After 45 years, Barbie met her match with the “totally dangerous, totally ferocious and totally funkadelic” stylings of Bratz, as they appear here in the video, Starrin’ and Stylin.’

Although some lip service goes to the importance of academic performance, the Bratz exist in a consumerist fantasy of unlimited wardrobes, attentive young males and compulsive shopping sprees. In one of their recent books, the Bratz buds find themselves fortuitously trapped in a mall after closing time. The title sums up the horror of their situation — All-Night Mall Party. The gender norms for these dolls consist of being popular eye candy, dressed to kill, glittering celebrities of the high school scene. Their roles as shoppers, consumers and boy magnets could not be clearer.

In direct competition with their squeaky-clean rival, the Bratz not only toppled Barbie, they buried her. Before 2001, Barbie accounted for 90% of fashion doll sales; by 2003, it was down to 70% and dropping fast. During that pivotal year Barbie’s sales fell by 25%. An ill-advised marketing ploy in which Barbie and Ken “broke up” after a 43-year relationship backfired miserably, and a 2004 poll found Barbie ousted as top doll by the Bratz.

The battle spilled over into animation; indeed, how could it not? Barbie certainly had a luxurious lifestyle. What the lovely doll lacked, however, was animated exposure. The mavens at Mattel, Barbie’s manufacturer, changed all that in the mid 1990s. A series of TV commercials featuring a CGI Barbie and her buds brought the golden-haired girl to life, and another computer-generated version made a hilarious appearance in Toy Story 2. It did not take long for execs at Mattel to see the bright possibilities. Rather than expose Barbie to the rating wars and the rigors of network deadlines (especially when working with pixel-based technologies) Mattel decided to lavish time and care on their meal ticket. Little did Mattel know that Barbie was about to lose the animated battle as well.

Beginning in 2001, Barbie began appearing in direct-to-video movies, and she has done so on a yearly basis since then. The first OAV starred Barbie dancing her way through the Nutcracker and was an amazing success. It is important to examine Barbie’s forays into animation to date: Each successive video cast Barbie in either a ballet fantasy or a fairy tale setting. After the Nutcracker there appeared Rapunzel (2002), Swan Lake (2003), The Princess and the Pauper (2004) and this year’s entry, Fairytopia.

The appeal of Barbie’s computer-animated videos was limited to the younger set and did not greatly appeal to the coveted “tween” market. The major reason why? None of her videos featured shopping, hip tunes, modern fashions or realistic romances. Female tweens are into music, clothes and boys. Barbie, neither dangerous, ferocious, nor funkadelic, comes off as a purebred princess/ballerina displaying attitudes and behaviors that most feminists have laughed out of existence. Her videos are closer in spirit to Disney’s Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, and fewer female “tweens” romanticize in this manner today.

Many of those tweeners have long given up their tutus and they hip hop to Nelly rather than jeté to Stravinsky. In fact, they are stripping the store shelves of Bratz dolls. Barbie’s OAVs are of good quality, but the messages in them seem to be outmoded, uncool and, frankly, boring to millions of girls who have immersed themselves in the Bratz lifestyle. The dividing lines could not be clearer -- Barbie would never make a video clad in the Bratz fashions. The Bratz would have Swan Lake as a locale where they could go stylin’ in their winter togs while skatin’ around attracting Bratz Boyz.

MGA Entertainment launched its counterstrike in 2003 with its animated video, Bratz: Starrin’ and Stylin.’ It is a video for the age of reality TV and American Idol, one in which every living American has a birthright to 15 minutes of fame and everyone gets it simultaneously. The Bratz do not dream of being Rapunzel; they dream of being Paris Hilton, Alicia Keys, or, well, Angelina Jolie. In this video, the plotline (which has something or other to do with a prom, a gossipmonger and a school project) is trivial. The real point is fashion, shopping, style and the importance of looking slammin.’ A fashion mall game is included as an extra, but this is almost a redundancy; the video is a fashion mall game, one that helps train young females to be conspicuous consumers of clothing, makeup and accessories. How better to reel in the Boyz?

In late March 2005, MGA entered into partnership with Mike Young Productions to produce a CGI television series starring Yasmin, Jade, Cloe, Sasha, et. al. As Larry Sarnoff, senior creative director for Bratz Ent. put it, “(The Bratz) have come to life through this process and we are excited to show their fans around the world their stylin’ new looks and hip attitude.” Thus, TV animation will serve as a conduit for transmitting the Bratz’ values to a generation of tweens, just as Mattel is transmitting their version through Barbie’s animated video adventures. At present the Bratz seem to own the bling, but this does not mean that one message is inherently better or worse than the other one.

One can deride Barbie as an unreachable ideal and her animated videos as outdated and jejune. Some child psychologists also believe that the unquestioned canalization of fairy tale princess myths can lead to unrealistic adult idealizations. The results could range from disappointment at best or co-dependency and tolerance of abusive relationships at worst. Conversely, there is nothing wrong with being drop-dead gorgeous and aspiring to become a physician, veterinarian or senior executive. Or staying monogamous for more than 40 years. Or dancing with the grace of Fonteyn.