Old ‘Barbie’ Animated Series Becomes a Huge Hit on Netflix

Barbie’s enormous success in theaters continues to reverberate throughout the pop culture world. Rather than just showing up and doing insane numbers at the box office and that being that… Barbie is having a full-blown resurgence. Mattel has slowly and steadily been releasing tons of Barbie material over the years, just nothing quite on the level of the blockbuster feature film.

Between 2001 and 2009, 16 direct-to-video Barbie films were released. A good few of those are available on streaming services. The real star here is Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse though. This series has managed to take the number 5 spot on Netflix’s weekly top ten shows list, racking up 1.9 million viewers and 9.1 million total viewing hours.

The series actually started out premiered the internet, available on YouTube and the official Barbie website back in 2012. Up until the release of the Barbie movie, the streaming numbers for the series weren’t really anything to write home about. Now though, we can expect a very major uptick in pretty much all Barbie-related activity.

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Life in the Dreamhouse follows Barbie and her boyfriend Ken, and various other characters in a mock reality show format. While not quite as meta as Greta Gerwig’s film, it does occasionally satirize the tropes of the Barbie brand.

Aside from just the major increase in attention on Barbie-related media, Mattel has big plans for the future. There are projects in the works centered around everything from Barney to Hot Wheels. There’s also the potential for a sequel in the works, although Barbie director Greta Gerwig said there were no immediate plans as of now. The focus was on creating a really solid single work, not so much on setting up a whole media franchise. Upon seeing the success of the first Barbie, Mattel will almost certainly want to make another.

If the movie wasn’t enough for you, you can definitely check out Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse on Netflix.