The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 13

AGENDA 13 THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1996 Move over, Ken, it's and BARBI HOW VJ 1 To infinity and beyond Buzz far left, boasts intergalac-tic excitement while super-Barbie combines a career with child care and glamour. Shame you can't buy one for love nor money, laments ERIC BAILEY, as he enters the to see how they stitched together 1,416,192 pixels to create the 'must have' toy what are most little girls clamouring for? ANN RENEMAN examines the aiiure Buzz. His antecedents are impressive too: Toy Story was made for Disney by a California studio called Pixar, once owned by Star Wars' George Lucas, whose first love was animation. But in the mid-1980s Lucas lost enthusiasm for computer work, and sold the studio to its employees and to Steven Jobs, who co-founded a little enterprise called Apple Computers, but who had just been ousted after a boardroom Jobs used the success of Toy Story to boost an offer of stock in the company and on the first day's trading, shares rocketed by 77 per cent to SUS39 turning the already impressively rich Jobs into a billionaire. YET none of this explains why Buzz has become The One.

Even the lesser toys featured in the film Mr Potato Head, Etch-a-Sketch -have sold better while basking in Buzz's limelight (though a seasonal scene featuring a parent who brings home a spud-on-legs film Toy Story, Buzz has somehow become The One. The plot summary of Toy Story is straightforward enough: the toys belonging to eight-year-old Andy, including the laconic but aging cowboy doll, Woody, await the arrival of his birthday present, a box-fresh Buzz Lightyear, "the best toy in the Woody is king of the bedroom, claiming the coveted centre-bed position, but Buzz turns all that upside down with his astronomical ego and his boasts of being able to fly. What's more, Buzz doesn't know he's a toy. Insufferably, he thinks he really is Buzz Light-year, Space Ranger. Woody is jealous and tries to destroy Buzz.

In the resulting chase, they find themselves in the bedroom of the kid next door, where Buzz sees a television advert for Buzz Lightyear dolls thousands of Buzzes, just like him, march across the screen. The truth dawns: he is just a toy, after all. In his anguish, he rips his laser unit reached fever pitch before Australian parents knew what hit them. When it comes to supplying markets, says Hardy, Australia is simply not big enough to rate a detour of containers. Thinkway, she says, sent all available supplies to Europe and America.

"It is a very sad story. Parents are desperate," says Hardy. "They have been coming straight to us, but we can't supply them. Our last supply was in October and we had three container-loads come in. They sold out in about a week.

We could have supplied many, many thousands more." But perhaps there is something else about Buzz that marks him out from the rash of chronically superhuman heroes of recent cartoondom. Buzz is funny; Buzz is flawed: a mess of pomp and hubris down to his teryllium-carbonic alloy fingertips. When Buzz has his existential crisis, he is everyman: he thought he was real, and he isn't; he thought he was special, yet he 120 new outfits and a new career. What never changes is her figure. There is a story that if Barbie were a real woman she wouldn't be able to stand upright.

I'm not sure this is true, though it can be a shade tricky walking when you've got S-shaped feet. Researchers at the University of South Australia have actually computed what the neck, chest, arm, waist, hip, thigh, calf and ankle measurements of Barbie would be if she were scaled to average height Thus Kevin Norton, associate professor of physical education and sports studies, is able to report that the probability of meeting a real-life Barbie body (that's 36-18-33) is "less than one in The world of Barbie stretches far beyond the confines of the toy shop. A California make-up company, Urban Decay, is collecting Barbie "horror stories" on its Web site, and hair is a recurrent theme as is murder. It tells us that the Todd Soionz as a Buzz substitute is too gruesome to contemplate). The Australian supplier, Toys, blames the surprise release of the video a few months ago for the sudden rush in demand.

Buzz was actually introduced in 1995, says the company's marketing manager, Jurate Hardy, but it was after the film's release, and demand was slow. Interest had tailed off when the video release suddenly had children pleading for a Buzz. In fact, Buzz is made in China for the American company Thinkway Toys, which bought the licence from Disney. He's quite a complicated toy, with his unusual body shapes and fully jointed movement since he was the best toy in the world in the film, he had rather a lot to live up to. So it's not easy to add, say, an extra production line for Christmas.

Jurate Hardy says that although the video hit Australia in October, we were several months behind the US and Britain, so demand there Dolled up the unauthorised Drag Queen Barbie. timeless but in reality she is relentlessly up to date. Every year, about 90 different Barbie dolls, including "friends and family are created. Her skin colour is what you want it to be and her nationality varies from Indian to Ghanaian to Japanese. Every year she gets i I IT happens every year, and nobody quite knows how.

Is it instinct? Telepathy? Some kind of prepubescent communication lost to whiskery adults? Whatever, as each November becomes December, we learn that all over the country youngsters are suddenly aching, dreaming, wanting the Number One Christmas Toy. Mum and Dad, your mission you have no choice but to accept it is to get one and lay it before your child on Christmas morn. Despair and desperation ensue; grown women slug it out on the floor of Toys 'R' Us over the last battered blister-pack; bleary-eyed fathers take their sleeping bags to the store where, rumour has it, a dawn delivery is due; unacceptably large sums change hands in pubs and shady alleyways. And come New Year's Day, the shops are bursting with the things, suddenly useless and inert: who now wants a Cabbage Patch Doll or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Whatsit? This year's chosen one is evident: step forward, in that characteristically bumptious, interrupted gait, Buzz Lightyear, 30 centimetres of extruded heaven. As toys go, Buzz is not especially expensive $39 if you could find one, which you can't or especially complicated.

Battened up, he has a laser light that flicks on and off, and a fairly low-tech voice loop: "I'm Buzz Lightyear and I come in peace" and his bragging catchphrase: "To infinity and beyond!" His jut-jawed features, like Kirk Douglas after a week of pizzas, are encased in a goldfish-bowl helmet, his body in a Sputnik-era spacesuit. He is curiously dated: even his space trousers are flares. He totes a laser and pop-out wings, and his ball-jointed arm can be encouraged into a karate chop of sorts though nothing that would impress a Terminator fan. But it's the history that Buzz brings with him that is important; of all the characters in the Disney lines of code, 110,000 frames comprising 1,416,192 pixels each. But whereas Snow White is two-dimensional, Buzz Light-year is three-dimensional, with shadows that move as he does, and facial expressions calculated through the assessment of millions of possible fluctuations of his eyes, nose, mouth and lantern jaw.

A tree in Toy Story has 10,000 leaves and Andy's head has 12,384 hairs. Buzz moves through a landscape with megabytes of detail: in Sid's bedroom "general filth" was generated with a precision list of digitised muck that the animators quantified as follows: "seven blotches, two crayon marks, four mosses, five rusts, three brush-marks, 16 splats, four dirt, one drip, two holes, two scrapes, four spills, eight cup-rings, three smudges, two sprays, three wood-grain chips, one rug dirt, 15 scratches, six watermarks" all made with keyboard strokes and mouse movements. Such glorious trivia adds to the mystique of the film, and of BARBIE FACTS More than 1 billion Barbies (and members of her family) have been sold worldwide since 1959. Placed head-to-toe they would circle the earth more than 11 times. Barbie has more than 1 million pairs of shoes.

More than 95 million metres of fabric has gone into making Barbie and friends' clothing. That stretches from London to Sydney three times. More than 910 million fashions have been produced for Barbie and friends since 1969. Barbie has more than 35 pets, including 16 dogs, 10 horses, four cats, a parrot, a chimpanzee, a lion cub, a giraffe and a zebra. Source: Mattel UK has never been manufactured in the US.

Instead, she is made by women in Asia who look nothing like her. About 11,000 peasant women work at the two Barbie factories Personally, I'd be glad to oblige. OK, and now on to the 1996 Dumb As Toast Fashion Idea Of The Year Award (the envelope please, Mervyn love those lederhosen, babe). And the winner is: bum cleavage! Yes, those brainy designers came up with a brilliant idea to make frocks with holes cut in the very lower back area, to show the first couple of inches of what is known in the glamorous world of haute couture as "bum or as isn't; he thought he could fly, yet he can't. "Stop with this spaceman thing," entreats Woody, and eventually Buzz must.

The slow illumination is moving and engrossing. But as for the future? Well, Buzz Lightyear may have come in peace, but he will go in ignominy, like the sad cavalcade of other Christmas Number Ones. If Jurate Hardy does manage to winkle another delivery out of China, it's a good bet that a few months down the track retailers will be knee-deep in unshiftable Lightyears. Then it will be next Christmas, and something else will be coming forward to fill Buzz's space boots. The retailers will already have guessed, and placed their orders.

Hardy has her money on the toys from Lost World, Steven Spielberg's sequel to Jurassic Park, and Goose-bumps merchandise. Her advice to parents: buy those Christmas presents in April. The Telegraph. London film Welcome to the Dollhouse features a 12-year-old decapitating Barbie with a chainsaw. Ken, for those who don't know, is Barbie's boyfriend.

His full name js Ken Carson and he and Barbie graduated from Willow High School. It turns out that he was actually named after Ruth and Elliot Handler's son. This leads to suspicions that they might in fact secretly be brother and sister. This would explain why it is completely unbelievable that Ken is Barbie's boyfriend and perhaps it explains Ken's absence from the "Barbie Wedding On the back of the box, Barbie tells her flower girl and page boy her dream of a garden wedding, but there is one thing missing from her description: a man. Barbie, it seems, is marrying herself.

Toy sellers say Barbie is a mega-star; her Newsdesk says she's an icon. But Barbie is what we make her, and what we've decided to make her this Christmas is very rich indeed. The Guardian the account from his arm, and there, embossed in his suit, is the painful motif of self-discovery: Made in Taiwan. Part of the thrill of Buzz is that we know he is a technical marvel. A strong selling point of Toy Story is that it was apparently the first fully computerised feature-length animation, filmed on location in cyberspace.

Traditional animations are made by painting each shot on a "eel" then photographing it: up to 24 drawings are used for each second of film. Snow White, the 1937 Disney classic, required 119,550 frames, painted by 300 animators over three years. Toy Story was made by 1 10 people, manipulating a regiment of computers whose abilities remain fascinating and somehow impossible to assimilate: if Buzz has a family, they are among this pasty-faced bunch of supernerds. They did Buzz proud. Even the things that look real in Toy Story are computer-generated: Buzz's world is really 4.5 million Barbie Millicent Roberts was created after Mattel founders Elliot and Ruth Handler spotted their daughter Barbara playing with paper dolls.

She was launched at the 1959 New York Toy Fair but does not have a birthday as such. "We call it her anniversary," says the Newsdesk tactfully. It seems Barbie does not have any parents. The unofficial version of Barbie's past, as revealed in Erica Rand's book Barbie's Queer Accessories, is a bit sexier. It seems that she has a predecessor of sorts.

Lilli was the vampy heroine of a Das Bild cartoon who was also adapted as a sex toy sold to men in tobacconists. Rand says Mattel bought all rights to Lilli in the 1950s and we have never heard of her since. So what does Barbie herself have to say on this? I return to the toy cupboard. "Cool! Why don't you go to the movies with me tomorrow?" she asks. Barbie may be thought of as the All-American girl but she swimsuits by Mr Souza and his assembled pervs (that's the women in swimsuits, not the pervs, natch), who are mostly cosmetic and dental surgeons.

"Technicians" then assess the would-be contestant for body-fat percentage, cellulite, and what surgery Mr Souza's team orders for them: eyebrows, noses, chins, breasts and teeth are common targets. The official team dentist, Mr Moises Kaswan, told The Economist that some young women had their gums painfully retracted to show "Farrah Fawcett teeth, toilet-bowl Yummo. The girls or women are chosen early, in the hope that their physical scars, swelling, possible complications and bruising will heal before the contest. "A woman has td strike me like a blow," says Mr Sovja. Fashions so funny they're a crack-up The 1MB On Call Rates Interest rates are paid on the entire balance of the account, except for pension plus accounts which pay the relevant interest rate for each step in accordance with government deeming rules, and are subject to change without notice.

Interest on all deposits is calculated on the daily balance at a daily rate equivalent to the annual rate divided by 365. in China's Guangdong province. Their world is about as far as you can get from Barbie's pink one. There, wages are not just cheap, they are dirt cheap. A Los Angeles Times report estimates that just 35 US cents of each Barbie sold is for labour.

Barbie's components are also multinational. Her hair is from Japan, her colouring from America and the oil that makes up the plastic resins is imported from Taiwan, with most of the oil originating in Saudi Arabia. I asked Barbie what she thought "Cool! Let's play our favourite music with Midge tonight!" Barbie likes to do things and she also likes to do them with her many friends, which you then have to buy. Barbie is an Action Woman and she is nobody's fool. Global sales last year topped SUS1.2 billion (SA1.5 billion).

That is a lot of plastic pellets and pink packaging. But there is more to this than meets the eye. Barbie may look we know it in Australia, the land of low-slung elasticised shorts, "the builder's It was recommended as the perfect look for a job interview or picking the kids up from school (or maybe that part was a hallucination), and real women everywhere have flocked so far away from it there's been a change in the earth's axis. An English reporter for The Guardian recently reported that during a conversation 10 years ago with the frock maker Galliano, he said he didn't like bosoms because they spoiled the line of a frock. Mr Galliano, now head of the House of Dior, a man who would rather women looked like a bit of four-by-two for draping reasons, made the $15,000 nightie that Princess Diana recently wore to a ball in New York.

And so (Mervyn, raise your goblet and adjust your jerkin bodice) we toast the winner of the 1996 I'm So Miserable I'd Like To Cheer Myself Up By Running Practically In The Nicky Noo Nar But I Can't Be Stuffed So I'll Settle For a Petticoat in Public Award, Mrs Beryl Biffo of Mount Druitt. What a shame nobody asked her to the ball. THE Barbie Newsdesk at Mattel reports that two Barbie dolls are sold every second somewhere in the world, but to anyone who has fought through the toyshop crowds this Christmas, that must seem like an underestimate. Two a second? More like two a nanosecond. That is a lot of Barbies, but then it is a Barbie kind of year.

She has her own CD-ROM, her own horse named Nibbles, and accessories to die for. No matter how many people love to hate her, Barbie is the top girls' toy in the world. But who is Barbie? And. why do we lovehate her? For the definitive answer I turned to the toy cupboard. There I found Talking Barbie, who was in some disarray.

She was naked and bits of her hair had been dipped in paint and cut off, with the rest dividing into rasta-like clumps. I gave her some time to get her ballgown together and phoned the Barbie Newsdesk instead. The official story goes that WHATEVER KAZ COOKE competition by winning five Miss Worlds and four Miss Universe titles (as alert readers will recall, Miss Universe is harder to win because people from other planets may enter). We are indebted to a report in The Economist about Mr Souza, who frots around Venezuela with a team of perving assistants, trawling through "discotheques, shopping centres, schools the street" for girls or women who fit the bill. The bill to fit is as follows: aged 17 to 24; educated (to answer questions on the podium); at least 1.7 metres tall Once the list has been narrowed down, the girls or women are inspected in Term Account balance Interest rates pa.

EVERYDAY on call $50,000 and over 2.50 (passbook or cashcard, $20,000 to $49,999 2.25 (Visa card, flashcard) $5,000 to $19,999 1.50 Junior Savers (passbook) $1,000 to $4,999 0.50 $500 to $999 0.25 up to $499 0.00 BUSINESS on call $20,000 and over 1.75 CHEQUEBOOK $5,000 to $19,999 1.25 (statement savings) up to $4,999 0.00 MONEY MARKET on call $50,000 and over variable weekly (passbook or minimum initial $20,000 to $49,999 variable weekly (cashcard savings) deposit $5,000 $5,000 to $19,999 variable weekly up to $4,999 0.00 PENSION PLUS on call $30,000 and over 7.00 (passbook, Visa card or minimum initial $2,000 to $29,000 5.00 cashcard savings) deposit $2,000 up to $1,999 1.00 effective 1197 CHRISTMAS CLUB on call All balances 0.00 (passbook savings) bonus 2.00 industry one last time. (A poster advertising a band called the Gusset Rustlers was torn down in a nearby street recently. Probably a disgruntled Vogue employee.) First up, let us examine the field of the Body Police. There were women's magazines telling us to feel good about ourselves on Page 4, and how to get thinner on all the other pages. There was the Trevor Hendy stomach-crunching thingie, which looked remarkably like the Jane Flemming stomach-crunching thingie, both sold by people on daytime telly who looked as if they'd had a pert overdose and who disapproved of our tummies.

But the winner of the 1996 Body Police Mind Your Own Parts Buster Award is (trumpet blurt, thank you, Mervyn) Mr Osmel Souza, the former frock designer who chooses the contestants for Miss Venezuela the country which has, in the past 17 years, blitzed the If there are any withdrawals between January 1 and October 31 will be closed and the bonus forfeited. Illawarra Mutual Building Society Ltd Telephone: 1300 361880 IMB869.