Charles's Pages about Doll Stuff - www.dollstuff.net

Beach Party™ Ken® and his two boxes

In the next-to-last paragraph of this entry, I mentioned that there might end up being a lot of box variations depending on how serious Mattel was about altering existing packaging to replace the current Barbie® logo with the "vintage" one.

Well, it turns out they're pretty serious about it: All of this year's dolls that have been produced with packaging using the old logo are being revised to use the vintage one.

That's a lot of dolls.

You won't be surprised to find out that packaging variations like this have already caused me to end up with - among other things - approximately four hundred Cali Girl™ dolls I can't bear to part with because they have different boxes. It's a good thing I'm (somewhat) past that phase now - I don't think there's ever been a change that's affected literally everything the way this does, and I don't have room for literally everything.

However, I needed another Beach Party™ Ken® anyway.

Original issue on top, revised issue on the bottom (notice the spaces for the non-existent flowers to the left and right of "Beach Party!" the top one

This is the logo on the front of the package. Every other instance of the Barbie logo on the box was changed, too, although a couple of medallions with the previous Barbie "B" were left alone.

As you can see, although the logo cutout was changed, the recessed area it fits into on the plastic blister wasn't. The logo on the new cutout was sized to fit into the same space. Interestingly, the blister already had spaces for the flowers molded into it, even though they didn't appear on the original version.... (Edit: The blisters were eventually changed to match the shape of the new cutouts.)

So far, the only Beach Party™ dolls I've seen with revised boxes are Ken and Teresa®. (Which is weird - I thought nobody bought Ken dolls? )

The Ballerinas changed, too

But, like I said, this is happening on everything - including... you guessed it... the 2008/2009 Basic Ballerina dolls I mentioned before as being the specific source of my anxiety. In the olden days, I would have gotten both of them... But, since I've finally learned my lesson (and also remembered my cell phone has a camera on it ), I just took a picture instead.

You obviously can't see it here, but even the logo on the brush handle was changed.

I found lots of other dolls and Barbie paraphernalia affected by this, including Cut 'n Style™ Rapunzel, Clean Up Pup™ Barbie (black and white versions), all of the basic mermaids, fairies, and princesses, Totally Stylin' Tattoos™ Barbie and Nikki®, the nameless Fashion Fever™ dolls, and so on and so on and so on. Suffice it to say, you could fill an entire room just with the box variations caused by this logo change.

But I'll leave that to next generation of Barbie collectors who will buy everything and then live to regret it.