A few of the Barbies and Kens (and Allan), appear immune to the brainwashing from the Kens. While its fair a few have a natural immunity, another explanation is that these are Barbies and Kens that have had similar problems that Stereotypical Barbie is having.
Growing Up Skipper and Camera Barbie's immunity could be explained by how the two were played, with Skipper bringing uncomfortable feelings to girls (or more accurately, the parents that didn't like the idea of a doll growing breasts) and Camera Barbie making little sense as a concept note The truth is the FBI was concerned about children filming things they shouldn't., reflected in Sasha's comment and Camera Barbie's remarks.
Sugar Daddy Ken and Magic Earring Ken meanwhile had to do deal with image issues. Notice Sugar Daddy Ken has to clarify that he is "Sugar's Daddy" as though he has had this talk before and is aware of the word play. Magic Earring Ken points out his name comes from his Magic Earring, and nothing else.
Additionally, Magic Earring Ken was unintentionally based on gay male culture, and was primarily bought by gay men. Since gay men are also often harmed by the patriarchy, it's possible that Magic Earring Ken was naturally much less inclined to support it than the other Kens.
Sugar Daddy Ken is also noticeably older than the other Kens. Similar to the note about Allan below, he might not be so easily sold on the childishly over-the-top ideas of masculinity Beach Ken espouses because he's more mature and comfortable with himself.
It's also notable that both of these Kens are some of the only ones shown who were sold with a gimmick other than "Barbie's boyfriend", meaning they're some of the only Kens to have an identity not centered around Barbie and as such might not have the same identity issues as the other Kens.
Teen Talk Barbie generated controversy for lamenting "Math class is tough!", in an attempt to make Barbie more relatable to children, which instead led to accusations of the doll enforcing a negative female stereotype.
As Weird Barbie introduces the other Discontinued Barbies (and Kens)note and Allan, there's another Discontinued Barbie standing to one side who does not get introduced by name. You'd have to recognize her outfit to know that this is Teen Talk Barbie. A doll who was sidelined due to accusations of being a negative female stereotype is now in a world where the majority of Barbies have been reduced to negative female stereotypes. You'd think she might have a working knowledge of the patriarchy, though whether she'd be for it or against it is hard to say.
Allan is a bit of a unique case. The movie states that there are no other Allans, but this gets contradicted later by a comment Allan makes. Given that other Allans exist in the real world, Allan's observation of the Kens' ineptitude of building a wall, and Allan's ability to beat up the Kens, Allan may actually have a better idea on how the real-world works compared to everyone else in Barbieland. Which isn't much, but something.
Another explanation can be that Ken is turning Barbie Land into "Kendom". And while the Kens may agree with each other because they are all Ken, Allan is not Ken. So the things that the Kens are changing do not appeal to Allan. He certainly doesn't like the leather couches!
A final explanation is connected to Midge. In early Barbie promotional material and well into the 90s, Allan and Midge are married. In other words, the Kens are acting like Bachelors. Allan is acting like an adult.
Similar to Magic Earring Ken, Allan has typically been queer coded by those in the fandom. He's been marketed as 'Ken's Buddy' who can fit Ken's clothes. He also shows zero interest in any of the female dolls, including Midge. The patriarchy probably doesn't suit him for a lot of the same reasons it doesn't work for Magic Earring Ken.
Beach Ken initially believes that horses are masculine animals that embody the ideal of patriarchy, even though they're actually matriarchal (with him later admitting that patriarchy lost its appeal for him after he learned it wasn't all about horses). A herd of wild horses is led by their oldest mare (with said mare's mate acting as her second-in-command at best), who is the one to direct the herd's movements, guide it to food and water sources, and otherwise control its direction and routine. Stallions, on the other hand, have the role of breeding with the mares and defending the herd by fighting predators and rival stallions. This is actually in line with what the Kens do in Barbieland; they just try to date their respective Barbie, and fight each other in the end when the Barbies manage to turn the Kens against each other.
"Kendom" is a play on the word "kingdom", but separate the two words and they become "Ken" and "Dom" which perfectly describes the Kens using patriarchy to dominate the Barbies.
In the CEO's ramblings, he argues he can't be discriminatory to anyone because he has Jewish friends. Ruth Handler herself was a Jewish woman, and if we follow the metaphor of Barbie as Ruth's "child", he might think that is a reassuring thing to say to Barbie. Of course, Barbie herself doesn't follow the absurd logic, and it just makes Aaron, the one Jewish human in the room, uncomfortable.
Also, the CEO shooting down Gloria's idea of an 'Ordinary Barbie' doll, only to backpedal when his accountant confirms it would make a lot of money, seems a bit contradictory to how he's depicted as notOnly in It for the Money, but that might just be due to his fears of it potentially being a Franchise Killer for Barbie. Especially considering how it almost got replaced by a Ken line in the first place, he wouldn't quite want to risk the brand just yet.
It could also be seen as not Greed, but "keeping score." If something is wanted by a consumer base, they will buy it, and it will make money. "Ordinary Barbie" being confirmed as a definite moneymaker means there's a market for her, that there are a lot of people who would resonate with that doll and what she represents. Which means fulfilling the dreams of and inspiring little girls everywhere, which is what the CEO said he really wanted. That a lot of that money would find its way into the board member's salaries is just a bonus.
The narrator saying that one day the Kens will have the same power in Barbieland that women have in the Real World is a great bit of satire. For all that great strides have been made in womens' rights... the Real World is very much not equal and progress is constantly complicated by reactionaries, both men and women, trying to undo what work has been made, claiming that we've come far enough, and generally being hostile towards anything with a message of female empowerment. An audience member ignorant of these struggles might take the narrator's statement as purely positive. The more aware the audience is, or the more they've had to struggle with it themselves, the more blistering it is. And, coming back around to optimism, it suggests true equality is possible; if the real world ever manages, there's hope for the Kens as well.
When Weird Barbie is offered a government position as an apology for being a Barbieland outcast for so long, she immediately replies "Sanitation!". While this is a goofy thing to say in keeping with the character, we have also seen throughout the film that Barbieland has no liquids of any kind. Of Any Kind. This would presumably make sanitation an extremely cushy gig.
The first thing we see Barbie do after she becomes a human for good is go to a gynaecologist. This actually makes a lot of sense- Barbie as a doll didn't have a vagina, but knew what it is. Now that she's human (and presumably has a fully-functioning reproductive system), it does stand to reason that she'd want to see an authority on the subject so she can find out everything she knows about this new part of her anatomy and what to expect from having one. Her being nervous about it also makes sense, since she's going to have to admit to this person that she knows virtually nothing about a subject that (had she grown up as human) she (at least theoretically) should know a lot about.
It goes unacknowledged in the film, but Ken's actually already demonstrated he can have an identity outside of Barbie — his obsession with horses has nothing to do with his assigned role as "beach" Ken.
There's no way Gloria's the first person to ever involve more mature themes like aging or anxiety in her play sessions with Barbie, so why is she the only one to cause problems in Barbieland? Most likely, it’s because she works for Mattel, and thus has more influence over Barbieland than the average person.
In addition, there's also Barbie's line while riding to Mattel with some executives, which gains another meaning in light of the reveal:
Barbie: Mattel! Of course it was you that brought me here.
She probably also was the reason why there was a "Weird Barbie" in the film, because she said she had a Weird Barbie.
The other Barbies state that Weird Barbie was once "the most beautiful Barbie of all" before someone played with her too hard. Looking closely at the flashback scene, we see that she started life as the wildly popular Totally Hair Barbie, the best-selling Barbie variant in Mattel's history.
At the beginning of the movie, Stereotypical Ken is struggling to get Stereotypical Barbie's attention, and trying to set it up so he can "stay over" at her Dream House as "boyfriend/girlfriend." Yet Barbie doesn't seem to understand why, and to his frustration simply treats him as another Ken. Halfway through the movie when it turns out this Barbie is emotionally tied to Gloria, Gloria reveals that she never had a Ken doll to play with: Meaning she grew up without learning the relationship dynamics expected between Kens and Barbies.
Also, when Barbie asks why Ken would want to stay over, and what they would do, he sheepishly admits that he doesn't know. Of course, there's one very obvious thing they might do. . . but neither Barbie nor Ken have genitals (though they are aware of them). So even if Barbie did let Ken sleep over, they wouldn't be able to "take their relationship to the next level" because, for them, there is no "next level." The relationships between Barbies and Kens is, ultimately, shallow and surface-level, with no foundation of compatibility to build on (the Kens are "with" their Barbies just because Ken A goes with Barbie A), and nothing to build towards. A kind of sneaky reinforcement of one of the main themes: Barbieland is "perfect" but only on the most superficial level; the real world has seriously deep flaws, but it's real, and has depth and complexity.
The reason why the Mattel CEO, his executives and Aaron take so long to get to Barbieland is probably because the CEO was bringing a whole boardroom amount of people there, in contrast to the maximum of three that we otherwise see during the travel montages.
The Mattel execs run aimlessly after Barbie and are almost thwarted by a turnstile they could have easily stepped over, while the CEO is hilariously awkward in every interaction with others. The joke is that the execs never leave the boardroom and are so out-of-touch with the rest of the world that they have no idea how to perform even basic tasks.
Several people both in the film and out question how Ken could overturn the entirety of Barbie society in the time it took Barbie, Gloria, and Sasha to travel from the Real World to Barbieland (Barbie says he did it in a day, though it seems at most a few hours). But this is Play Time, baby. Just as a little kid wouldn't have the patience for Ken to recover from his beach injuries (leaving Dr. Barbie to announce that he was cured in the time it took to read his chart), they wouldn't have the patience (or indeed, the necessary real-world understanding) to play out all the steps it would take to change the world from a feminist utopia to a frat-bro's paradise. Any contrivances just sort of happen in order to facilitate whatever scene a child feels like enacting, much as a child might announce that all their Kens are cowboys today without bothering to explain how they all got horses or why they all work at the same ranch.
Barbie's ending of leaving Barbieland to live in the real world parallels the Abrahamic creation myth of the Fall of Adam and Eve. In the film, Barbieland is a Garden of Eden where Barbie is immortal and experiences no hardships but is also held in emotional and sexual stasis. While the Fall is often seen as a damning event, there are faiths that instead see it as a liberating one that allowed Adam and Eve to experience the ups and downs of mortality and experience sexuality (bearing children), something they could not do in the Garden of Eden. Barbie's choice to enter mortality in the real world thus mirrors the fate of Eve, who was tempted by the Devil to be cast out of the Garden, yet here she does so entirely independently.
Like Eve, Barbie gained knowledge of "good and evil," seeing the incredible beauty of the real world, but also its flaws and hardships. Early in the film, before she has knowledge, she tries to choose to just stay as she is, only for Weird Barbie to inform her the choice was an illusion and she had to go. At the end, with her knew knowledge, she can choose, and chooses the joy and hardship of reality over the static contentment of Barbieland.
Initially, Weird Barbie offers Stereotypical Barbie the difference between remaining ignorant in Barbieland and learning what's going on by going to the real world using a pale pink Barbie heel and a flat, brown Birkenstock shoe respectively. At the end of the movie (after Barbie has left to become part of the real world), she's shown wearing pale pink Birkenstocks—showing she has blended her knowledge and past as a Barbie with her real-world-knowledge and future as a real woman.
During a Heroic BSoD, Stereotypical Barbie chooses to lie on the ground until one of the more leader-oriented Barbies helps her. Not long after this, one does come to help save her, just not in the way she expected: Weird Barbie, who then reveals to be leading a resistance against the Kens.
The movie goes out of its way to stress that there's only one Allan, though Allan later states that other Allans have escaped undetected to the Real World, indicating the existence of other Allens. The reason for this contradiction might be that there are no variants of Allan:note An Allan variant was released in 2002, decades after the original was discontinued, as a counterpart to Pregnant Midge, but the movie does not include this Allan. unlike the Kens, there was never any Beach Allan or Tourist Allan. Every Allan is just Allan. (This sort of implies that multiple identical Allans exist or have existed in Barbieland. Like Allan says, he's confused about it, too.)
When Gloria goes on her rant about the difficulties of being a woman, the camera pans over to Sasha twice in two key moments: when she mentions the duality of a loving mother vs stop talking about your kids and when she says "Don't forget the system is rigged." Pay attention to Sasha's reactions to both moments:
Sasha looks sad during the former moment because she realizes she is a part of the system that has led her own mother to think like that and therefore keep the patriarchy intact; pessimistic, hating feminine things, calling Barbie (the one thing that made her mom happy besides her and her father/Gloria's husband) a fascist. And she's probably realizing that Gloria must've been shamed by not just her, but total strangers because they were annoyed by the idea of a mother loving her child as much as Gloria loves Sasha.
Her second look, she's much happier because she realizes she's not the only one angry at the patriarchy for constantly discrediting women and their femininity. Not only did Gloria break Barbie free from her BSOD with her speech, she also broke her daughter free from her borderline misogynistic way of thinking about women and Sasha gained a newfound respect for her mom.
Why does Barbie go to a gynecologist after she becomes a human being? Because despite her long and varied career, this is the one thing she's never done (or needed to do before), due to her lacking the requisite organs.
The 2001: A Space Odyssey parody that opens the film. 2001 is a sci-fi classic, widely regarded, but it's also considered a bit slow, pretentious, and "artsy." Even some die-hard sci-fi fans find it boring or incomprehensible. Parodying that film's opening scene, especially so well, is a pretty blatant telegraph to the audience that Barbie is going to be a smart movie, with lots of depth and complexity. Anyone on the fence about how good a Barbie movie could be is likely to be won over by that scene, the filmmakers demonstrating they're clever enough to open the film this way, and trusting their audience to be clever enough to get the joke. It can also be considered a sly wink to a portion of the audience: "Smart people, this movie is for you, too."
The Planet of Steves aspect of Barbieland isn't just because of Rule of Funny. Barbie and Ken may have other friends and relatives, there are times they're retired, or Demoted to Extra, but there are always be Barbies and Kens, and Mattel will often use the name "Barbie" and "Ken" for dolls regardless of if they look like the classic white, blond Barbie or Ken, such as the Fashionistas line.
There's an extra layer of genius in making Sasha's Barbie-hating Girl Posse a reference to Bratz if you know how the rivalry between the two franchises ultimately went down. When it first came out, Bratz initially got some praise saying it was superior to Barbie, since it had more racial variation in its dolls and its stylized designs meant it couldn't be accused of promoting an unhealthy body image; however, (one) reason it ultimately floundered was because the Bratz characters had a far shallower pool of interests (largely centered around makeup and fashion) than the multi-talented Barbie. Similarly, Sasha and her friends all claim they're superior to Stereotypical Barbie and put her down, but quickly out themselves as having incredibly shallow views on social issues in the process; meanwhile, even before her Character Development, Barbie is able to point out that they're using the term "fascist" wrong, showcasing her depth compared to them.
Adding onto this, two of the main antagonists of the Bratz line were the Tweevils, a pair of Alpha Bitch twins who happened to have blonde hair and an obsession with the color pink, even wearing outfits that were close to Barbie pink in tone. So depicting the Bratz girls as a mean girl posse isn't just a simple jab at the competition — it's essentially Laser-Guided Karma for how the Bratz treated Barbie!
The call from the FBI to Mattel on the appearance of Barbie and Ken mentions that Skipper went to the Real World, got a babysitting job, and tried to teach babies how to surf. This is mentioned as a disastrous occurrence, and there are multiple possible ways it could have gone wrong:
Babies have not developed the motor skills necessary to stand or swim, nor do they have the mental capacity to judge wave action.
The beach in Barbieland is shown to have waves fixed in place, as if in a playset. Skipper would presumably have no context for real world wave action, and whatever lessons she had would be useless in the Real World.
Given that Real World beaches have hazards like rip currents, which can kill even the strongest swimmers, which Barbieland does not have, it's very likely that Skipper's attempt to teach babies how to surf had fatal consequences or was at the very least a close call.
When Sasha insults Barbie and calls her a "fascist", Barbie is visibly hurt and she runs away crying. The next scene reveals that Barbie knows the meaning of fascist ("I don't control the railways or the flow of commerce!"). Keep in mind that she hasn't stayed in the real world for too long. So how does she know what a fascist is? Is there a Fascist Barbie in Barbieland?!
Given how a lot of Barbie's "not-Barbieness" comes from Gloria's dark designs of her leaking over; it's entirely possible she drew one or "Worried About Fascist Takeover" Barbie, and that's where it comes from. Still leads to Fridge Horror if Gloria was on the verge of more extreme beliefs due to her alienation from her daughter's rather harsh views of the world.
In spite of their sheltered existences, the Barbies aren't entirely ignorant of Real World concepts: in the opening sequence, we see a Barbie speak intelligently about corporate plutocracy, a concept that also shouldn't exist in Barbieland. It's possible Barbie knows the definition of fascism even though she's never experienced it. After all, she knew what a vagina was even though those don't exist in Barbieland either.
shows them as dolls escaping a store!