Barbara Millicent Roberts is having something of a moment, with the Barbie movie recently becoming the first film directed by a woman to hit $1 billion at the box office.
It’s a fitting achievement for a doll that has also been the president, a member of the L.A. Dodgers, and the first American female astronaut in space. But before she became an international icon, Barbie had her roots right here in Los Angeles.
As Evan Lovett tells us on “L.A. In a Minute,” Barbie was the brainchild of Ruth Handler, co-founder of El Segundo-based toy company Mattel.
Inspired by watching her daughter play make-believe with paper dolls of adult women, she realized there was an unfilled niche in the toy market. Handler wrote in her autobiography that she wanted a doll for girls “like the toys that allowed her son to imagine himself as a firefighter or astronaut.”
During a trip to Germany in 1956, Handler came across a doll called Bild Lilli. The voluptuous doll was based on a pin-up character and marketed to adult men as a gag gift. It was exactly the figure Handler had in mind for her children’s toy.
Handler bought three of the dolls and brought them back to the United States, where local designer Jack Ryan helped her tweak the look. They called their prototype Barbie, after Handler’s daughter Barbara. (Ken, by the way, was named after Barbara’s brother.)
Barbie made her debut at the American International Toy Fair in 1959. The next year, the German manufacturer of Bild Lilli sued Mattel for copyright infringement. But Mattel got the last laugh, buying out the company’s copyrights in 1964 and taking Bild Lilli out of production.
Barbie was an instant hit…with almost everyone. Handler’s children reportedly hated the dolls, with Ken’s namesake telling the L.A. Times that Barbie was a “bimbo” who “doesn’t have a brain in her head.”
As for Handler, she was forced to resign from Mattel in 1975 and later indicted for falsifying business records, proving girls really can do anything, including mail fraud.
But Barbie lived on, skipping through a series of more than 200 different careers, and even weathering a divorce and remarriage. It’s estimated that over a billion Barbie dolls have been sold worldwide in over 150 countries.
For more Barbie lore, listen to the full episode above, and follow LA In A Minute on Instagram and Tiktok.
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