Ask for It by Name!

Call her the preternaturally perky perennial preteen product with a past.

Don’t tell the millions of Barbie devotees that have made Mattel’s doll a billion-selling global sensation since 1959, but Barbie’s original name wasn’t Barbie — it was the far more staid “Barbara.” Ruth Handler, who founded Mattel in 1945 with her husband and another investor, named the doll after her own daughter.

Handler’s real inspiration was, however, the realization that young girls didn’t really want to play with baby dolls. They wanted grown-up figures upon which they could project their dreams of love and romance. Handler developed and marketed the first adult woman doll and revolutionized the toy industry. Today three Barbie dolls are sold every second somewhere in the world.

Of course, Barbie isn’t exactly a normal adult woman, and her unlikely physical proportions reflect a lineage Mattel would rather forget. Handler modeled the doll on a German gag gift for men, a toy derived from a risqué comic strip character named Lilli, a practitioner of the World’s Oldest Profession. Barbie is, to put it bluntly, a recycled German hooker.

No wonder her boyfriend Ken (created in 1961 and named after Handler’s son) always looked a bit anxious. Sadly (at least for Ken), Mattel announced just before Valentine’s Day 2004 that Barbie and Ken were breaking up after 43 years of going steady. Russell Arons, vice president of marketing at Mattel, explained that the pair “feel it’s time to spend some quality time apart,” and denied rumors that the split was caused by the arrival of a new male doll, Blaine, described as “an Australian boogie boarder.”