Writer of Pop Culture

1959: Barbie Comes Out to Play

On this day in 1959, for the first time ever, people got a glimpse of what would become one of the toy industry’s greatest sellers – Barbie. The first Barbie doll went on display at the American Toy Fair in New York City. She was the first toy doll in the U.S. to have adult features and was considered sort of an extension of a paper doll. Barbie has a creepy backstory though.

Barbie was inspired by a German doll named Lilli, which was based a comic strip character. Lilli was first marketed to men in tobacco shops as sort of a naughty gag gift. The name “Barbie” though was named after the daughter of Ruth Handler, the co-founder of Mattel. In 1961, Barbie would get a boyfriend Ken, which was named after Handler’s son.

Since 1959, more than a billion Barbie-themed dolls have been sold around the world. In 1987 Barbie began to appear in straight-to-video movies. She also appeared in Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story movies. After years of complaints from women that Barbie is an ideal that no woman can ever achieve, Mattel offered a new line of the dolls in different shapes and sizes in 2016.

In the summer of 2023, Margot Robbie starred as the title character and Ryan Gosling as her Ken in the movie Barbie, which was written and directed by Greta Gerwig. It too was a big hit. The movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards but only won one for Billie Eilish’s song, “What Was I Made For?” (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

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2014: We Saw Dead People

Jason Mott’s Novel, The Returned was the basis for the fantasy drama series, Resurrection. Taking place in the fictional town of Arcadia, Missouri, residents became uneasy when family members who had died years earlier begin popping up. Oftentimes, they weren’t even aware that they had been dead.

Jacob Langston (Landon Gimenez), an eight-year-old boy who had drowned in 1982 was the first one to show up. He was surprised to learn that his parents (Kurtwood Smith and Frances Fisher) were now old. Caleb Richards (Sam Hazeldine) was the next to arrive. Soon, many former dead people inhabit the town and those of the living become skeptical of the former residents.

On this same day, but in 2015, A&E debuted the series The Returned, which was an adaptation of the French series Les Revenants (which was based on a French film They Came Back). Again, various people, who had died many years earlier, suddenly appeared in the fictional small town of Caldwell, Washington. This series starred Agnes Bruckner, Sandrine Holt, Sophie Rowe, Mark Pellegrino, Jeremy Sisto and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

Although both shows sparked interest when they began, they were both cancelled fairly quickly (Resurrection after two seasons, The Returned after just one) with both ending on multiple cliffhangers frustrating the living people watching these shows.

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1982: The Time Traveling Party That No One Attended

According to the New York Times, it was on this day when a group of people gathered for “an epidemic of temporary lunacy” waiting for visitors to arrive from the future.

The nine planets were as close together than they had ever been in about 200 years and so a group Known as “Krononauts,” the group anxiously waited for “visitors from the futures” to arrive at a party set up just for them. While the group drank, danced and some even took off their clothes, it wasn’t enough to entice time travelers to show up.

Two days later, one of the group’s leaders, Kirby Malone, was asked what happened to his guests. ”We really don’t know. One possibility is that they came and didn’t want to be visible. Another that occurs to me is that there is no future, so there was no place for the people to come from. Another, of course, is that the people came and just decided they didn’t want to be here.” He didn’t blame them.

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