American Girl Doll

Flightless Bird

David Farrier

Comedy, Flightless Bird, Documentary, Society & Culture, David Farrier

5 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2024

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week’s episode, David visits the American Girl store in Los Angeles, attempting to learn what is so American about the American Girl doll. There he meets Alyson Campbell, the Senior Events and Marketing Coordinator at American Girl - who explains how the store works. He then gets Jamie Cygielman on the line, senior vice president and GM for American Girl. He discovers the doll is the invention of Pleasant T. Rowland - an American educator, writer, and philanthropist. She spent some time as a TV news reporter - anchoring KGO-TV in San Francisco from 68 to 71. By the mid 80s, Pleasant had saved over a million dollars from selling the textbooks she’d written for students - and started American Girl, hoping to teach kids about American history through the medium of 18 inch dolls. With all this in mind - David heads up to the restaurant to dine with his own American Girl doll, meeting both kids and adults who are fans. LINKS: Flightless Bird Live in Seattle Feb 8: https://www.stgpresents.org/events/flightless-bird/ Flightless Bird on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@flightlessbirdpodcast Flightless Bird merch: https://www.webworm.store/merch/flightless-bird Contact Rob and David: flightlessbirdchat@gmail.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi Hayden, how are you?
0:03.5	Hi.
0:04.4	I'm calling you about the podcast. Is that okay?
0:07.2	Oh, but why did I think, why? I actually got fooled again. I actually got fooled again.
0:13.0	We're doing an episode today about American girl. And without saying anymore, do you have any idea what American Girl is?
0:22.7	Yeah, Hillary Clinton. Now, American Girl Dolls. Does that help?
0:27.4	Kim Kardashian. No, what? I'm just naming American Girls. Is that not what you want?
0:32.7	So American Girl, I'm reading from Wikipedia, American Girl is an American line of 18-inch dolls released on May 5, 1986 by Pleasant Company.
0:44.1	The dolls portray eight to 14-year-old girls of various ethnicities, faiths, nationalities,
0:50.0	and social classes throughout different time periods throughout history.
0:53.6	Okay.
0:56.6	Well, I mean, few questions.
0:59.6	How do you know which faith this doll is?
1:04.0	They come, I believe, with a little storybook in each box,
1:06.8	and so they all come preloaded with a backstory.
1:07.8	Right.
1:12.7	So it's hard to just tell from looking at someone, you know, this is a practicing Buddhist. Do they come in the lotus position or something? Like, is there, so do you
1:17.6	get a decent idea of their theology? These are all good questions that I need to find out.
1:22.7	Because it seems like that it's sort of pretty woke, you know, diversity, equality, all of that stuff. But you really
1:29.8	need to get into the nitty gritty because even if they are of a certain bay, well, they could
1:35.4	have problematic beliefs within that bay. They could have cultish beliefs. They could be close
1:39.5	brethren, for instance. You have a couple of young kids.
	...

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