Rainbow Brite Receives a Makeover — Feministe

Rainbow Brite gets a make-over. She's older, thinner and more stylish...let's add one more unrealistic female icon for our girls!! Baaah.
Here's a dynamo post by the folks at Feministe:
So, Rainbow Brite, that little girl icon of the 80s, received a makeover. (h/t). While the redesign was revealed a few months back, Hallmark is expected to release the dolls this month, and as the above image shows, they are going to look very different from how they once did. Rainbow Brite is older, she is thinner, and she is more stylish. Like many female characters over the years, there were clearly many fundamental, and very human, aspects of her that were found to be gravely flawed.

There were a couple of years of my own childhood where Rainbow Brite was my life.

I had a Rainbow Brite bedroom, and a collection of all the dolls. I tortured my mother endlessly with a live-action half hour film called Rainbow Brite at the San Diego Zoo, to the point where she can still recite much of it from memory. When choosing clothes, I purposely sought out ones with rainbow patterns and designs, and eagerly requested brightly colored hair ties with dangling stars to pull back my ponytail, so that I could more closely resemble her.

I not only worshiped Rainbow Brite, I also wanted to be just like her. I would wear my rainbow belt and dance around the living room with a little rainbow pouch, and throw around the multi-colored star confetti that my mom had found for me somewhere. I think that somewhere in my very young mind, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could be her.

And it is for all of these reasons that this particular makeover hits me hard.

I could understand perfectly well — be sad and stick my nose up at the redesign still, but understand all the same — if Hallmark decided to simply restyle her outfit and haircut. After all, both of these aspects of the original Rainbow Brite are devastatingly 80s. While I imagine that lots of little girls still like big poofy outfits and bright colors (and a part of the charm of Rainbow Brite’s outfit was that she looked like she probably designed it herself), and while I’m not wild about the new hair and outfit styles they chose for her, her overall look could be a little bit more modern — and when the goal is to sell a product, I can see how that kind of makeover could be seen as a dire necessity.

So no, what upsets me is to not just see my childhood hero look different, but how she looks different.

What they’ve done here is changed a round-faced, pug-nosed little girl with baby fat — the kind of role model girls have less and less these days — into a svelte and fashionable young woman who appears to be wearing makeup. It wasn’t enough for Rainbow Brite to be in charge of all the colors in the entire universe, in spite of being only somewhere between the ages of 6 and 10. Apparently she can only be considered marketable if she is older, acceptably thin, image-conscious, and conventionally pretty. As we know, for women professional success, while still a requirement for any sort of personal worth, is absolutely nothing unless you look hot while having it.

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