Growing Up Skipper

Earlier this week in one of our team meetings, we got a little distracted talking about toys we had as kids and as you would expect in a room of five women, the conversation eventually drifted around to Barbie. Most of us had been into Mattel's star creation in some way, and we compared notes on our experiences. Jess noted that she chopped off Barbie's hair and eventually just popped her head off "to see how she was put together". Albee also remembered "Darci", Kenner's answer to Mattel's blonde heroine.

I always really wanted my Barbie to have boyfriend, but I never did acquire a Ken doll, so she was destined to remain an independent woman, cruising around in her pink Corvette and taking the occasional road trip with the girls in the orange RV with the pop-out side canopy. One year Barbie got a dog for Christmas (an Afghan with long flowing hair just like his mistress) and another year, she got a horse. Her assigned profession evolved over time from a lawyer to an actress to a professional barrel racer (the latter being short-lived and only spurred by the arrival of the horse and a pretty hot wardrobe of rodeo wear).

In an attempt to introduce Mr. Right into the scene, my next door neighbour would occasionally bring over his GI Joe's, but that never really went very well. Joe didn't have much of a wardrobe and Barbie got bored pretty quickly with his army fatigues. He also refused to ride in the Corvette (lest he look like a sissy when the other Joe's spotted him cruising down the carpeted hallway in a pink convertible), so he and Barbie didn't go out that much. He never brought his own wheels with him either and Barbie started to wonder if he was really just a wee bit of a dead beat. Ultimately Barbie and Joe drifted completely apart and went their separate ways. (We think he continued to pursue an armed forces career for quite some time.)

As we were reminiscing about Barbie and the ever present controversy that surrounds her and her Jessica Rabbit bodily proportions, a couple of us remembered also having a Skipper doll who was meant to be Barbie's younger, prepubescent sister. Skipper was about an inch and a half shorter than Barbie and her feet were molded so that she could only wear flat shoes and boots (compared to Barbie whose permanently arched feet just invited the presence of sexy stilettos.)

(As an aside, it just occurred to me that Barbie is probably the key reason I have always walked on my tip toes when I don't have shoes on... )

But back to Skipper.... I piped up and said "Oh yeah, and remember how you could turn her arm in its socket and she would grow about an inch in height and she would suddenly "develop" in the chest area?"

The rest of the room looked at me blankly and then burst out laughing: "What kind of dolls did you HAVE in Canada??"

Skipper was first introduced in the mid-60's to address the "sex symbol" controversy that surrounded Barbie. There were a number of Skipper concepts introduced to market, including: Bendable Leg Skipper, Twist & Turn Skipper, Sunset Malibu Skipper and even Japanese Skipper. (Barbie's family must have adopted Japanese Skipper.)

Then in 1975, Mattel introduced "Growing Up Skipper" and THIS was the very Skipper that made her way into my toy box and into the makeshift Barbie condo that I created on my Dad's pool table. The packaging said "Make her grow from a young girl to a teenager in seconds!" and sure enough, when you rotated one of her arms, she did exactly that.

I don't remember having any negative or confused reactions to Skipper's changeable body proportions (I was more disappointed that she didn't fit into Barbie's clothes and that she couldn't wear high heels), but Mattel sure took a beating in the press for introducing a doll that visibly went through puberty just with the twist of an arm. But honestly, is that really any worse than the dolls you can feed and they will "make doody" in their dolly daipers?