Attention, Mad Men fans: Mattel has heard your prayers for $75 Barbie and Ken dolls in the style of your favorite characters from the show, and they have decided to answer them. Mad Men characters Joan Holloway, Roger Sterling, Betty Draper, and (of course) Don Draper are getting the Barbiefication treatment, although the stick-thin Joan doll certainly belies New York Magazine‘s recent cover story on Christina Hendricks [who plays Joan on Mad Men] and the rebirth of voluptuousness.
The New York Times reports:
The dolls are part of a premium-price collectors’ series for adults that Mattel calls the Barbie Fashion Model Collection. Although there have been Barbies and Kens based on other TV series, among them “I Love Lucy” and “The X-Files,” the dolls will be the first licensed line for that collection, Mattel says, with a suggested retail price of $74.95 each.
…
That [the Roger and Joan] dolls represent a relationship outside wedlock, and Don Draper’s propensity for adultery, may be firsts for the Barbie world since the brand’s introduction five decades ago. But for the sake of the Barbie image, her immersion in the “Mad Men” era will go only so far: The dolls come with period accessories like hats, overcoats, pearls and padded undergarments, but no cigarettes, ashtrays, martini glasses or cocktail shakers.
The excellent Footnotes of Mad Men (foot)notes that in 1959, Mattel began producing “Career Girl” Barbie dolls.
(Non-)spoiler alert: Mad Men fans may recall that Betty Draper (icily, because she’s Nordic) bought her daughter Sally a Barbie doll of her own in Season 3, which Sally proceeded to throw out the window, so it’s awful magnanimous of Mattel to overlook this brutal rejection of their brand.
The dolls will be available for purchase on amctv.com and barbiecollector.com.
