If you're watching barbie @ your age I guess I should feel less anxious about my nearly 15 year old daughter still watching duck tales (and talking to me about it
![Ack! :ack: :ack:](/images/smilies/ack.gif)
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I'm 60, not 600, Narz.
And no, I'm not "watching" Barbie. I don't go to movies, so the only way I'll watch this one is if it turns up on TV or on Amazon Prime.
My grandmother talked me into going to a meeting of the local doll club once. This was sometime in the '80s; I don't remember just when. One of the members was a former alderman (back when Ethel Taylor was the first woman on City Council, they had no gender-neutral term for it; she died years ago and has both a bridge and a major street named after her).
Most of the women there were over 60, and part of what some of them did was to make clothes and mend old dolls for the Christmas Bureau. I helped out a bit with that one year, trying to make decent hairstyles for some of those Barbies (one of the most useful skills to do with hair and fashion is learning to braid). It's not like they sat around and played with dolls.
We were able to get a lot of good information to figure out what was and wasn't valuable in our own collections. I remember my grandmother being extremely happy when one Mother's Day came along and I presented her with the Sonny half of the Sonny & Cher set. She'd been looking for him for years, and I ran across one in decent shape at the swap meet/craft fair I was selling at (I'd set up my table, get someone to watch it, and spend 10 minutes taking a quick scan of the competition's tables; as soon as I spotted the Sonny doll I bought it). The person selling it had no idea what it was really worth, so I got a VERY good deal.
I've also got a slew of patterns for doll furniture. One sturdily-made Barbie chair makes a good bookend and a handy pincushion.
The first book series I seriously collected was
Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators. I got into those in Grade 5 when the school librarian read one of them to us. I later took the book out to read it for myself and gradually read more. I asked for some for my birthday, and that was the start of a lifetime fondness for this series. There used to be a Yahoo group for TTI fans, and one of the members wrote a fanfic novel, releasing one new chapter a week. Since I don't toss old emails that matter to me, I may be able to reconstruct that novel even though the group itself got zapped when Yahoo got rid of them. Most of the people in that group were over 40, as we had fond memories of collecting these books decades ago. I still have mine.
I still re-read them now and then, just like every few years I'll re-read my Archie comics. Your daughter might decide next week that she's not into Duck Tales anymore, or she might still enjoy them 20+ years from now. I don't see what difference it makes.
Her telling you about it means she's engaged in thinking about stories. That's good exercise for the imagination for people who are interested in writing.
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=> She was always a teen.
Must've been a prodigy, then, since she's also had careers that require multiple university degrees.
Not all Barbies are that kind. I have several variations of Skipper, and my first Barbie was actually Skipper's friend, Fluff (appalling name, but she was cute).
There are even younger members of Barbie's "family".
I’m missing something here. As Mattel is the maker of the toy, are they also not maker of its canon? I mean, I don’t think they’ve ever felt constrained by it since she’s been a cheerleader, veterinarian, astronaut, Canadian Mounted Police, NASCAR driver, Olympic athlete, and candidate for President of the United States.
Not to mention Starfleet. It had been many years since I'd bought any Barbies, but I couldn't pass up Star Trek Barbie & Ken when I saw a set on eBay. They're still mint in the box.
Candidate. You don’t need to be 35 to lose.
Do you have to be 35 to file nomination papers, or whatever they do in the U.S. to be a candidate?