Linda Parson Pipi Longstocking

What would Linda Parson say about Pippi Long Stocking? (Feb 21 2010)
Parson states that “in our mass-media culture we are surrounded by the vestiges of fairy tales from marketing of Disney products to the perpetuation of romance ideology, the binary positioning women and men, and women’s and girls’ obsession to manifest socially defined beauty.” Pippi Longstocking challenges this idea since she is not obsessed with her looks; she is a freckled faced red hair nine year old girl who lives on the edge. She has superhuman strengths and is able to lift her horse one-handed without difficulty. Pippi doesn’t like to follow directions from adults and tends to mock them or challenges them when she encounters them. Her clothes are miss- matched or ragged.
Well according to Sherri Inness in “Anti- Barbies” she talks about the American Girl dolls and how they are challenging Barbie and the views that girls have about themselves. However I found it very fastening how these dolls start off at $82 and can total up to $995 if you were to purchase all the accessories that went with them. These dolls were marketed towards the middle-upper class white family. Sherrie Innes would say that the Pippi Longstocking doll would market to all classes, Pippi is no ordinary girl- she has bright red pigtails, she can carry a horse with one hand, and she is not afraid of anything! She would need no accessories as she finds adventure in everything she does making pancakes, cleaning around the house, going to school and many more adventures that she takes. Unlike the American Girl dolls that grew in sales over 7 years it took years for Pippi Longstocking to become popular. The first Pippi book was published in Sweden in 1945 and it didn't take too long for Lindgren's book to reach the screen, but this was rarely seen and the few stills that surface from it showed a bulky young woman with a female wrestler physique, hardly the ideal image of a boisterous nine year old girl! After this production it took nearly two decades before anyone else attempted to film Pippi, and when they did it was for the small screen. In the 1970’s the Pippi TV series and films rampaged throughout Europe and much of the world gaining a foothold they have never relinquished. Inness would say that both Pippi and the American Girl dolls taught young girls was it is okay to be different and the importance of friendship with all enthicy and class. I did find it strange that the American Doll company makes a black doll and markets her as a slave. This seemed strange to me since their demographic is towards the upper middle class girls which back in the day would have been from a family who mostly likely approved of having