There is now a Queen Elizabeth II Barbie doll, and I don’t know how to feel about anything anymore.
In a video posted by Reuters on Thursday, you can see the doll — produced to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee year — waving serenely out of the window of a full sized Range Rover as a full-sized human drives it away from Buckingham Palace.
Needless to say, this is quite disturbing. I kept expecting the doll to swivel its head 180 degrees, fly at the driver’s throat and saw through his carotid artery with her tiny tiara.
Now that I think about it, I’m also not sure she was waving. It’s possible she was making a belligerent punching or chopping gesture, like that He-Man or BA Baracus doll you played with once in 1986 when you visited the rich kid in your class who had both Castle Grayskull and the A-Team van.
Those dolls had a little tab in their back that you’d wiggle to make the arm do its chopping or punching or high-fiving, and it’s possible the Barbie Queen has a similar tab, perhaps offering three, increasingly vicious modes of attack, such as Corgi Discipline, Punching The Valet When He Mentions Meghan, and What’s That Chinless Cockwomble Andrew Gone And Done Now.
Then again, perhaps Queen Barbie simply waves, and that’s OK too: Elizabeth’s ancestors didn’t spend their lives butchering the peasantry so she would have to get her hands dirty karate-chopping her enemies.
I also happen to think that the Queen has worked fairly hard for all her loot. I have often felt like faking a stroke after 10 minutes trapped with dull strangers. She has done those 10 minutes 20 times a day for 70 years.
No doubt Britain’s republicans will grumble. Some progressives might also wonder why, having tried to rebrand Barbie by producing dolls celebrating women in science and public service, toymaker Mattel has now opted to immortalise perhaps the world’s most famous embodiment of unearned privilege and gigantic, wholly unsustainable wealth.
While I am frightened by the doll, as I’ve explained above, I’m not offended by it. It’s nice to see Barbie fighting ageism by championing very old people, in this case by gluing silver hair onto a face that’s somewhere between 18 and 24.
I also happen to think that the Queen has worked fairly hard for all her loot. I have often felt like faking a stroke after 10 minutes trapped with dull strangers. She has done those 10 minutes 20 times a day for 70 years.
The Queen Barbie, however, does disappoint me in one way, namely, that it’s a one-off. I can’t help feeling that this is a wasted opportunity, depriving us of what would surely have been a gloriously macabre House of Windsor Barbie range.
Consider, for example, the possibilities of a White Mischief set, complete with crowds of Jamaican dolls for Wills and Kate to touch through chicken wire fences or tower over on top of toy Land Rovers.
Forget Ken and Barbie: it’s time to thrill to the Fifty Shades-eques chemistry of Charles and Camilla, lying face down, fully clothed, side by side in wild service of the sexual dark arts.
Just imagine the hours of fun with in the Schrödinger’s TV Studio set, where Harry and Meghan gaze earnestly at banks of cameras and tell hundreds of millions of people, over and over again, that all they want is privacy.
And let’s not forget the Mummy, Make It Go Away set, featuring a Prince Andrew doll carrying a carpetbag full of his mother’s money to give to a doll he claims he never met, to settle a court case over a crime he claims never happened.
Like I say, it probably won’t happen. But last week we lived in a universe in which Queen Elizabeth and Barbie could never, ever meet, let alone be the same person, and now here we are. You’ve been warned ...
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