so I guess that catapults us slightly into the computer realm. But I’m really stretching to make people feel better about goddamn Barbie, and that doesn’t make me feel good about myself.
Barbie’s computer then gets a virus, which she then spreads to Skipper’s computer. Skipper is pretty cool about this, by the way. If my brother did that, I’d be kinda pissed. Skipper seems to be more even-keeled than me. I suspect she may have been using drugs. But let’s stick to what’s explicitly wrong here.
Barbie then asks her computer engineering teacher, who is an attractive lady in a lab coat, how to quash a virus.
Why the fuck a computer engineering teacher is wearing a lab coat is beyond me. I’m sure some computer engineers do, but do they do so in the classroom? If so, folks, I think you’re taking advantage of a situation, sort of like when the coach wears the baseball pants in baseball. Seriously, do you think you might take the field at some point? Buy some jeans, asshole.
Barbie tries to fix her computer, and fortunately Steven and Brain come along and help.
Could she have done it without the bailout. Hard to say. But does my confidence in her ability to draw a robot dog give me a lot of faith in her computer skills? Not so much.
Oh, and they don’t even SHOW us the fucking robot dog! All that fuss, they have a whole page about how cute this robot dog is and they don’t even show us. There was still a chance that I could derive some pleasure from this. There’s always a chance I’ll be satisfied if there’s a truly cute robot dog. But alas…
What do we learn from Barbie?
Well, Barbie sucks. And I don’t think there’s any way around that at this point.
This is just one fella’s opinion, okay? But I DID play with a lot of action figures pretty late into life. Which is a fact I’m somehow trying to use to gain credibility here, and I don’t know if that’s going to work.
Here’s what kind of sucked about action figures: They were what they were. It was tough to have Ghostbusters do a lot besides bust ghosts. It didn’t make sense to have Wolverine action figures disappear in the Beetlejuice vanishing vault. I guess there was potential for a Beetlejuice/Ghostbusters crossover, but that never occurred to me until just now. It’s far too late now. Sometimes life feels like an ever-increasing stack of missed opportunities.
Anyway, the appeal of a Barbie, she could kind of be whatever. Is your Barbie a pilot? Sweet. Is yours an inventor? Awesome. Is yours half robot with wires sticking out of her head, like my sister’s was after I convinced her that we should modify it? Very cool.
Before Barbie had a voice, she could have been whatever. And frankly, if you felt Barbie was too pretty to be an astronaut, well that sounds a bit like stereotyping to me.
But then we’d have no movies. No books. No video games. We’d just have…huh. Whatever little girls decided.”