David Bowie Gets His Own Barbie Doll
A Barbie doll?
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It’s been over six years since David Bowie passed away at the age of 69 from liver cancer, and his legacy continues to live on in more ways than you might expect. There are the dozens of albums he released over the span of close to 50 years. There’s his unforgettable screen appearances in films like in 1986’s Labyrinth and 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. There’s his Barbie doll… wait, Barbie doll? Yep. Barbie doll.
As reported by Comic Book, this week a Barbie doll based on David Bowie as he appeared in the 1973 music video for “Life on Mars?” went up for pre-order on Amazon and Entertainment Earth. The doll reflects Bowie’s purposely androgynous look in the video including his powder blue suit, tie, platform shoes, eyeshadow, and hair. You can see a picture of the doll below, followed by the “Life on Mars?” video so you can see how accurate the doll’s designers were.
The David Bowie doll is part of Mattel’s Barbie Gold Label Collection whose other entries include such unexpected dolls as a gender-swapped Elvis, superheroes, vampire queens, and even Celtic goddesses. Only about 20,000 Bowie dolls will be made and if Comic Book is right, you should expect them to go fast. This actually isn’t their first Bowie Barbie doll. In 2019, Mattel released a Gold Label Collection doll based on Bowie’s character Aladdin Sane, and according to Comic Book the dolls got scarce “lightning fast.”
Ironically, in spite of thesong title and David Bowie’s fascination with science fiction, “Life on Mars?” has little to do with space or sci-fi. The song was recorded only a couple of years after the Apollo 11’s historic Moon landing, and at the time the subject of whether it would be America or the Soviet Union to reach Mars first was in the news quite a bit, thus inspiring the title. Regardless it’s likely Bowie’s androgynous look in the video was part of the evolution which eventually led to his creation of characters like Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane.
Of course, it isn’t just dolls that are helping to keep David Bowie’s legacy alive. Funnily enough, there’s currently a critically acclaimed sci-fi series helping to keep his memory in the zeitgeist even though he doesn’t appear in it. Showtime’s The Man Who Fell to Earth stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as the alien Faraday who travels to Earth in the hopes of saving his own planet, only to find our world is on the same trajectory as his own. The show acts as a kind of sequel series to the 1987 film of the same name, in which Bowie starred as the alien Thomas Newton. Bill Nighy (Love Actually) plays an older version of Newton in the series.
It will likely be a long time before the music David Bowie made stops being relevant to our collective memory; particularly when it comes to tracks from the 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. In 2014, James Gunn made good use of the track “Moonage Daydream” in Guardians of the Galaxy and “Starman” became an earworm once more with the release of the Lightyear trailer.
