En garde, Princess!

For the first time ever, Barbie may have a challenger who can kick her anorexic butt. At least that's what her unauthorized biographer thinks.

By M.G. Lord

Oct 27, 2000 | If I were Barbie, the 11-and-a-half-inch princess who has dominated the doll world since 1959, I would keep an eye on the newly formed SWAT team of action figures known as Get Real Girls. I wouldn't raise the pink drawbridge or dump the radio-controlled alligators into the moat. Not just yet, anyway. But I would watch my bony little back.

I do not say this lightly. As the author of "Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll," I know that the princess has systematically annihilated each and every one of her competitors, beginning in 1963, when Marx Toys introduced a shabby wannabe, Miss Seventeen, with whom Barbie swiftly wiped the nursery floor. There were legal issues involved, but they did not ultimately matter. Miss Seventeen was a wreck -- jaundiced skin, shoddily implanted hair, a veritable Miss Teen Runaway -- and kids simply didn't want her. Consequently, when I was asked to evaluate these new pretenders to Barbie's throne, I knew I had to move fast. Barbie's challengers do not tend to last long.

When I saw the Get Real Girls, however, I was thrown off guard. These dolls are far from slipshod wannabes. And the time seems right for a toy-world upset. Last year, something happened at Mattel that had once seemed impossible: Jill Barad, the company's Barbie-identified, pink-suit-wearing (a bubble-gum shade) juggernaut of a CEO, resigned -- after making such a mess of the company that its stock lost 70 percent of its value. If Barad, who built the Barbie line from about $250 million (when she arrived as a low-level manager in the 1980s) to $1.7 billion last year, could suffer a reversal of fortune, why not Barbie herself? This warranted a closer look: at Barbie and Barad, and the new, punchy young upstarts, the Get Real Girls and their creator, Julz Chavez.

The Get Real team has six members: Gabi, a soccer player, Corey, a surfer, Skylar, a snowboarder, Nakia, a basketball player, Claire, a scuba diver, and Nini, a mountaineer. You won't find these girls in toeshoes or figure skates. They are a tough, muscular lot, whose swelling biceps and chiseled abdominals are as much inspired by Brandi Chastain, the U.S. soccer player best known for ripping off her shirt after last year's World Cup victory, as by the original pumped-up action figure, GI Joe. (In fact, if you do rip the shirt off a Get Real Girl, you will find a trim little sports bra covering up a modest package in place of Barbie's bare, bullet-shaped bosoms.)

Chavez is not your archetypal doll designer. A cousin to César Chavez, the legendary 1960s labor leader, she worked in toy development for 15 years, several of which were spent behind the fuchsia ramparts of Barbie's own manufacturer, Mattel. Chavez's dolls, however, do not bear a trace of fuschia. Their boxes are blue and orange.

"Our stealth name for the project, while we were working on it, was, 'No Pink,'" Chavez told me over coffee recently. But the defiant moniker didn't make it to market. "If you call a concept 'No Pink,' Mattel will come after you big time," she explained.

Mattel will usually come after you anyway. In the fall of 1985, for example, the Barbie team learned from undercover sources that Hasbro was planning to release Jem, a new rock star fashion doll, the following February. "Within minutes," a former Mattel executive told me, "we had a war council." Within an hour, they had a plan: Pull together a rock group for Barbie. Although Barbie and the Rockers hurt Jem's sales, the Hasbro doll destructed on her own. At 12 inches tall, she looked like a surly drag queen in Barbie's clothes. "If you're going to go up against General Motors," a dealer in collector merchandise explained, "you'd better be the same size."

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