GoldieBlox Are Back With A New Campaign, Reimagining Action Films With Women As The Lead
"All girls deserve to see themselves as heroes."
You might remember in November 2013, when toy manufacturer GoldieBlox launched a viral campaign for their new product, which was designed to inspire the next generation of female engineers. The ad campaign featured a complicated and delightful Rube Goldberg-style contraption, that re-appropriated the types of gendered toys we’re all sick of seeing in supermarkets — barbies, baby dolls, pink tea sets and lit-up love hearts — into an engineering feat.
The campaign was not without criticism. The initial ad featured an adorable rap parody of ‘Girls’ by the Beastie Boys, which unfortunately violated the band’s copyright; also, one of the construction sets for sale confusingly revolved around two of Goldie’s friends competing in a princess pageant (although they seem to have changed the description since then).
But regardless of the controversy, and the purple and pink that still colour most of their products, GoldieBlox encouraged an important global conversation about gendered toys — and appear to have put their money where their mouth is, with a diverse range that’s been growing ever since.
Overnight, GoldieBlox launched a new campaign that gender-flips Hollywood action films, starring their action figures Goldie (an engineer, who ziplines) and Ruby (a coder, who skydives) as James Bond, Rocky, The Terminator and Marty McFly. And with Ghostbusters and Oceans 11 both getting all-female reboots, they seem to have hit the zeitgeist on the head.
“Hollywood has a representation problem,” GoldieBlox’s Jayme Brown writes on their website. She cites examples of women in Hollywood — from Geena Davis to Cate Blanchett to Kerry Washington to Jennifer Lawrence — who have recently spoken out about gender inequality on screen, and draws attention to familiar statistics, like the 12% of protagonists in major Hollywood films who are female, and the 1% of films which star women of colour that made it onto a list of the top 500 films of all time. GoldieBlox have also started a page recognising real life heros, featuring Mindy Kaling, Laverne Cox, and Black Girls Code‘s Kimberly Bryant among others.
“Our girls deserve action heroes with flowing hair and combat boots,” Brown writes. “Our girls deserve to see themselves onscreen as well as calling the shots behind the scenes. Our girls deserve more.”
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Head to the GoldieBlox website here, and watch the behind-the-scenes video below.