Credit: SNLThere’s been a lot of talk lately, as the premiere of the Barbie movie creeps closer and closer, about this new Mattel Cinematic Universe that the company announced a little while ago. As the first of what will be many films comes to the last legs of its press tour, others are just ramping up.
Talk of a Hot Wheels movie directed by J.J. Abrams and a Barney movie involving Daniel Kaluuya has been a new favorite subject, and some have just remembered that Tom Hanks is already attached to a project that will see him play Major Matt Mason – the astronaut doll that inspired Buzz Lightyear.
Mattel is Hard at Work on their Cinematic Universe
Related: Marketing for ‘Barbie’ Keeps Getting Weirder – And Better
Other announced projects have even less detail surrounding them – we know that Mattel wants to make 45 movies in total. Among the list of properties to be adapted are other familiar names, including Polly Pocket, Uno, and American Girl.
For some of these, it’s easy to imagine how they could make them into a movie – in fact, Polly Pockets are so similar to Barbies in play style that we have to wonder how Mattel will manage to make the two films substantially different enough. For others, it’s more difficult – the only situation we could imagine for Uno is one where they’re trapped in the game until they finish somehow, like in Jumanji.
However, for at least one of these upcoming films, Saturday Night Live has already given us an answer when it comes to the question of “what will this be about?” After the premiere of the first full Barbie trailer, SNL decided to show us what it might look like if Mattel did this with their American Girl dolls.
SNL Predicts Mattel American Girl Movie
Related: Disney Announces Live-Action ‘Bambi,’ Bringing A Dwayne Johnson SNL Sketch To Life
The American Girl Doll is a line of historical dolls meant to teach young girls – roughly ages six to ten – about what life was like for girls their age in different periods of American history. The dolls stretch as far back as the era before colonization, where Native Americans lived in peace, all the way up to the 90s – though their main core series of dolls stops at their WWII-era doll Molly.
The American Girls each already have an individual history – that’s the whole point of the dolls. Each one comes with a series of books to help put girls in their doll’s shoes, whether that mean suffering through the Great Depression with Kit, or trying to avoid cholera with Kirsten.
However, SNL recently asked: What if they were all living together in one world, like in Barbie?
The result is a trailer for a movie in which it appears that all the American Girls are living together in an orphanage, showing off their various historical styles and sharing their tragic backstories.
What Might the Mattel’s American Girl Movie Actually Look Like?
Related: Fans Are Loving SNL’s Gay Jafar and His Attack on Ron DeSantis
In the fake trailer, the dolls repeat the phrase “It’s okay!” as they seem to journey in covered wagon from the Doll World to the Real World, losing friends to what appears to be cholera along the way. Fake reviews said things like, “These little girls are going through too much.”
We have absolutely no idea what the American girls will be put through in their own movie when their turn comes in the Mattel Cinematic Universe.
Perhaps the company will go the more traditional route, and simply return to telling the individual American Girls’ stories in a cinematic fashion. These films have been made before, albeit with much smaller budgets than the newly minted Mattel Studios would provide, and since the material is all already there, it would be a no-brainer.
In the SNL sketch special attention is paid to Addie – something most American Girl fans will tell you was rarely done in promotions or magazines when they were kids. Her problems as a Black girl and runaway slave in 1864 are an obvious departure from the rest of the solemn stories in the circle, and the other dolls – all white save for the Hispanic girl Josefina – don’t seem to quite know what to say.
It’s possible that any film Mattel makes could address issues like those – and the fact that American Girl still has far more white dolls than dolls of any other color – much like Barbie will address criticisms of the doll for being anti-feminist in its history.
However, given Mattel’s apparent dedication to keeping their films fresh and interesting, we wouldn’t be surprised if they went another way entirely – we’ll have to wait until they announce a director or writer for the American Girl project to make any more educated guesses.
What do you think they’re going to do with the American Girl movies in the Mattel Cinematic Universe? Let Inside the Magic know in the comments below.