She’s Barbie, and I’m Ginger
This Barbie and Ginger toy dates back to 1997. Ginger is a battery powered dog that barks and walks, and can be used to tow Barbie on her skateboard, complete with little Hotwheels-style wheels. The top frame is a still from a creepy TV commercial. It may have been 1997, but the girl on the left looks like she’s stuck in a 60’s children’s book. The screen cap looks craptacular, but that’s as good as it gets. Someone digitized TV commercial in pre-hd days. The same low-res version with awful motion compression artifacts is all over the web under assorted watermarks. Unfortunately nobody’s uploaded a decent version of it, not that you’d want to watch it endlessly. It does have a sort of hypnotic quality to it, in a Jonestown massacre sort of way.
– Thanks to Goofyfoot Rff for the tip.
Images of the Japanese version of Barbie and Ginger are from Ebay seller den268.
That’s some, err… quality late 90’s photoshop skilz on that action photo. Remember the smudge tool?
This version of the Barbie skateboard often appears by itself on Ebay. Now you know what it’s from. Earlier generations of Barbie skateboards have more traditional looking plastic wheels that don’t look like they came off a die cast car. This particular solo skateboard is from Ebay seller thorseufer.
This just in… Ginger also came with African American Barbie! She may, or may not have been named Nance. I’d like to prove better pictures but these are the only ones available at the time. I’d link to the sources but they all seem to be archived versions of foreign Ebay sales or web sites with IP addresses only, and sketchy links are not good. Notice this version of the prop dog biscuits features the actual Milk Bone brand compared to the made up brand that caucasian Barbie has. The images fro African American Barbie can be traced back to India, so maybe she’s not supposed to be Indian. It’s hard to tell if this version was released in North America.
At first I thought they were going to make African American Barbie’s dog pink, but lit looks like the right half of the box was exposed to sun or something else that changed the color of the print. Check out the even worse job someone did on the motion blur of Barbie. She’s starting to look like she’s under water.
