Move Over, Elsa. Why Barbie Still Reigns

Photo by Tracheotomy Bob/Flickr

The big toy news this week concerns the popularity of a certain blond, shapely doll — and another, well, blond, shapely doll. Barbie, according to a survey from the National Retail Federation, has been knocked from her No. 1 position for the first time, dethroned by Elsa and other “Frozen” merchandise.

But, warn toy experts: Not so fast.

“I don’t think Barbie’s going away,” Marianne Szymanski, president of the consumer research group Toy Tips, tells Yahoo Parenting. “She still reigns.”

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According to the NRF’s annual survey findings, about 20 percent of parents plan to buy “Frozen” toys — which include Elsa and Anna dolls — for their daughters. Barbie, which had been in the top spot throughout the list’s 11-year history, was knocked down to number two this year. But experts say the ranking is deceiving.

“It’s totally not true,” Jim Silver, editor-in-chief of the popular toy review website Time to Play, tells Yahoo Parenting. “The Barbie brand is still much bigger. ‘Frozen’ is just hotter and came out of nowhere.” A ranking in actual doll sales alone, he notes, would have Barbie — a $1.3 billion franchise — at No. 1, followed by Monster High dolls, and followed, in third place, by the “Frozen” princesses.

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Photo by Eileen Neylon/Flickr

Barbie has been widely criticized in recent years — for her unrealistic body proportions, and, most recently, for being portrayed in a Mattel book as a computer engineer who keeps turning to two male friends for help. This month, artist Nickolay Lamm released a realistically proportioned version of Barbie, called Lammily, pre-selling more than 21,000 dolls through a crowd-funding effort before his site even launched. And despite Barbie’s overall popularity, sales have been gradually slipping.

Carolyn Danckaert, creator of A Mighty Girl, a website that curates and sells toys meant to inspire girls, says that’s no accident. “With all of the recent movement toward creating more empowering dolls that look like real girls, Barbie continues to be behind the times. An excellent example of this is the recent Girl Scout Barbie — she has the same impossibly thin body as other Barbies, and she’s even wearing high-heeled hiking boots,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “Of course, Mattel has done a number of things right with Barbie, like showing her in a wide variety of careers. But unfortunately, she continues to have a very stereotypical and unrealistic appearance that’s quite limiting to girls.”

Still, toy experts are not worried. That’s because Barbie, unlike the “Frozen” girls, comes without a preset narrative, which inspires imaginative play.

“Let’s remember the essence of Barbie,” Silver notes. “She is truly a fashion doll. She is about fashion, style, clothes. Elsa, as popular as she is, has the blue dress. Same with Anna, she’s got the one dress. Plus, Barbie’s had hundreds of careers — she’s a vet, she’s a teacher, she allows you to be everything you want to be.”

When I was a girl [cough, cough] years ago, I played with Barbies. Piles of them. They were indeed blank canvases upon which I inflicted all sorts of wacky plot lines — many of which involved the cutting of hair, the busting of limbs, the burying of in sand (don’t ask). And while I haven’t bought one for my 6-year-old daughter and don’t plan to — mainly because now, as an adult, I find her pinup-like appearance jarring, but also because she hasn’t expressed any interest in one — I don’t dismiss the hours upon hours of creative play my Barbies inspired when I was a kid. And that’s part of what keeps her going strong today, notes Szymanski.

“She’s been around for multiple generations, which makes her a classic toy,” she says. “So a mother will be more likely to share it with her daughter.”

The real reason behind what might be Barbie’s subtle fall from grace, Silver notes, is more of a cultural one: Girls grow up faster these days than they used to. “Older girls want something hipper and edgier now,” he says. “It started to happen in 1999, with the Britney Spears doll.” So now Barbie’s demographic, traditionally vast (I was still playing with mine at 10!), is split: While Barbie does well with the 3- to 6-year-old set, he says, girls 8 and older prefer Monster High dolls — which, by the way, sit comfortably in the No. 4 spot in the NRF survey, and which are also made by Mattel.

Still, while it’s true that Barbie’s everlasting reign can be partly credited to her being a blank slate, according to Szymanski, that edge over characters like Elsa and Anna isn’t huge. “In the research I’ve done, I’ve found that kids will act out what they know of a licensed character if they saw the movie,” she says. “But after that, the doll becomes their friend, and so a lot of play patterns can emerge.” In other words, “Once they’re done with the excitement, the doll becomes just another doll in their collection.”