Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Toys'r'us Cool Looks Barbie 1990



It’s freezing outside, there’s a thin layer of snow on the ground and I’m sitting by the window like a 5-year old looking out for Santa to bring her a Barbie. Well, I’m a bit older than that and I’m awaiting a courier, not Santa, but the anticipation is the same and well … he’s to bring me a Barbie. I’ve waited a long time for Cool Looks Barbie whom I purchased from a lady form Illinois over two weeks ago and I’ve checked her progress with alarming regularity about twice a day and at long last she sure came, my Neon Queen! My Barbie’s previous owner has taken her out of the box, but she arrived in it and the doll, her outfit and her accessories were in a very good condition.


Although the box doesn’t indicate that, Cool Looks was produced in 1990 in collaboration with Toys’r’us as their special edition and a single doll, no friends to accompany her. On the surface she may look like a very much generic doll, and her being the “special edition” is not at all impressive. Just another doll for another chain of stores. But to me she’s very special, and a long awaited, top-five-doll because I used to own her once as a child when my family from NY bought her for me along with some clothes and sweets and before putting them all in a cardboard box, they photographed the goods and placed the photo amongst them and I’ve recently found the photograph but I didn’t really need it, I remembered Cool Looks Barbie very well. For a doll wanted as much as this I was willing to wait a little longer with the purchase, but I decided to bring it forward as with Toys’r’us closing business their exclusives have been getting a lot of attention lately and this may in short time be reflected by their prices. So my classic 80s had to wait for their turn.




Mattel gave my Barbie a very sweet, innocent look, an adorable, smiling face. Some other dolls share the same facepaint of her eyes because Mattel can be repetitive at times, and I’ve seen such happy looking eyes several times already, Western Fun, Capri and Cute’n Cool have them too. But it’s easy to tell my Cool Looks from them, she lacks the green triangle in her eyes and her lipstick is very dark. There’s a tiny paint chip by the way, but I’m still pleased with the doll. Her hairdo is pretty unique and it looks like her hair stylists couldn’t make up their minds and were torn between crimps and curls so they gathered her hair in two asymmetrical pigtails, crimped one of them and curled the other one plus they gave her the bushy bangs. Pretty interesting indeed.




For a generic doll, her outfit is really well put together and consists of as many as 5 separate pieces and not 4 as her box informs us, but anyway, you can mix and match them as you wish. The colors of her outfit are vivid, crazy neon apart from her vest that’s black with green polka dots and colorful music notes all over it. Under the vest, there’s an orange t-shirt with a decal and a plastic snap and I remembered the plastic snap so clearly, I must have hated the vile Velcro since early childhood. Under the t-shirt there’s a surprise – a short green top. In the 90s it was high fashion to wear short leggings and a skirt together and Barbie followed that fashion of course. The leggings are not very interesting but the skirt is great - a cascade of orange and pink frills and a yellow plastic detail that I remembered equally well. Strange, how your brain registered the tiny details while I forgot the way Barbie’s hair was styled or her facepaint altogether. She’s also wearing simple pink sneakers that discolored her feet slightly and hot pink geometrical jewelry that I’ve also seen somewhere else, Style Barbie perhaps?








Cool Looks also comes well accessorized and these were put in a plastic bag by a Malaysian hand and glued to the inner cardboard and so they remained for 28 years until I took them out and decorated them with the stickers that were still in the box. But before I did that, I stopped for a minute and wondered about this little plastic bag and decided that I’m really fond of the lazy, imperfect way Mattel once displayed a doll’s accessories in the box. Now every tiny piece is placed in a clear box in an orderly way so you can see them all easily. That’s fine and I like the esthetics, but there’s no surprise and I remember how I enjoyed discovering what curious little things my doll came with. But anyway, her accessories include a journal, a pen, a phone, a can with something to drink, a triangle alarm clock for some inexplicable reason and a round hat case sort of bag to store some of it. I’ve seen such accessories before, Teen Time Skipper and Cute’n Cool Barbie had them too. One of the pictures comes from the ebay auction because I opened the plastic bag before taking any pictures.





For a 90’s doll you would expect her to come with her classic Barbie brush, but instead she was given a comb that once belonged to the Spectra and the Shimmerons doll line. Spectra and 4 of her friends were released in 1987 (produced in 1986) only to be discontinued a year later. Spectra was a happy looking doll with pink hair and heavy make-up dressed all in lace. She was actually an alien that came from the planet called Shimmeron, her body had the articulation of the Bend and Move type and it was made of a strange, metallic looking, shiny plastic, her head was the regular, skin toned vinyl. It looks like the consumers were not ready for Spectra and her gang and she sure was ahead of her times, but right now the dolls are highly appreciated by collectors worldwide and the dolls themselves as well as their fashion packs, accessory packs and a single playset tend to be very expensive. But back then it looks like Mattel had a stock of combs they produced for discontinued dolls so they put them where they could and so my Barbie comes with one.



I knew it would be a very long entry, but what can I do when the doll is so magical to me that even a simple comb is worth a separate paragraph. My doll may be hardly recognizable, not at all appreciated, but for me she holds some very happy memories and she’s one of the dolls from my childhood that I really wanted to own again. Now, I’m only missing the United Colors of Benneton Barbie, but this girl is unfortunately very much popular and hard to get in good shape and for a decent price so it may take me some time, but I hope that sooner or later, she’ll join Cool Looks and Super Star 1988 and the rest of my collection.



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