The Mysterious Disappearance of Sugar Daddy Ken
How Far Down Does the Rabbit Hole Go
*This article contains minor spoilers for the new film, Barbie.
It happened, I saw the new Barbie movie. As any other man in a committed relationship will agree, you pick your battles carefully, and Oppenheimer simply wasn’t worth fighting for. Off to Barbieland, I went.
I’ve successfully avoided most of the noise concerning the Barbie movie, but I’ve seen the headlines and get the gist of it. I don’t want to touch all that hullabaloo with a ten-foot pole. Overall, I thought it was a relatively fun movie (Ryan Gosling played an excellent male blonde bimbo), but something I discovered during my viewing jolted me.
Sugar Daddy Ken!?
This actually existed!? Who the hell did the executives at Mattel think was going to play with that?
After a moment of shock, I chalked it up to lazy, out-of-touch marketing directors doing what they did in the 80s and 90s. When I arrived home later, way too full of popcorn and orange Fanta, it was revealed to me that Sugar Daddy Ken was not the brainchild of some clueless 20th-century boomer. Sugar Daddy Ken was released in 2009.
As part of the 50th anniversary of Barbie, Mattel released a series of collectors’ editions. One…
