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Beach Party™ Barbie®

(Text that's this color was added on 1 February 2009.)

Guess what? I was surprised to find out about some of the new Barbie® dolls coming out for 2009.

The new beach dolls are called Beach Party™. They apparently come packaged in surfboard-shaped plastic blister packaging, which means yet another set of dolls where you can't open the box to fix messed up hair and things like that. On the plus side, Barbie has a center part!! (Finding cheap dolls with the 2006 head that have center parts is not easy.) Unfortunately, the female Beach Party dolls have flat feet again.

Beach Party™ Ken®

Some people will be mad because Beach Party Ken® and Steven® have molded hair. They both have the same heads as this year's Groom dolls - Steven has the re-revised 1990 Jamal™ head with new molded hair and Ken has the head with longish parted hair, except it's painted blond instead of brown. (This is the thing I'm very excited about, because I love this head. I don't care if anything about any of the other dolls changes as long as the production Beach Party Ken doll has this head. I won't even say anything about the colors of his outfit. ) (Edit: He was produced with this head, and he looks even better than the catalog picture. As per our agreement, I'll refrain from saying anything about his outfit, even though it's purple and baby-blue and he comes with magenta sunglasses instead blue ones like the catalog picture. )

The black version of the 2009
Barbie® Princess doll

Unfortunately, the sculpted-on clothing thing is going crazy this year. The new sets of basic ballerina, fairy, and princess dolls all have sculpted-on clothing with fabric accents (like the Fairytopia dolls). The ballerinas also appear to have solid legs with "en pointe" feet and sculpted-on toe shoes.

Ballerina Barbie® (this is also
the black version)

This is very disappointing to me. It's become almost impossible to find inexpensive Barbie dolls with "normal" bodies since the beach dolls have flat feet and the basic ballerinas have had colored legs, and now it appears that there won't be any lower-priced dolls with un-adorned 1999 "belly button" bodies with regular high-heel feet in the US next year. Hopefully there will be foreign market basic dolls like Barbie Glam with "vanilla" bodies that will be available in the US at some point. (My stash of bodies is running out and piles of unusable [for me] body parts are piling up. Plus, my hopes of finally getting 1999 bodies that match the new brown skintone on the "Nikki®" dolls is gone.) This also signals a move even farther away from the idea of buying Barbie dolls and separate outfits to dress them in.

Oh - in addition to the sculpted clothes, all of these dolls also have the 2006 Barbie head. (Even the black versions.) (Edit: The black fairy was produced with Barbie's head, but the black Ballerina and Princess dolls have the Asha® head. I'm going to write more about them later.)

Thumbelina's friend Janessa™

The next fairy-themed Barbie movie is Thumbelina. 2008's Mariposa™ dolls had a new body that was smaller than "normal" Barbie dolls, but the Thumbelina dolls take it a step farther; they're completely unlike Barbie, with large heads and tiny bodies with very long legs. The trailer gives the impression that Barbie only appears in a framing device and doesn't play a character in the actual story. (Some of the other movies have used the "Barbie tells a story" setup, but this would be the first one where she doesn't "play" one of the characters.)

Do you think these dolls were inspired by Japanese "pose dolls"?

There are three new dancing-themed "action" dolls. Twinkle Toes™ Barbie has a button on her side that makes her "dance". She may be electronic. There's also Pirouette Princess™ Barbie, another ballerina which is electronic and is able to dance, but I'm not sure how she works. Both of these dolls have molded-on clothing. Lastly, there's a radio-controlled ice skating doll. She's a larger size like the electronic dancing Genevieve™ Barbie doll from the 12 Dancing Princesses™ and apparently combines that doll's ability to move on her own with a radio-controlled motion base and a programming function.

There's also a Cut and Style™ Rapunzel Barbie doll with an interesting "hair-cutting" feature involving chainable hair extensions that can be hooked together (so the doll's hair is never actually "cut"). And the new Happy Birthday Barbie dolls revert to the tried-and-true "princess" styling with child-size tiaras (different from this year's Fashion Fever®-esque birthday dolls aimed at older children that came with Smackers® lip gloss).

These dolls should start showing up at stores in the next few months. Remember, things can always change before they're released so don't get your hopes up (or down) too much yet. (Just please let Beach Party Ken be like the picture. )

(I'm going to be writing about some of these dolls in future posts.)