Barbie Trivia Quiz: Are You a True Fan?

Trivia Quizzes Movies

Stereotypical Barbie has a perfect day, every single day, in a plastic pink utopia where every version of Barbie holds a prestigious job and every version of Ken exists mostly to be looked at, until the morning she wakes up with flat feet, unshakable thoughts about death, and no idea why her perfectly engineered reality has suddenly started malfunctioning. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie takes a toy with a complicated cultural legacy and builds an ambitious, self-aware comedy around it, sending Barbie and a stowaway Ken into the real world to track down the cause of her glitch, and using that fish-out-of-water structure to interrogate everything the doll has represented, badly and well, since 1959.

Ruth Handler modeled the original doll on Bild Lilli, a German novelty based on a newspaper cartoon and sold from 1955 largely to adult men, then launched Mattel’s version at the New York Toy Fair on March 9, 1959 in a black and white striped swimsuit priced at three dollars. Mattel bought the rights to Lilli outright in 1964, which ended the awkward comparisons. Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach put Handler herself into the film, played by Rhea Perlman as a ghost occupying a private kitchen at the top of Mattel headquarters, and let her mention both the daughter Barbara she named the doll after and the securities charges that ended her run at the company she founded.

Barbie Land runs as an inverted matriarchy where the Kens have no jobs, no houses, and no purpose beyond standing near the beach, and Ryan Gosling’s Ken returns from a single afternoon in Century City having misunderstood patriarchy so thoroughly that he converts the entire society into Kendom over a weekend. Gerwig declines to treat the original arrangement as the correct answer either, and the film’s most quoted passage belongs to America Ferrera as Gloria, a Mattel receptionist listing the mutually exclusive demands placed on women while her teenage daughter Sasha listens. The discontinued products get their own dignity: Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, drawn on and forced into splits by a previous owner, Michael Cera’s Allan, who came in Ken’s clothes and was pulled from shelves in 1966, and Emerald Fennell’s Midge, discontinued for being visibly pregnant.

The sets were built practically at Warner Bros. Leavesden outside London, with hand-painted skies and no functioning water in the pools, and the production’s demand for fluorescent Rosco paint was widely reported as having strained the manufacturer’s global supply. Sarah Greenwood’s design opens the film with a straight parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which small girls smash their baby dolls after the monolith arrives in the shape of a giant Barbie, narrated by Helen Mirren.

Warner Bros. released it on July 21, 2023 opposite Oppenheimer, an accident of scheduling that turned into the Barbenheimer double feature and helped push Barbie past 1.4 billion dollars worldwide, the highest gross of that year and the highest ever for a film directed by a woman. It collected eight Academy Award nominations, including supporting nods for Gosling and Ferrera, and won one, for Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s “What Was I Made For?”, while Gosling’s power ballad “I’m Just Ken” lost in the same category and was performed at the ceremony anyway. Questions here run from Weird Barbie’s advice to the identity of the Mattel chief executive played by Will Ferrell and the destination of Barbie’s final appointment, with the answer key waiting underneath the quiz.