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- [00:05]
A
Hello, and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate Money where we chat with brilliant and interesting people. I'm Emily Peck. I'm a writer at Axios and co host of Slate Money. And I'm here today with Tarpley Hitt, the author of the amazing new book Barbieland, the Unauthorized History. It's everything that the Barbie movie wasn't. There is more drama. I'd say there's backstabbing, there's corporate espionage, there's crime. This book has everything. Michael Milken is in the book. It's insane. Tarpley, welcome.
- [00:38]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [00:40]
A
I'm so excited. Before we kind of dive in, maybe I'll just ask you, why Barbie?
- [00:46]
B
Why Barbie? Amazing question. I've asked myself that a lot of times. But basically it started when I got wind of the Barbie movie happening. And I was someone who never really had much of a emotional attachment to Barbie, but I did have this sort of enduring obsession with dolls and sort of this impulse to make these little replicas of ourselves and sometimes worship them, sometimes give them to kids. Usually a bit of both. A couple years ago, I wrote about these women who make reborn dolls. They're super expensive, hyper realistic baby dolls that are often used in, like, grief therapy. And they're so realistic that they demand certain behavioral norms. So, like, if you leave one in a hot car, someone might call the police. But the women who make these were kind of wicked and would, you know, do all these things where they brought them out without following the rules and things of that nature. So I was kind of obsessed with the polarized emotions that these dolls inspired, which was like, on the one hand, some of the people who bought them formed real kind of attachments. Like the way now people are becoming too obsessed with their AI Chatbot girlfriends. And on the other hand, people who don't have these relationships with them are sort of disgusted. And when it seemed obvious that Barbie was going to be having a new moment, I was thinking like, well, what captures that polarized reaction more than this one doll, which has been hated and loved more than any other doll in the history of human civilization? And I thought, you know, I'm a Barbie agnostic. Let me sort of try to figure out what was the Barbie sauce.
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A
All right, so we'll figure out the Barbie sauce and more. And it's all coming up on money. You're about to make a trade. Which U do you listen to? Is it get optioning those options.
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C
Or.
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A
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- [02:39]
C
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B
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C
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B
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C
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- [03:02]
A
Slack tomorrow, I would explode.
- [03:05]
C
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- [03:09]
A
Slack business plus so I saw the Barbie movie. Actually, I think I saw it more than once and it has this great origin story in the film where these girls are playing with these baby dolls and the song from the movie 2001 comes on, right? And it's shot for shot, supposed to be like that movie. And all of a sudden this giant Barbie doll that looks like the first one with the strapless swimsuit comes and all the girls see her and then they start killing their baby dolls because they are so excited to have a womanly doll to play with. And that's the origin story, right? It's like Ruth Handler, the founder of Barbie, along with her husband, the two of them, she decided that girls really needed to have a real, like womanly doll to play with, not a baby doll like has been in the past. And that's sort of like the origin story that we were fed just a few years ago. But lo and behold, I read your book. The Barbie origin story is 100% not that at all, has nothing to do with women, has nothing to do with girls, nothing even to do with children. Were you, did you know this going in or were you surprised to find it out and then tell us about the origin story?
- [04:18]
B
I knew a little bit of it going in and one of the reasons that I was interested in the story is I've been kind of drawn to what makes a sort of a knockoff better than an original. And knockoffs and originals. I was working at a rebooted website at the time, the Gawker 2. At the time, it seemed like everything was a remake of something else and it was inevitably worse than the original, you know, and here was Barbie, which had been just straight up stolen from this German mascot. And it wasn't like, you know, Facebook where they steal the idea. But the Winklevi hadn't made like a successful social media platform at that time. But with Build Lilly, which is the doll that Barbie has stolen from, she was like the Mickey Mouse of post war Germany. I mean, she was everywhere. She was on news kiosks, directing people to the paper. And so how is it that this doll is stolen from this German doll and like so surpasses her that we've barely even know about this original doll. And to the extent that we know about her, she's sort of a punchline. Like there's a lot of misconceptions about her being a sex doll and stuff like that.
- [05:20]
A
Yeah, so she was. Let's see if I have this right. Axel Springer, who people now know because they bought business ins, have an investment in Politico. That's how I know them. Anyway, now the German publisher, but back then they had a newspaper and they wanted to have like a. A comic strip in the newspaper modeled on one in the uk. And they came up with this like pinup looking woman, I guess. And that was Lily.
- [05:45]
B
Yeah, that's totally correct. Axel Springer was a publisher and after World War II, basically there are very few newspapers operating in Germany. He wants to come up with a tabloid that's based on the Daily Mirror in the uk that is basically a tabloid that will compete with television. So something super visual with really simplified story premises. So the headlines are quite sensational and there's not that much text. And this is a passion project for him. He lays it out himself. And as he's laying out the first issue, he notices that there's an empty space. It's only four pages and they've forgotten to put in this two by four chunk. And so he has a cartoonist make a cartoon in the moment. And they want sort of a sexy woman, like a bikini babe in a beer ad. And it's supposed to be a one off, but it becomes so popular she starts getting her own fan mail. And so they give this guy a contract for 25 years and eventually she gets the full Mickey Mouse treatment. I mean, she gets a song, she's on perfume, she's on champagne, there are Bilbilli candles. She's in a movie. She's in a movie and they draft like a national contest to find like the most like build Lily looking girl in continental Europe, of course. And they find this girl, Anne Smirnier, who's living in Germany at the time, and they make her into this giant movie. So she's a huge phenomenon. And Ruth Handler gets wind of this and sort of it's like, okay, great, we've got proof of concept, okay?
- [07:08]
A
And so Ruth Handler gets wind of it even within that that's first acknowledged but kind of lied about. She says she saw the Doll just. She just happened to see the doll on a vacation. I forget where.
- [07:21]
B
In Lucerne, Switzerland.
- [07:23]
A
Lucerne, Switzerland. Yeah, I just. Just happened to see it. Just stumbled upon, innocently stumbled upon the doll.
- [07:28]
B
First she tells the story that you get in the movie that she came up with the adult doll and that there had never been an adult doll ever before. Every doll was a baby doll. Which even in her own telling isn't quite true because she says the moment of inspiration came to her when she saw her daughter play with paper dolls and changing their outfits and sort of play acting what it's like to be an adult woman. And she was like, how come there's not a 3D version of this? And she tells this story for 30 years. At one point, the Wall Street Journal gets wind of Bild Lilly and goes to Mattel for Comet. And they say, oh, the similarities between these dolls are inadvertent. And that's the only article that I could find, and I read thousands that mentions Bild lilly in the US before the 80s. And it's only in the 80s that this sort of starts to come out through fan networks and Mattel alumni. And then finally, in 1994, M.G. lord, a historian, writes one of the first really big popular mainstream books, histories of Barbie. And she tells the Bild Lilly story in full. And in a genius PR move, Ruth Handler puts out her memoir the same year they come out within months of each other, where she sort of recasts the story as not a lie. But, you know, they weren't copied. She was just inspired by this doll.
- [08:49]
A
Just inspired. And I mean, Barbie does go on to surpass Build Lilly in all ways. And Build Lilly is marketed, I feel like, to adults as like kind of kitsch or to men as kind of kitsch. And this is, I mean, obviously Mattel took it in a different direction, we can now say. But yeah, I guess that's a good opening. Because I wanted to talk about Ruth Handler again, because in the movie she's kind of sanitized by Rhea Perlman, you know, and made into this sort of like benevolent feminist. Then I read your book and I learned that not only was Ruth Handler not a benevolent feminist, she surrounded herself with male executives. And I don't think you mentioned her hiring, like, any women executives or at that level, maybe she hired them as designers for the doll. Not only that, but she was asked to work on equal employment law for Richard Nixon and actively worked against several feminist policies. So, yeah, maybe you could talk a little bit about Ruth's complicated vibe.
- [09:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, the movie is. I mean, she lives in like a mystical kitchen and she comes down as like a fairy godmother and she has one crack that sort of like acknowledges that she's a more complicated figure. Where she says, like, that was until I got into trouble with the irs. Actually, she never got into trouble with the irs. She was indicted for fraud by the SEC and district attorneys because she was cooking the books for a while in the 70s. But yeah, she really was not a feminist. She actively rejected the label, as did Mattel, basically, up until when the movie came out. And even then there was some reporting about how they wanted to get that word out of the script. And she didn't really like women. She said openly, like, I thought girl talk was stupid. I didn't have any female friends. And yeah, when she serves on the Nixon committee, she literally. There is a alternate version of the world where the Nixon White House comes out in favor of the private sector adopting maternity leave policies and treating maternity leave as it would any other temporary disability. And in fact, the draft of that memo was written and Ruth Handler, single handedly, in red ink, crosses it out and is like, this is too burdensome for companies.
- [11:04]
A
Like, I just. The founder of Barbie, who's somehow morphed into a feminist icon in 2025, which is a wild thing to contemplate, actively got rid of a federal maternity leave policy recommendation is just. I just wanted to repeat it. Tarpon. I have no point. I just couldn't believe it. I was like, why is she involved? What? And she liked Nixon and all of this. And it's sort of the second time that Nixon is like, so close. I think he also almost pulled the trigger on universal childcare, I believe as well. So it's just sort of interesting. There is this alternate history of like Nixon as feminist president somehow.
- [11:42]
B
Yeah, if only. I mean, yeah. One of the big ironies of the archive, where all of her stuff is, she stored at the Schlesinger Library, which is this women's library at the old Radcliffe campus. And so all of the people around her, like her old enemies, you know, she was constantly beefing with now, and all of their records are stored there. Betty Friedan, Peggy Sharon, founder of Action for Children's Television, that was constantly petitioning the federal government to place limitations on how much advertising was shown in children's tv. Throughout Ruth Handler's like, you know, interview transcripts, she's always like, peggy Sharon, that woman is nuts. You know, and now all of their stuff are basically like, in a row Underground in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- [12:23]
A
Incredible. Let's take a break and then when we come back, I want to talk about Mattel.
- [12:34]
D
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- [13:02]
B
Experian hey, Max Shafkin. Here on the latest episode of Bloomberg's Everybody's Business. Stacey Vanek Smith and I have gathered the best and brightest of business podcasting. We're gonna dissect the biggest stories of 2025.
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A
That's right.
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B
We are talking with odd lots, Tracey.
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A
Alloway, Felix Salmon of Sarah Slate Money.
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B
And Robert Smith of Planet Money.
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A
But TikTok, to be clear, has been.
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C
Banned all year like it is.
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A
It's a law.
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D
It is a law of the United States of America.
- [13:30]
B
It was such a good time. It was a good time. You can find everybody's business wherever you get your podcasts.
- [13:35]
A
So Tarpley Barbie gets all the attention, but what I liked about your book was you gave Mattel a lot of attention and it does not come off well. The company, just to to summarize, it does not come off well at all. And weirdly, as I was reading your book, there was a Q and A with the current CEO of Mattel in New York Times Sunday Business. And he actually came across pretty well. And I was like, the PR blitz continues from Mattel. So the company starts off, it's really this mom and pop with Elliot and Ruth Handler kind of winging it basically in this sort of like down and dirty kind of toy industry where they're constantly ripping each other off putting out new toys. But then slowly it seems like, or maybe all at once, you can tell us, Mattel becomes this just kind of model of just the modern day corporation for its era, like from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and it just sort of like rolls with whatever the latest corporate trend is. Like at one point the trend is towards companies just buying up all different kinds of companies and becoming these big conglomerates that make no sense. That I feel like Berkshire Hathaway is still an example of that. But at one point it was like every Company want. You wanted to make screws, you wanted to make dolls, you wanted to sell insurance. It made no sense. Mattel was on board that train. Michael Milken shows up. Like they all of a sudden become this sort of very boring, horrible corporation so quickly. Like, did that surprise you? Like, can you say more about that?
- [15:03]
B
I think what was surprising to me was how much they sort of not only followed the corporate trends, but anticipated them. So in, you know, in the early 50s, Ruth Handler's like, all of our compet, all of our competition is in Japan. Let's stop hiring American workers and like just make everything in Japan. And so they get. Barbie was never made in the US like there was some, you know, assembly that happened in California and they still, you know, had American manufacturing plants for other toys. But for the most part Barbie was made abroad, you know, and change locations based on who was paying workers the least. And so they're really into offshoring, like right away. And then they, because they're sort of anticipating a lot of these trends. They get, you see all of these sort of like characters from the American 20th century pop up in Barbie's orbit. I mean the Michael Milkenwood blew me away. He basically single handedly saved Mattel in the mid-80s. But then there's also like Kevin O', Leary, you know, like the Shark Tank.
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A
Guy, He's a mess. How is he judging Shark Tank? I want to know after reading about what a mess he's made. Tell it, tell about his company.
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B
He basically buys his way into running the Learning Company, which is an electronic games company in the 90s that owns like Reader Rabbit and where is Carmen Sandiego and a bunch of like familiar toy titles at the time. And the CEO of Mattel is this Barbie ish woman named Jill Barad. And everyone is talking about electronic games. Like kids are getting older too quickly and they're giving up on toys right away and they're moving to E Games. And so in a move that you can kind of understand, she's like, okay, we'll buy this company that already has an established reputation as an electronic games purveyor and fold that into our catalog.
- [16:50]
A
Makes sense.
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B
It makes sense if you don't look at the Learning company's financials. But everyone else around her was like, okay, but the financials are really not good. It turns out that this company is just been amassing so much debt, they anticipate that after this merger goes through that they're gonna post a $100 million profit first quarter. And it turns Out. They buy it for $3.8 billion. Billion.
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A
At the time. That was how much they spent at the time.
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B
Yeah, at the time. And it immediately becomes clear that this company is, like, it's just a house of cards. And so they post $100 million loss, first quarter, and then everything just falls apart almost immediately. Kevin o' Leary is, like, pushed out. So is one of his executives. Jill Barad is pushed out. Shareholder lawsuits are just. You know, there's dozens. Eventually, they can't even sell it. They give it to a PE company to basically strip for parts, and it's Gore's group. And if Gore's group can, you know, find something profitable in the rubble, then Mattel will get a piece of that, maybe. And so I think they eventually get 50 million out of it.
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A
It's not clear to me, like, how smart this company was after. After they come up with Barbie, and they iterate on Barbie, you know, forever. Like, they're just, it seems like, adrift on sort of corporate trends and fumes for a really, really long time. Like the executive that they brought in towards the end of Handler's reign, who she really didn't like, because they keep bringing in these, like, corporate men in suits, basically. And this one guy comes in, and it's like, after he leaves his last company, like, financial fraud is discovered. He go to another company where he leaves, and they discover financial fraud. Like, he's obviously some kind of disaster, yet they bring him to Mattel. It's almost like that's the requirement for doing a deal with Mattel. It's like you have to be like, a Kevin o' Leary with a terrible company, but somehow they buy it. They buy everything except women leaders. It seems to me like they'll. They'll fall for any guy in a suit. Like, it's not clear to me, like, what was their edge all these years, besides the initial pop of the blonde doll? You know what I mean? Like, what were they doing? Right.
- [19:01]
B
Well, I think one of the smart things Ruth Handler did was not give Barbie any lore and not sort of, like, carve out a particular personality. You know, there's only so much Runway you can get out of, like a Labu Boo or like a Beanie Baby. These, like, things that burn fast and bright that have a particular niche, whereas Barbie is sort of like her only thing is that she has jobs. But so that means that you can put her in any scenario.
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A
It's a total blank space. Like, she has no backstory. She has no lore.
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B
No lore. And so one of the things that I get into in the book is, like, in the 80s, Hasbro, which has been trying to get into the fashion doll market and get some edge on Barbie for years, puts together this team that spends years developing Gem and the holograms.
- [19:51]
A
Yes. I remember this show. That's how old I am Purple. I remember this song. Jem is truly outrageous. Truly, truly outrageous.
- [19:59]
B
Yes, yes. And so when Jem is still in the works, you know, the public is completely in the dark about Jem. Judy Shackelford, who's in charge of Barbie marketing at the time, gets a call from one of her. You know, they all have little spies.
- [20:11]
A
Oh, my God, the spies. Yes, yes. She gets a call from the spy.
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B
She gets a call, and he's like, hasbro is making a Barbie, and she's a rock star. And. And so it usually takes a doll between 18 months to 2 years to go from idea to store shelf. And Shackelford basically assembles the Navy Seals of toy design. And it's like, we're gonna make a rockstar Barbie, and we're gonna beat Jem. And so they make Barbie and the rockers, and it's, like, clearly a knockoff. They've done it so quickly that all of her accessories are, like, things from other toys in the Mattel catalog. But they do. They get Barbie and the rockers and out to market, and all of the coverage is like, oh, there's two rockers on the market.
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A
What a coincidence.
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B
What a coincidence. Meanwhile, Hasbro's executives, they have, like, cartoon steam coming out of their heads. Their. Their anger is so obvious in the quotes they give to, you know, the Journal or whatever. Like, they clearly just scrapped this doll together to beat us. And yet it doesn't matter. I mean, like, Jem gets a TV show, but do you see Jem on the toy shelf? No. And it's because Barbie has just edged out every possible competitor by just putting out one that's the exact same. But you gravitate towards the name brand.
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A
Incredible stuff. Although, I mean, just in Mattel's defense, how hard is it to put out? Like, why did it take Hasbro so long to put out these characters? I mean, they did it in, like, three months. Couldn't they have sped it up? It's not that creative an idea, is it?
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B
Right. And their mistake was that they gave Jem so much lore. I mean, she gets a TV show, so much lore. They're kind of going for something different. They want something that's toyetic, which is a term one of the Mattel guys comes up with to Describe a toy that is adaptable to television. And Barbie was like, the opposite of that. They avoided making a TV show for so long or a movie because they wanted her to be this blank thing. So they later come out with a blanker doll to sort of try that. And that doesn't work either. Like, there is something about the way Barbie has sort of wedged herself into the cultural imagination that makes it hard to find an easy competitor.
- [22:15]
A
Oh, my gosh. Yes. And I mean, and you make it clear in the book, sort of as the Internet is beginning, that Barbie was there, that everyone is just taking Barbie and using her to make. It's really like you can use Barbie to make whatever cultural criticism you want to make. It seems like to me, like, it doesn't even matter. She can be your case for feminism. She can be your case for, like, a retro kind of sense of femininity. You could do anything with Barbie. She's so malleable. And I guess, like you're saying, it goes back to the handlers not wanting any backstory or lore. It's like this blank canvas. You could just paint whatever you want on it.
- [22:50]
B
Right. And that becomes Barbie's greatest asset. But it also becomes something Mattel freaks out about, because since anyone can make a Barbie in any context, people sort of run with it and are having fun with it. You know, there's all these artists. This guy, Paul Hanson in San Francisco is making, like, trailer trash Barbie and drag queen Barbie and Tom Forset, this photographer is, like, making a bunch of photos where Barbie is, like, being blended to death in various kitchen appliances. And. Yeah, and Mattel's response to this is to just sue them. They become one of the most aggressive copyright litigants of the 90s, and before that as well. But the ones in the 90s really start to gain press coverage. And in a way that was not amazing for Mattel.
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A
No. And it all culminates, I guess. Let's just get into it. Can we talk about it? It's the end of your book, so I don't know if you are into spoil. Like, you don't want to spoil. We'll try not to spoil it too much.
- [23:43]
B
Right. Mattel is such an aggressive litigant that there are. The book is sort of framed by these two big lawsuits. One between Mattel and the Germans, where the Germans are saying, hey, you stole this doll from Bill Lilly. And one where Barbie has become so ubiquitous and there's so many different kinds of Barbie that Mattel is looking at Bratz, this doll that in so many ways has nothing to do with Barbie and saying this is stolen from Barbie. And they actually do have kind of an interesting case. The designer of Bratz Sky Carter Bryant, was working for Mattel when he comes up with the idea. And so the question is like, did he work there long enough such that this idea belongs to Mattel?
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A
So he has a backstory and lore, just like every doll in the book or maybe in the world has. You know, he was back home in, I want to say, St. Louis or something and walking back from his terrible job at the Old Navy because he was on leave and he saw these teens out in the wilds of St. Louis. I'm kidding. It was a suburb.
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B
It was suburb.
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A
And he's like inspired and he makes brats because they have headphones on and they're like cool and they're not like Barbie, who's just very generic and all of this anyway. And I was like reading his story, that story in your book, and I was like, is this even true? Did he. Maybe he went to Lucerne. Like, how do I know this is even true at this point?
- [25:03]
B
Exactly. I mean, so he basically takes a mental health leave from Mattel where he is feeling stifled there creatively and he wants to freelance. And so he says that it was during this six month period that he was on leave that he comes up with this doll while he's at home. And then he goes back to Mattel. And the trouble is that he knows that Mattel is not going to make this doll because they don't want dolls that will draw away from Barbie's market share. So he pitches it to another company. And while he's sort of getting that off the ground, he's still working at Mattel. And so the whole case becomes this very meticulous scrutiny of a several week period at the turn of the millennium where it's like how much of the doll was created while he was still at Mattel versus when he left to go to mga. And I'm sure that both sides are sort of fudging a bit. You know, I mean, he would have had to be extremely meticulous to have made sure that he was only thinking about this doll on his off hours, only on leave. You know, I'm sure it was actually much blurrier than that. At the same time, is Mattel's contract so ironclad that that means that the doll belongs to him? And so it starts off as this sort of contract dispute and then a lot more emerges about Mattel's various Strategies and corporate espionage operation. And it spirals into a almost two decade long legal battle.
- [26:26]
A
I couldn't believe it because I was telling you before we started recording, I was at. Listeners of Slate Money will know I was at this intellectual property magazine in the early 2000s and I remember we wrote many articles about the Bratz Barbie trial. And I even remember like Carter Bryan's name. Like, and he was at issue. I had no idea that after I left the magazine they retried the whole case. I didn't realize that Alex Kaczynski, who's like this very famous, maybe someone even say notorious, notorious federal judge was involved. He was one who decided there should be another trial. The trial itself is just wild. It goes so far beyond Carter. And you know, whatever he was thinking or doing, he eventually like leaves the stage a broken man. Like, is he okay? I was telling my daughter about this. She's 14. He, she was like, is that man okay? Because he gets on the stand and like under questioning he kind of has a breakdown and I believe he leaves the trial, goes to the airport and collapses. Like, is he, is he okay?
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B
He is alive and well, but I mean he was put through the wringer. He eventually settles with Mattel, but he's still drawn back into this lawsuit because he is like, you know, a key witness. He's being grilled twice. You know, there's two trials and deposed and all this stuff. And I mean by the time he gets to the second trial, which is in 2011. I mean, 2011. Yeah. I mean like a decade of this trial. And you have to understand, this guy was at the top of the world for a minute. Like he was working on Barbie's team. And then he goes from working on Barbie's team to designing like the most popular fashion doll of the early 2000s.
- [28:00]
A
Those dolls were really popular. They were like, so everyone was like, look at these dolls. And they attracted like controversy too sexy or whatever. And they had that early aughts vibe of the low rise jeans, if I'm recalling correctly. Like people were super into these dolls. It was, it was. It's actually kind of weird how into dolls adults can be. But that's another show, I suppose.
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B
Well, I mean, absolutely.
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A
Come to think of it. Yeah. So, okay, so he's okay.
- [28:29]
B
He's okay. But he's, you know, he is super NDA'd. He sells dolls on his personal website. I tried reaching out to him. He's very hard to get in touch with and you know, you just, you feel for him. He lost Everything. And he had this on and off boyfriend who invested a lot of his money around the financial crisis, a lot of it in real estate. He bought like a luxury trailer park.
- [28:52]
A
Sounds bad.
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B
Yeah. And it just really went. So he loses like a lot of his money to the point that like, he can't even pay the settlement. He settles in the tail for $2 million, but by the time the second trial rolls around, he hasn't paid any of it because he has no money.
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A
Sad.
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B
Everyone who I spoke to who was at the trial said he just looked like so different and broken. Like, because you're seeing his deposition videos, which were filmed, you know, a decade ago, and then you're seeing the man that's there and you can just, just. It's like looking at those pictures of Abraham Lincoln over the course of his presidency or something, you know?
- [29:24]
A
Barack Obama.
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B
Yeah.
- [29:27]
A
Wow. Okay, well, I feel like we're running out of time, so we will never get to speak about Jack Ryan. But people should get the book and read about this guy, Jack Ryan, because he's an amazing character. But we'll say no more about that. But what did Mattel have to say about your book overall? You must have reached out to them at some point.
- [29:43]
B
Okay, so when I first started reporting, the first, very first thing I did, the first email I sent was to the organizers of the National Barbie Doll Collectors Convention, which is a fan run operation. Mattel, you know, comes and they contribute like dolls, but it's really run by like women across the country and men as well, of all different ages. And they alternate, the clubs alternate and who's like putting it on that year? And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna work my way source wise from the outside in and talk to people on the fringes and then like, you know, beef up my source book and then finally get to the middle. Okay, wrong. I. Wrong. Immediately after reaching out to these women, my email is forwarded to Mattel.
- [30:26]
A
Damn.
- [30:27]
B
And so the first email I get is Mattel saying, we don't participate in books unless you pay us a licensing fee.
- [30:33]
A
You have to pay them.
- [30:35]
B
Yeah. And so I'm like, well, I'm not going to license the book. I'm not gonna do that. So I spoke to many people at Mattel and I spoke to many people who had worked at Mattel, but Mattel, the institution, was not a participant in this book. And so all of my subsequent calls and emails to them basically were ignored, including at the end when I send my big fact checking email, which is like, hey, I Would love to have you guys respond to all of this stuff. And that goes completely un answered. But the plus of their immense litigation arm is that they have been speaking about all of the controversial issues on the record for decades. So most of the material that I have that comes from Mattel comes from lawsuits. There's a vast paper trail of that.
- [31:29]
A
That's great. That's really great. And I'm sure. Well, did you get to see the licensing deal? I wonder what it would say. Like, you can't say anything bad about Barbie or.
- [31:38]
B
No, no, no, I didn't get that. I didn't. They said we don't participate in unlicensed books. They never sent me like a contract for how much I would need to pay to license the Barbie name. But that actually is a really interesting question.
- [31:50]
A
And there was no, like, legal issues because, you know, the book is Barbie pink color and it says Barbie real big on the title. And that's okay, that's fair use.
- [31:58]
B
Yeah. So the book was very heavily vetted legally by Simon and Schuster's team. So yeah, the pink that is copyrighted is a particular pantone shade. Okay, so this is not that pantone shade.
- [32:10]
A
Oh, okay. I would never have known that. Is Mattel still as litigious and as protective of its IP now? Did it learn any lessons? Because it did not win. It did not come off looking good from the Bratz trial. And it didn't win.
- [32:23]
B
No, it didn't. It didn't win. And you see in a lot of their more high profile cases in the 90s and the 2000s, you see these sort of reach arguments. So like they sue famously, the record label that put out Aqua's Barbie Girl in 1997. And they're arguing basically that it's trademark dilution and copyright infringement to use their brand name. But it's very obvious if you, if anyone is familiar with copyright law or with trademark law that this is parody. It's protected fair use. And so they lose that and it goes up to, you know, they petition the Supreme Court for cert. And so it becomes this national news story and it's extremely bad look for them. And I think after the Bratz trial, where so much of their dirty laundry was put in the public record that there was a internal decision not to pursue those kinds of cases anymore. So they're still quite litigious, but it's in these more straightforward trademark dispute kind of ways. So like Nicki Minaj made a rap snacks called barbecue chips and they sued her, but they still make reaches from time to time. Like, there's a podcast called Coffee with Ken, and in the fall, they sued him for trademark infringement. But his. His name is Ken, and it's a politics podcast. Like, it's just like it was dismissed. So they still are quite litigious. But I think they realize that they can't sue their critics for things where they don't have a straightforward claim.
- [33:44]
A
Where is Barbie now? In the culture? You have this stuff in the book where they ask kids about Barbie, and the kids were like, no, she's so uncool. We don't like our ick, even the girls. But the movie really seemed to change everyone's mind or at least give Mattel, like, an incredible marketing boost. So where's Barbie now, Tarpley?
- [34:05]
B
Barbie. The idea is omnipresent. Barbie, the doll is pretty much chugging along, chugging along. But Mattel is now trying to be Disney, where they want to license the IP of their vast toy catalog and become a sort of entertainment empire. So they're building two theme parks in Arizona and Oklahoma, and they just got a license to build indoor water parks. Inan Kreitz, the CEO, is saying this all the time. He's like, we want to be an IP empire. We don't have customers. We have fans. So I think the takeaway from the Barbie movie is like, they're no longer just selling a doll. They're selling Stanley Cups with Barb. It's the same premise as always, which is Barbie's accessories, but Barbie's accessories are now a more abstract idea.
- [34:49]
A
Right. Like, Barbie was kind of envisioned like a razor, where you don't make money selling the razor, you make money on the blades.
- [34:55]
B
Exactly.
- [34:56]
A
So we're just living in all the Barbie blades, just coming down on us.
- [35:00]
B
I'm getting cut by all these Barbie blades.
- [35:03]
A
Is there anything else I should ask you or you wanted to say, or.
- [35:07]
B
Buying the book is such a noble use of time and money.
- [35:13]
A
Well, thank you so much, Tarpley. I really enjoyed your book. Thanks for coming on Slate Money.
- [35:17]
B
Oh, thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.
- [35:20]
A
That's it for our show this week. Thanks to Jessamyn, Molly and Shaina Roth for producing. Ben Richmond is senior director of podcast operations. Neil Lobel is executive producer of podcasts. I will be back in your feed on Saturday along with Felix and Elizabeth for a regular episode of Slate Money. Until then, thanks for listening.