Before ‘Barbie,’ One Show Made the Dolls Total Assholes

It’s Barbie Week at The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, celebrating the doll’s pop-culture history, our favorite Barbie memories, and a certain major movie. Read all of our coverage here!

In Greta Gerwig’s highly anticipated Barbie movie, the titular doll characters appear to be perfect. Margot Robbie—who plays the most familiar, leggy blonde Barbie—is sweet, understanding, and can even fly, per trailers of the movie. Other Barbies, like Issa Rae’s President Barbie, Dua Lipa’s Mermaid Barbie, Hari Nef’s Doctor Barbie, and others, all look to have an equally saccharine personality. How delightful!

All of this sweetness is expected from the hot pink-adorned dolls. But what if Barbie were actually a major dick?

That was the premise behind The Most Popular Girls in School, an early 2010s web series that went viral on YouTube for spinning the common perception of Barbie as the perennial nice girl on its plasticky, perfect head. The show, which ran for five seasons from 2012 to 2018, followed a handful of high school girls (all played by Barbie dolls and voiced by humans) who absolutely despised one another.

In high school, co-creator Mark Cope says, “I knew a lot of great, nice people. But they weren’t Barbie—that person sucked.” To be more reminiscent of high school, instead of making the Barbies kindhearted, the MPGIS girls had potty mouths, talked shit, and emotionally destroyed each other. “If Barbie was real, that is how she would behave,” he tells the Daily Beast’s Obsessed over Zoom. “That is exactly the person Barbie would be. If somebody is 6 feet tall, gorgeous, and perfect in every way, she’s going to be a nightmare in high school.”

The original idea for MPGIS came when Cope saw future co-creator Carlo Moss performing a sketch in Los Angeles. Moss played three bitchy high school girls in the bathroom, each girl even crueler than the last, whining about boys and having to poop. Watching Moss on stage, Cope thought: What if the two of them remade this for YouTube, a platform skyrocketing in popularity, but with dolls instead of humans? Thus, The Most Popular Girls was born.

The series could have been done with any doll, Cope says. He just happened to go for the Barbies first—though he immediately turned away from buying new, official Mattel dolls, when he saw their hefty $18 price tag. Instead, Cope visited his local dollar store, where he found fake Barbies (“Larbies,” he calls them) for a buck apiece. The first three he purchased then became head cheerleader Mackenzie Zales, her sidekick Trisha Cappelletti, and unpredictable newbie cheerleader Deandra.

“We assumed 10 people would watch it, and eight of those would be family members,” Moss says.

They were wrong. People latched onto the girls as if they were full-fledged TV characters. “Who the fuck are you,” a quote from Mackenzie in the first episode, became an instant meme and MPGIS calling card. I still find myself saying “Hi-eeee” and “Bye-eeee,” Valley Girl-style salutations that the characters use in a handful of the episodes. The series’ YouTube page still has more than a million subscribers, even though Moss and Cope uploaded the last episode more than five years ago. The first episode has 11 million views.

(Three years ago, during the pandemic, MPGIS was revived for a short bit of time as The Most Popular Girls in Quarantine.)

The Barbies in MPGIS are perfect by human society standards; they’re beautiful (and, boy, do they know it), tall, smart, and wealthy—similar to Gerwig’s spotless bunch. But these Barbies are more sadistic than what you’d expect. They get high on tearing one another down; alas, that means each one of them is a victim of the others’ abuse too.

“I found a lot of fun in [how] these characters carry so much stress, even though they have so much going for them,” Moss says. “They’ve been told their whole lives how great they are. They’ve been given every advantage. But they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders because of prom, or because somebody said this in the lunchroom. Those stakes—they’re so high because you don’t have the context of the rest of the world to be like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter.’”

A community grew around the MPGIS lore. Fans would make pilgrimages to spots in Overland Park, Kansas (where the series takes place) mentioned by characters in the show. One of the show’s biggest demographics was “that right-out-of-high-school age,” Moss says. He believes it was because viewers that age found it so relieving to see that, yes, high school stinks for everyone—even Barbies.

“There wasn’t anything like this at the time, either on the internet or on TV. [Fans] were able to create all these different forms of connection for themselves,” Moss says. “It was cathartic writing it, and I think for a lot of viewers, it was cathartic getting to see the people who made your life miserable—their lives suck too.”

While fans were supportive of and even obsessive about the series, I have to wonder: Was anyone ever peeved at the fact that the original MPGIS ladies weren’t authentic Mattel Barbies?

“It went in the opposite direction,” Moss says with a laugh, about fans’ reactions to the knockoff dolls. “People weren’t upset that [the characters] weren’t Barbies—they had to figure out exactly what type of doll they were. We had fans that had full collections of each character. There were online databases of, ‘If you’re looking to make an authentic Rachel, here’s the doll base you need. Here’s the shirt, here’s the pants.’”

As the show grew in popularity, Moss and Cope say friends donated real Barbies for them to use for the show, so there are a handful of Mattel originals in the later episodes. The budget grew, too, meaning that they finally had their pick in the expensive Barbie aisle.

While part of the original MPGIS idea came from Moss’ sketch, as the creators grew more and more familiar with Barbie and her fans, they wanted to be sure that there was some element of doll-like playfulness in their series. How do people play with Barbies? Yes, they play house—but playing with Barbies can also get dirty. Sometimes, Barbies serve as a way for youngsters to explore their sexuality. Other times, kids make their dolls curse!

“That’s why we kept the aesthetic—that rough, hand-drawn look—even as we eventually opened our own studio, [so] it still looked hand-made and DIY,” Moss says, to help the show feel reminiscent of viewers’ own memories of playing with dolls. “People connected with that, because it felt like these two weirdos were playing with their Barbies. They’re going, ‘Oh, that’s how I used to play!’”

This portrayal of Barbie was something that Moss and Cope had never really seen before. “We never really connected to the character Mattel or Barbie is trying to push,” Cope says. “They’re trying to do this idealistic thing, which is great for young kids. But I think a lot of fans loved our show because they went, ‘That’s real life. Now we’re playing with real toys.’”

Mattel never reached out about the show—neither to send a cease-and-desist order, nor to thank Cope and Moss for popularizing a new take on Barbie. (Cope and Moss even went on to work with Mattel on other stop-motion animation videos with their studio Extra Credit, though none of the content was Barbie-related.) But, Moss says, parodying Mattel and Barbie was “never what the show was about. It was always about the characters.” The dolls, he says, were just the medium to tell their story, in the same way that another director might choose a certain type of film or camera.

“We’re fairly certain it is, at some level, aware of the show,” Cope says of Mattel. “Some of [the Barbie dolls that we used for] our characters, you can still buy. If you’d go on Amazon, the reviews [for those toys] would be about our show. The reviews would be like, ‘This girl is such a bitch. She lit her car on fire!’ I’m sure Mattel was like, ‘What the hell are they talking about!’”

Barbie has changed in the decade following the release of MPGIS. In the upcoming movie, for instance, some Barbies forget how to be Barbie. Ken (Ryan Gosling) sings a memeable, ’80s-style ballad. In one scene, while throwing a disco party, Robbie’s Barbie has an existential crisis on the dance floor. “Do you guys ever think about dying?” she asks the other Barbies, a huge smile still plastered on her flawless face. That subversiveness, Cope and Moss say, was exactly what they were trying to get at with MPGIS.

“[Barbie is] starting to become different, and I’m sure the movie will try to expand its very basic principles,” Cope says. “But that was what was so fun for us: You just never saw them do this. You never saw them act like this. Which is why I’m sure this movie will be interesting.”

Though the two stories—Barbie and MPGIS—are clearly different, both are equally able to show what’s so alluring about Barbie. Barbie is everywhere. She’s one of the—if not the—only toys that has a full aisle at the toy store. That sense of imagination, that she can be and do anything, makes her the perfect vehicle for storytelling.

“Because [the dolls] were all uniform, it was really about who the characters are and how they look or what they do and their physical personality,” Cope says. “That’s also why Barbie is so famous and funny and big, because it can be whatever you want. When kids play with Barbie, there’s no script, there’s no backstories. It’s whatever you decide it is. It can be crazy or awful or hilarious.”

With the release of Barbie, Cope and Moss have seen a recent uptick in viewership on their videos. On Twitter, fans are hoping for the movie to make a reference to MPGIS. The co-creators would love that—though they think it’s unlikely.

If there were to be a reference to the web series, though? Cope would want one of the Barbies to say “Who the fuck are you?” or “I want to poop here.” Moss would love to see a robot arm or a lunch that costs exactly $57.

“If [the movie] did make a reference, or even if it just expanded Barbie a bit, it opens the door to the kind of show that we did and more things like that,” Cope says. “There’s a lot of fun to be had in that world. I love that, for fans, MPGIS is their Barbie lore. To them, that’s part of Barbie.”

And what about vice versa—if Robbie’s beautiful Barbie was introduced to the MPGIS crew?

“She would just be ripped to pieces,” Cope says. “She’s not ready for people not to love her. Our characters would hate everything about her.”