Realistic Playscale Fashion Dolls

It's time we brought figurines, like Barbie and Ken, home from the fashion runways. They seem to be unrealistic anorexic poster children, dressed for appearance at a toxically eternal fashion show or a never-ending formal ballroom, and living in a collection of pink and purple dollhouses.

GI Joe and other military action figures, on the other hand, are engaged forever in World War II battles that never end; available alternatives appear to be endless battalions of
well-equipped German military figures, glorifying a very sad chapter in world history, perfectly uniformed for a battle dress inspection that will never happen.

It's time we brought them back home to the normal world of the towns and cities from which they came, dressed in standard street and work clothes. Where are the usual variety of cars on the street? Why are so many excellent models of cars built in incompatible scales like 1:18? Surely, it would have been just as easy to design them to harmonize with other miniature worlds. Where are the houses, stores, and buildings that form the normal backdrop to these street scenes? Even model railroads can be found in one-eighth scale (one-and-one-half inches to the foot) but skip over the almost obvious one-sixth size, when trolleys and street cars to take Barbie and her kin into town would have made so much sense.

Only now are appropriate and realistic houses being shown at web sites like Shrunken Treasures, which has done a remarkably good job of manufacturing and selling Barbie-size (GI Joe-size) two-inch-to-the-foot homes for our cast of characters, houses that look like they were designed by architects and built by builders in our hometown. It's about time !

Our goal, here at Miniature Universe, will be to attempt to rationalize the scales, the clothing, the sculpts, and all the parts of our normal world into one harmonious whole. We will urge miniature artisans to design and construct realistic true-to-scale figures --- we know it can be done. ... and we're going to lobby for miniature scenes modeled in Forced Perspective so that they make sense to the eye. More about that in future posts.

Please tell us what you think.