That's not me applauding Creatable World. I was quoting something. I can't think of a time when I applauded a toy, and, though I like the idea of children creating little imaginary worlds with their toys, I'm wary of Big Toy's packaging of a particular world to capture the creative energy of the child. Was Creatable World — i.e., gender-neutral world — offered as the antidote to the excessive genderizing of Barbie?
But what happened to Creatable World? I don't think Mattel ever announced that it was withdrawing the product. How much of a fiasco was it?
Did kids just not like it? Did the adults who liked that sort of thing simply fail to have children?
Who even remembers Creatable World? It surprised me to run across it this morning. Is it in the junkpile of things people like to forget ever happened? Have we created a world in which Creatable World never existed?
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This was clearly something drawn up in a DEI product development meeting, and marketing took it up with enthusiasm. They probably even did some focus groups and sifted through to get the answers they wanted to proceed with the project.
They thought the country was clamoring for gender neutral dolls when in reality all the kids want today is what they've wanted for years: Balls, trucks, cars, female dolls, stuffed animals, crayons, building blocks, and good stories.
I know this was from a few years ago, but it would be helpful for the people at toy companies to hire some people who actually have children. They might be able to provide some insight.
A Darwinian end to Creatable World Dolls?
I never even knew this was a thing and I have 2 girls.
Maybe not having TV save us some time.
I can't offer insight. I live near the most terrifying doll facility in the world: the Cabbage Patch Doll Hospital, which has a preemies wing, a birthing wing (yes, they come out of cabbages), and an ER where you can take your own Cabbage Patch doll for emergency surgery, all performed by employees in doctor and nurse outfits. I dare anyone to top that. I keep trying to go, but I'm not emotionally strong enough. I did do an extensive tour of historical sites that had original toasters once, but I was forced to do that by an asshole boyfriend. Thomas Woolfe was the best of the lot, by the way.
2019, eh? Oh, our innocence. We had no idea then where gender neutral was headed.
"Did the adults who liked that sort of thing simply fail to have children?"
Well, non-Hispanic black women are 13% of the population but have 42% of the abortions in the United States.
That's pretty compelling math.
Is Macron a real life gender neutral doll?
Kids might have liked the product, but I'm betting that the 75% of parents that are mostly normal would have refused to buy them. Creepy ad.
Know what small children do when you give them a life-mimicking toy that's "gender neutral," like a stuffed animal? The girls immediately gender and name it. If they have a little brother, the animal might be male to them; otherwise it's very likely to be female. The boys might or might not name it, but they'll look for something for it to fight (and if you ask them at that point what its name or gender is, it'll be male).
I didn't remember ever seeing this product. But it's just another Rousseau-Locke fever dream. Children are not blank slates. What sex a person (or a "person") is is vital information that we seek because of our evolutionary programming. The urge to seek it can be forcibly suppressed (oh, but with a smile) but not erased.
Grok certainly has a sense of humor about it:
"The line’s absence from Mattel’s website and major retailers, combined with clearance sales by 2021, points to its end. However, it remains popular among collectors, with some customizing dolls or using their clothes for other figures (e.g., Billie Eilish dolls)."
LOL. That's pretty on point.
>i>"Is Macron a real life gender neutral doll?"
Leave Macron alone. He is a rape victim trapped in a relationship with his physically abusive rapist.
I remember the Nissan 300ZX ad that had GI Joe drive to the a Barbie house in. 300ZX and take her away from Ken.
The US advertising industry is the world's most efficient, sophisticated, productive and flexible source of propaganda. That troubles me.
There are Reddit doll collector threads saying that the line was expensive and barely marketed.
AMDG said...
“I remember the Nissan 300ZX ad that had GI Joe drive to the a Barbie house in. 300ZX and take her away from Ken.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGMI_mWmb7g
Barbie was OK. But ken was a wuss who needed a ass kicking.
Just from seeing the ad, I don't know any Girl would buy those dolls. And I guess Girls agreed.
In a lot 60s and 70s Households, Ken got damaged by GI joe. For obvious reasons.
The US advertising industry is the world's most efficient, sophisticated, productive and flexible source of propaganda.
Can I bring up the brainwashing book again? One of Lemov's themes is that, contrary to the pop-culture conceit that "brainwashing" is rare, foreign, and cartoonishly transparent and evil, it's ubiquitous and - in the words of a friend of hers - "erases itself."
Trent: even better than the cabbage patch hospital, the American Girl store restaurant serves booze!
JSM
"Can I bring up the brainwashing book again? One of Lemov's themes is that, contrary to the pop-culture conceit that "brainwashing" is rare, foreign, and cartoonishly transparent and evil, it's ubiquitous and - in the words of a friend of hers - "erases itself.""
I'm in the middle of reading that book. Very happy to see it talked about.
I question the premise because the famously smooth crotches on both Barbie and Ken, no holes or appendages at all, were a source of childhood laughs and embarrassment. I have not looked into exactly what “customization” was possible but really the big takeaway from undressing Barbie and Ken was that they were “gender neutral” right out of the box.
In a lot 60s and 70s Households, Ken got damaged by GI joe
The same thing happens today, but there's continuous consent. The Ken and Joe set comes with a little gerbil.
Mattel's SEC filings or a Wall Street analyst who follows Mattel would tell you how much Mattel wrote off on Creatable World, that is, if it was material.
"famously smooth crotches on both Barbie and Ken"
I asked Grok about that. I mean, Ken and Barbie are genderless. Except for her 60's pointy "boobs," which have no nipples.
Grok said that gender is determined by marketing.
So, it's definitely brainwashed.
As a boy I remember then trying to sell us GI-Joe dolls, but I don't remember any actual kids, of the kind that rode Sting Ray bikes and wore Red Ball Keds sneakers actually owning one. Green plastic army men, molded into different positions and combat roles were fine.
Grok, "I’ve searched through available sources, including Mattel’s SEC filings, but I couldn’t find specific information on a write-off explicitly tied to the Creatable World product line. SEC filings, such as Mattel’s 10-K and 10-Q reports, typically detail significant write-offs or impairments under categories like inventory, goodwill, or intangible assets, but they don’t always break down figures for individual product lines unless they’re material to the company’s financials. Creatable World, launched in 2019, was a relatively small initiative compared to Mattel’s major brands like Barbie or Hot Wheels, so any write-off may not have been significant enough to warrant specific mention."
I heard Jim Cramer this AM praising Grok and trashing ChatGpt
Kids are naturally inclusive. Kids don't care about skin color or ethnicity. Want to play? That's all they care about.
... Despite the left's non stop attempts to shame everyone as a racist, and as not good enough in their warped "diversity" speech crime club.
Watch videos of Palestinian parents teaching their children to HATE and FEAR Jews from an early age.
Chilling.
I don’t know about Mattel’s web site, but you can still buy Creatable Worlds dolls if you go go to Amazon via the Althouse Portal. Probably also works if you don’t use the Althouse Portal to get to Amazon, but why would you do that?
29-30 minute mark. The kid with the shaved haircut (gender confusion club hair cut for kids) , earring, and the faux Palestinian keffiyeh. Yeah - parents love that!
Creatable World is the political philosophy of the left, but they play with real live people and whole nations and economies.
you can still buy Creatable Worlds dolls if you go go to Amazon via the Althouse Portal.
My MIL, a single mom with a deadbeat ex, strove mightily to support herself and her two sons without public assistance. She regularly used a kind of consumer arbitrage, buying things more cheaply at one store and returning them for cash (back in the day when a persuasive cute little woman could get a store to accept a return without a receipt) at another where those items weren't on sale.
At one point, she bought a bunch of Jabba the Hutt "action figures" on sale at one store, only to discover that the other local store would no longer allow receiptless returns - so then she had to try to sell them, way pre-Internet. She did travel farther afield to return some at more distant stores, but everyone was getting wise to her tactics and cracking down on persuasive cute little women trying to return bulk purchases, so she could only get rid of one or two at a time. And - here's where Know Your Customer comes in handy - she hadn't seen Return of the Jedi and of course had no idea that no one wanted a Jabba the Hutt doll.
My husband said the stacks of Jabba the Hutt boxes were in the garage for quite some time. She did eventually divest herself of all of them, but I've never asked her whether she made a profit. Apparently it's a sore subject.
As a boy I remember then trying to sell us GI-Joe dolls, but I don't remember any actual kids, of the kind that rode Sting Ray bikes and wore Red Ball Keds sneakers actually owning one.
My dad was older, and old-fashioned, and didn't want his son playing with dolls, even if the doll was carrying a rifle and a bandolier of grenades. So I never had a GI Joe, but one of the neighbor kids did, and I was a bit envious.
My toys tended strongly to cars, boats, guns, and especially airplanes, as Dad had been a fighter pilot in the war. I also got a microscope, and a chemistry set, and a set of encyclopedias that I would read from at random for hours on end. Good preparation for a fulfilling and well-paying career.
My dad had a short fuse and repressed emotions that were shown only when he lost his temper, and honestly it was a bit scary when I was young. But he was a good father and I miss him terribly. A natural-born public speaker and magnetic leader of men, full of vigor and physical bravery, possessed of a fearless determination to speak his unvarnished thoughts regardless of the consequences, all of which thankfully rubbed off on me to some extent, even though I don't have the natural gifts he had.
Boy Boyd @8:58, oy vey!
Growing up in the 70s, lots of the boys in my neighborhood had GI Joes. The only thing better than GI Joes were Tonka trucks, especially the big dump truck and the giant fire engine that you could hook up to a garden hose.
PS. We'd get into fights whenever someone called the GI Joes "dolls". They were ACTION FIGURES, dammit, not dolls! LOL.
PS. One wonders how the kids in the Creatable World commercial are doing today. I realize there is a large, sometimes lucrative market for child actors and models, but I wonder about the parents who allow their kids to participate in that market, especially for projects like Creatable World. My guess is that the film set for that project would have been an unusually creepy environment.
Official Creatable World website here
https://corporate.mattel.com/brand-portfolio/creatable-world
At the 29-30 SECOND mark. The kid with the shaved haircut (gender confusion club hair cut for kids) , earring, and the faux Palestinian keffiyeh. Yeah - parents love that!
*fixed
Me and my friends were fairly disdainful of GI Joe, but when our younger brothers got them we came around. For a few years anyway.
It ended--of course--with setting up little dioramas of naked Joes clad in streamers of toilet paper engaging each other seckshually.
"I'm in the middle of reading that book."
Let us know how it comes out.
In gender-neutered and spayed world, viable men will be deposited in sperm banks, and women will be herded on farms. A parade of pride and progress at The Twilight Fringe.
GenXr here. When was in that age group, Star Wars toys dominated. Sure, there was GI Joe and Micronauts (my personal favorite), and Transformers/Autobots for my brothers, every kid I knew for years and years wanted Star Wars. Everyone had the action figures. The truly sought-after toys, usually only given for birthdays or Chrisitmas, were the spaceships and base/locations. And, to you point about creativity not being tied to a single world like Star Wars, we played the hell out of these toys and not once do I ever remember us reinacting anything from the films. It was always our stories set in that world.
We also used make model airplanes and battleships. And have mock fights with them. And have our soldiers fight, usually the best time was around 4th of July when firecrackers could stand in for artillery.
Long ago in another life, I wrote Hot Wheels commercials. One of the great indoor toys, imo.
What happened to dolls? I don't mean Barbie, the aspirational model with her Country Camper, Malibu Beach House, and Jet. I mean baby dolls (who could be seen as genderless). Do parents who give their daughters names like Taylor and Madison also give them baby dolls, or is that disempowering?
That brainwashing book is disturbing on so many levels. I have already thought of two novels I could write based on the real people in it, and bestsellers already have been written about them, like The Bourne Identity, The Terminal Man, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
One can see why people seeking power over the culture would be drawn to the toy industry.
PM said..."Long ago in another life, I wrote Hot Wheels commercials. One of the great indoor toys, imo."
Agreed! I loved my Hot Wheels and my Matchbox cars! My sister is nine years older than me. She used to take me into the town center and buy Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars for me when I was little. Some of my fondest childhood memories.
"No children were harmed during the making of this commercial."
Wanna bet?
Where have you gone, Major Matt Mason?
A lonely nation turns its eyes to you. Woo woo woo
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