Barbie's Best Movie Props Now Live In A Tightly Secured Vault At Warner Bros.
In Greta Gerwig's blockbuster "Barbie," the title character (Margot Robbie) finds that she is experiencing phenomena that no Barbie has ever experienced before. While dancing with her friends, she has idle thoughts of her own mortality. The next morning, her fake food is spoiled and her fake shower is cold. Most notably, her feet — ordinarily sculpted into a high-heels-ready point — now walk flat on the ground. There is only one Barbie in Barbieland that might know what is happening: Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), an outcast who lives on the edge of town.
It becomes clear that all the Barbies in Barbieland are, in fact, the Platonic ideals of the dolls being played with by little girls back in the real world. Weird Barbie, with her bizarre facial tattoos and wildly trimmed hair, is clearly the Barbie that has been played with too roughly. A little girl has drawn on her doll's face and taken a pair of safety scissors to Barbie's rayon hair. She is thrown in a toy basket somewhere, her legs positioned in permanent splits. Weird Barbie has seen what casts the shadows on the cave walls and can offer the Robbie Barbie some insight. Go to the real world and find your little girl.
Weird Barbie's house was just as wild as she was, featuring strange angles, zigzags, and pointed patterns that stood out from the rounded pink paradise of Barbieland. The sets for "Barbie" were designed by production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spenser who outdid themselves. Indeed, everyone working on "Barbie" loved the Weird Barbie house and wanted to abscond with certain props. Greenwood and Spense, talking with the New York Times, revealed that a certain rug had to be hidden in the Warner Bros. prop vault.
Weird Barbie
The rug on the floor of Weird Barbie's dream house is an irregular rainbow pattern that, in any light, is ostentatious and appealing; there aren't too many rooms where it would look out of place. The rug, however, was whisked off to the WB vault as soon as shooting was completed. The Warner Bros. archive is, as one might picture, a massive warehouse in Los Angeles that contains hundreds and hundreds of old movie props, and which is rarely open to the public. Back in April, the studio did finally open the vault for tours, and curious visitors could go look at Batman cowls and Batmobiles to their heart's content. No, you are not allowed to put on the cowls or sit in the Batmobiles. Also in the archive are the clothes worn by James Dean in "East of Eden," the Freddy Kreuger glove worn by Robert Englund in "A Nightmare on Elm Street," and multiple movie cars.
The pink Cadillac from "Elvis" is in there, as is the Dusenberg from "The Great Gatsby." If it counts as a vehicle, one can also see the power loader-like weapons suit from "The Matrix Revolutions." Perhaps most impressive is the "shrimp hand" glove used in the movie "Beetlejuice." There are also boxes and boxes (and boxes and boxes) of movie scripts.
The Barbie car is there, too. As is the mythical rainbow rug. Spenser, in the Time article, said:
"We all wanted her rug, but it's gone into the Warner Bros. vault of goods. But I love the fact that in this vault where you have to go through so much security, you have the Batmobile and then you have Barbie's car."
They are both superheroes, after all.