Warning: This article contains spoilers for Barbie.
The last few months have been an unstoppable whirlwind of pink as the immense hype built for the arrival of Greta Gerwig’s much-anticipated Barbie film.
Now, Barbie has finally arrived in all its plastic and fantastic glory, and it’s safe to say that it has gone down a treat with audiences around the world.
The film has made history by becoming the biggest debut ever for a film directed by a woman, bagging £293m on its opening weekend.
And while viewers have been fawning over Margot Robbie’s stunning and heartfelt performance as Stereotypical Barbie as well as Ryan Gosling as the hilariously vacuous Just Ken, fans have also pointed out the myriad Easter eggs and pop culture references Gerwig and Co have littered throughout.
From The Matrix to Love Island, here is a list of the ten most iconic references and hidden meanings in the two-hour pink-athon.
Space Odyssey – The Dawn of Woman
As was first revealed in Barbie’s teaser trailer, the film opens with a scene which is a riff on the opening “Dawn of Man” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Kubrick clip sees primates discovering the use of tools.
In Gerwig’s version, instead of seeing chimps in a desert, it’s girls flocking towards Margot Robbie as a giant, swimsuit-clad Barbie.
And another fun fact: in the scene, Robbie is actually wearing the exact swimsuit of the first-ever Barbie that Mattel released in 1959.
The Wizard of Oz – The Pink Brick Road
On her adventure from Barbieland to the real world, instead of following the Yellow Brick Road to Oz, Barbie follows a pink version of the iconic path out of Barbieland.
Driving in her pink convertible, she also passes a cinema marquee that’s playing The Wizard of Oz, as well as posters of the film’s main characters outside.
In the original 1939 film, a naive girl named Dorothy goes on a similar journey to another world, encountering new friends along the way.
Gerwig told Letterboxd that the aesthetic of The Wizard of Oz informed the design of Barbie Land.
“The Wizard of Oz, obviously is an extraordinary movie and beautiful and beloved,” she said. “It does something that I wanted to emulate, which is these incredible sound stages and these painted skies and this sense of… I say, ‘authentically artificial’, which I think is very beautiful and emotional.”
Taking inspiration from Clueless
In the 1995 cult classic Clueless, fashionista high school student Cher picks out her iconic outfits by skimming through a virtual wardrobe on her computer.
In Barbie, in a similar fashion, Robbie’s character magically gets dressed each morning by standing in front of her closet, finding her clothes just appearing on her body.
"This was a design thing that we were really excited about," Robbie told Architectural Digest during an on-set tour of the Barbie Land set. "We were saying that the wardrobe in ‘Clueless’, the bar was set so high and we would really like to do something that is as cool as that."
Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam
When Robbie’s character first meets the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), it’s in a small kitchen in the basement of Mattel HQ. There, Ruth makes Barbie a cup of tea, and the pair’s hands momentarily touch.
Robbie told Variety, “There’s a moment when Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, gives Barbie a cup of tea and our hands touch like The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, imitating the moment when God gives life to the first man. Greta snuck that in there.”
“It’s on the same trajectory and angle as the Sistine Chapel,” Gerwig told Time magazine. “Nobody is going to notice that, so I have to say it.”
The Matrix – stiletto or Birkenstock?
When Stereotypical Barbie pays a visit to the Weird Barbie’s house on the outskirts of Barbieland in an attempt to fix her “malfunctions”, she is presented with two options: either a pink stiletto (which symbolises staying in Barbieland and not facing her fears) or a Birkenstock (which symbolises entering the real world).
Fans have pointed out that this scene is a play on The Matrix’s “red pill or blue pill” scene, where Neo has to choose between the red pill and joining the resistance or the blue pill which will keep him in The Matrix.
The unlikeliest of cameos – Chris Taylor from Love Island
If there’s one thing there’s no shortage of in Barbie, it’s cameos. From Dua Lipa and John Cena to Rob Brydon and Nicola Coughlan, the cast is brimming with A-list surprises.
But one face that viewers were surprised to see – to say the least – was that of Love Island’s Chris Taylor, who appeared on the show in 2019 and dated Maura Higgins for six months in 2020.
Taylor explained that he was invited, along with fellow islanders, to a premiere and afterparty with Love Island superfan Robbie, who “literally came over and gave me a hug and knew my name, it was really weird.”
Robbie is famously a big fan of the UK dating show, and Taylor said that a year and a half after the afterparty, he got an email from Warner Bros. asking him to audition for "Barbie".
"I was fully convinced it was a prank," Taylor said. "These YouTubers, they’re clever, they’ll write full-on contracts and do the prank video. But I pulled up at Warner Brothers and saw Ryan Gosling walk past my car and I thought, ‘This definitely isn’t a prank’.”
A callback to Midnight Cowboy
According to the Barbie press notes, Gerwig wanted Barbie and Ken’s experience entering the real world to reflect the fish-out-of-water experience Jon Voight’s Midnight Cowboy character has when he walks through New York City in the 1969 film.
Gerwig aimed to capture a similar essence as Barbie and Ken arrive in the bustling beachside Santa Monica.
Rollerblading down the boardwalk, Barbie experiences catcalling and harassment for the first time, and is overwhelmed by the stark differences between the real world and the feminist utopia of Barbieland.
A sneaky reference to Bratz dolls
Eagle-eyed fans have pointed out that the three schoolgirls Barbie meets in the California high school are actually named after the original Bratz dolls, Yasmin, Sasha, Cloe and Jade. Bratz became a popular rival of the Barbie brand in the 2000s.
All the weird discontinued Barbies
At one point towards the end of the film, a whole group of discontinued Barbies make an appearance in Weird Barbie’s lair.
The group of misfits are all references to real dolls that were pulled by Mattel for one reason or another. One such doll was Growing Up Skipper, which garnered controversy due to its creepy take on puberty — you could inflate the doll’s breasts by cranking its arms. Another was Midge, a pregnant doll discontinued for simply being “too weird”.
Video Girl Barbie also makes a brief cameo — she was cancelled after being flagged by the FBI because the doll could record you.
And, perhaps weirdest of all, is Sugar Daddy Ken, released briefly in 2009 and played in the film by Gavin & Stacey’s Rob Brydon.
