The Penn Stater Magazine

Remembering Our Barbie Moment

March 9, 2009 at 3:57 pm Tina Hay Leave a comment

With today being the 50th birthday of the Barbie doll, I’m reminded of the time we ran a Barbie centerfold in The Penn Stater.

It was 1997, and Mattel had recently released the “Penn State Barbie.” One of our staff members got the idea to turn her into a centerfold in the magazine, à la Playboy. We hired a photographer to pose the doll suggestively (to the extent that a plastic doll in a cheerleading outfit can be suggestive) and had fun dreaming up the accompanying info: her vital statistics (bust size, 5-1/2 inches; waist, 3-3/8 inches), her major (Behrend’s plastics engineering technology program), and so on.

Click on the image to read the details.

Right around the time we were about to send the magazine off to the printer, it occurred to us that Mattel might not have the same sense of humor that we did about this whole thing. So we consulted the Alumni Association’s lawyer and told him what we were thinking of doing. He responded with a formal-sounding letter saying it would be ill-advised to run the piece. Dismayed, we got the lawyer on the phone to hear more about the ins and outs of copyright law, fair use, and the like. He wasn’t certain we would necessarily be doing anything illegal, but he thought we should err on the side of caution.

At one point I asked him, “What’s the worst thing that would happen if we did this?” His response: “Mattel would probably ask you not to do it again.” I said, “Well, heck, we only want to do it once.” The lawyer conceded that we were probably OK, and we went ahead with the spread. We never heard a peep from Mattel.

The last laugh proved to be on us, however. We wanted the spread to be the centerfold, but we miscalculated where the centerfold would fall. (How hard can it be, really? In an 80-page magazine, the centerfold is on pages 40-41.) The Penn State Barbie spread landed about four pages away from the center of the magazine, and instead the actual centerfold was this bland-looking spread about a faculty member’s research.

Not one of our most brilliant moments, huh?

Tina Hay, editor

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