March 02, 2006
Tracking snowclones is hard. Let's go shopping!
Posted by Benjamin Zimmer at March 2, 2006 03:42 PM
Posted from: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002892.html
...around Christmastime of 1993 came word of a shadowy organization known as the Barbie Liberation Organization, dedicated to switching computer chips between Teen Talk Barbie and her gender-stereotype opposite, Talking Duke G.I. Joe. (More about the BLO here, though the page inaccurately dates its founding to 1989.) The New York Times detailed the BLO's activities in a Dec. 31, 1993 article:
Your son tears the wrapping paper off his fierce new "Talking Duke" G. I. Joe doll and eagerly presses the talk button. Out comes a painfully chirpy voice that sounds astonishingly like Barbie's saying, "Let's go shopping!"
Does your son:
A) Furiously vaporize the doll with his own phaser rifle?
B) Go shopping with Joe?
C) Say: "Mom, I suspect we're the lucky victims of an elaborate nationwide publicity stunt designed to ridicule sexual stereotyping in children's toys. This barbaric little action figure you gave me may turn out to be a valuable collector's item."
If the answer is C, your son may be a collector's item himself, for he has correctly divined the latest socially conscious news media prank to hit the nation's toy stores.
For the last several months, a group of performance artists based in the East Village of Manhattan has been buying Talking Dukes and "Teen Talk" Barbies, which cost $40 to $50 each, painstakingly swapping their voice boxes and then, with the aid of cohorts, replacing dolls on the shelves of toy stores in at least two states.
The group, which asserts it has surgically altered 300 dolls, says its aim is to startle the public into thinking about the Stone Age-world view that the dolls reflect.
The result is a mutant colony of Barbies-on-steroids who roar things like "Attack!" "Vengeance is mine!" and "Eat lead, Cobra!" The emasculated G. I. Joe's, meanwhile, twitter, "Will we ever have enough clothes?" and "Let's plan our dream wedding!"
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