6 Holiday Toy Crazes and Why They Captivated Kids (and Parents)
This was a particularly delicate problem for Hasbro, the makers of G. I.
Joe, which was carefully branded “America’s Movable Fighting Man.”
In 1988, The Times’s editorial board warned about the effects of G. I.
Joe and He-Man saturation in young minds.
So why should we feel great about a message that says a woman can go to the White House if she looks like Barbie?”
The toy soldier has been at the mercy of changes in the adult world, increasing in strength and complexity during national militarization,
but stumbling when war becomes too real or unpopular.
It would not want a doll with a teen-age body — a bust and such shapeliness.’”
Barbie’s cultural staying power for half a century proved that people would indeed buy the doll, though not without controversies along the way.
A Christmas Eve dispatch from 1911 in observed:
The Christmas toy market is an illuminating commentary on modern life
and the conditions of the moment and reflects the attitude of the adult population rather more than it expresses the ideas at work in the childish minds.
In 1993, a group of guerrilla artists calling themselves the Barbie Liberation Organization went so far as to swap the voice boxes of G. I.
Joes and Barbies and place them back on store shelves.
