Barbie (ft Lydia Cowins)

In the great pantheon of childhood toys there are few as ubiquitous, as culturally dominant, as wildly oversaturated as Barbie, the plastic approximation of a woman whose various outfits probably cost more than your entire closet. Being so intertwined with the tumultuous development of young girls, the brand is of course subject to great scrutiny. Barbie has been accused of being everything from an unrealistic, self-esteem destroying symbol of the male gaze to a Pied Piper of liberal values luring girls away from homemaking and into the workplace. That’s quite a lot of fuss to kick up about a toy whose ultimate fate was met in the jaws of the family dog more often than not, but there are legitimate questions to be asked about what Barbie represents for girls and the impact she has had on them over the years. Thus, when the time came to make a live action movie about her, Warner Brothers and Mattel enlisted director Greta Gerwig, indie actress turned prophet of the adolescent American female, to try to make some kind of sense out of this little plastic doll. The result is the creatively named Barbie, released in 2023 to general acclaim. The Magellan brothers saw it as part of their Barbenheimer celebrations, but, since Nathan only ever owned the one Barbie doll (true story), they felt ill-equipped to judge Barbie’s treatment of its titular subject matter. Thus, they brought in the newly minted Lydia Cowins, their sister and former Barbie-owning young girl, to provide some much needed context to their bemused experience of a film that, whatever its merits or shortcomings, knows exactly what audience it’s playing to. Welcome to your dream home . . . for movie podcasts!