Friday, June 01, 2007

ToysRUs Giraffe: "Giraffe's are from Africa?!"

I heard about this documentary on TV this afternoon about kids and skin color preferences. It makes me sad, somehow moreso because the little kids the filmmaker interviewed are so gosh darn cute. Here's the entire 8 minute documentary, but



if you can't sit through it all, here's a
a quick synopsis
(with a KFC ad in the beginning, sorry)

It makes me want to get Baby C a whole bunch of dolls with different colored skin. That's probably not the desired response from the film, but hey maybe if there's more demand, toy makers will make more cute "ethnic" dolls that all kids will want to play with?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw this on Oprah a few days ago, my wife watches it so I watch it with her. Anyway it was sad how the little kids thought black dolls were bad because of their skin color.

I wondered though what the reaction would be to kids in this area asked the same question. One of the reasons I love the bay area is the diverse people, so you would think kids would have a different reaction to that question.

Unknown said...

I haven't watched this yet, but I will say that Scout has a rad little brown doll that aunt dianne got her. She loves brown.

Charlie said...

Yeah, the filmmaker made it in NYC, so that's a pretty diverse city.
I personally thought that the test was a litle biased because both of those dolls weren't very cute to begin with and the brown skinned doll wasn't well designed and wasn't very attractive. There are plenty of cute brown skin dolls out there and it would be interesting to see if that would make difference in the test.

Anonymous said...

I heard about that show and it's unfathomable to me. My mom just bought my niece a dollhouse. It came with a white family, but you can send away for an African-American, Asian, or Hispanic family for free.

I guess they all come with white families to begin with though. When things like this are pointed out, you wonder how far we've come after all.

Unknown said...

I only had three barbie dolls as a kid (I didn't ever want any more than that), one of which was vaguely Hispanic, or maybe Native American, but she was billed as "Southwest Barbie." She was my favorite.