A Wicked Misprint by Mattel Sends Parents into Moral Panic

With the highly anticipated Wicked movie set to come out later this month, Mattel toy manufacturer has released a line of dolls, featuring characters Elphaba and Glinda from the movie. However, these dolls have all been recalled due to a misprint on the back of their packaging. Instead of wickedmovie.com, the boxes display wicked.com, a URL owned by an adult- entertainment website. This means that these dolls, sold nationwide, in toy stores, Targets, Walmarts, and Amazon, have inadvertently directed significant traffic to the adult site, presumably coming from the young children whom the dolls are marketed towards. Google Trends data reveals that the adult site has seen its highest traffic since 2012, a trend which is almost certainly not coincidental.

Parents have since taken to social media to caution each other of the potential risk to their children’s emotional and moral well- beings. Some parents have voiced outrage at what they perceive to be an overt threat to their children’s innocence. Other parents have even suggested the misprint to not have been a mistake, but rather a cruel joke aimed at their children, resembling the likes of the infamous Barbie Liberation dolls, a similar scandal which happened in the 90s.

In 1993, the Barbie Liberation organization, an anonymous activist group, “performed surgery” on hundreds of G.I Joe and Barbie dolls, swapping their voice boxes. They gave Barbie a tough military voice and G.I. Joe a high-pitched feminine voice, both found to be highly offensive by many of the parents of the children these toys ended up in the hands of. Their aim was to highlight and disrupt gender norms reinforced by even children’s products.

While the Wicked doll incident may lack the intentionality of the Barbie liberation dolls project, and was likely just an unintentional manufacturing error, the moral panic its incited has been extremely resemblant. By connecting children to inappropriate content, whether through error or something more intentional, the misprint has put parents in a position in which they feel as though their children’s innocence is being put directly under attack. It echoes art crime tactics by undermining the trust that parents place in reputable brands, revealing how one small error can create waves of moral panic and public backlash. In both cases, toys became the medium through which trust in consumer culture could be tested.

Whether planned or accidental, these incidents make toys, one of the few commodities which are inherently symbolic of innocence and childhood, the same items which have incited a degree of distrust in major corporations. This is because, unlike many of the other things we consume, toys are unique in their emotional significance to consumers since they are so closely associated to our children. When a highly trusted corporation, like Mattel, breaches that trust, it forces consumers to be more hesitant when engaging in consumerism when it comes to their children.

These scandals highlight the high stakes of corporate responsibility in products aimed at children while serving as reminders of the potential impact of minor errors, such as a misprinted URL, or a full blown art activism, such as the Barbie liberation dolls, can have on public trust when it comes to the products we consume.