Camp Ken returns with manly makeover

Barbies ritzy playmate, Ken, makes a comeback as an immoral toyboy in <i>Toy Story 3.</i> Photo / Supplied.

He's an out-of-the-box one, that Ken. But what is the truth about Toy Story 3's breakout star?

While it's true that his underpants never came off, no matter how hard you tried to lever them with a screwdriver, Ken, Barbie's other half, was in many ways supposed to be the perfect "boyfriend".

I understood that, even as an 8-year-old, and so did my friends.

Ken's six-pack was exuberantly defined. His hair, first made from felt, then plastic, then rooted with real fibres, has over the years never been anything less than abundant.

If Barbie made little girls insecure about their bodies, Ken's physique was just as unattainable as her tiny waist and huge breasts. Yale University obesity expert Kelly D. Brownell wrote that the average man would have to "grow 20 inches taller and add nearly eight inches to his neck circumference, 11 inches to his chest and 10 inches to his waist to resemble the muscular Ken". What real man could live up to that?

But since seeing him in Toy Story 3 last weekend, I've changed my mind about Ken. Forty-nine years after his launch, Ken is the breakout star of this year's best film. He's not perfect, or particularly realistic. He's complicated. And he still has much to teach young girls about men.

Michael Keaton, who voices Ken in the film, has said that he didn't realise director Lee Unkrich wanted him to resemble "an insecure Burt Reynolds".

But Keaton gets the mid-1980s, frighteningly shallow California-guy just right, in a role that Bret Easton Ellis couldn't have bettered.

For although he sweeps Barbie off her plastic stilettos in his first scene ("Have we met before?" she asks giddily as Ken descends from the three-storey Dreamhouse in an elevator, dressed in turquoise Bermuda shorts and matching leopard-print shirt), Ken is soon revealed to be a mendacious, immoral, effete and deeply vain toyboy who drops good-hearted Barbie at the first sign of trouble.

Even when we were children, we always knew Ken was a bit odd. He didn't really seem to have a role. What did Ken do?

Action Man, whom I preferred, had death slides, rucksacks, helmets. Ken had an extensive wardrobe and a permatan. In the 1980s he wore silver and gold lamé tuxedos, neat white tennis outfits and white Nehru jackets with yellow slacks. And that was just for hanging around at home on Barbie's sofa.

Famously, the first couple of extruded plastic never got hitched and the long-awaited Wedding Day Ken (1990) was dressed as best man rather than bridegroom. Even Barbie dumped him in 2004, with Mattel releasing a statement announcing the pair "have decided to spend some time apart". (He returned two years later).

Toy Story 3's makers sublimate Ken's essential ambiguity with the other characters teasing him for being "a girl's toy".

So, is Ken gay? As the other adults in the cinema sniffled over the "growing up and letting go" plot, I found myself considering the evidence. This month he models rugged fashion in a full-length shoot for the British edition of Esquire magazine - I kid you not - and later this year two special Mad Men dolls will see Ken playing both Don Draper and Roger Sterling (cocktails and cigarettes not included).

So maybe Mattel is attempting to make him straighter. But it's too late. Ken's outfits have always teetered into camp, sometimes further. One notorious doll of 1993, Earring Magic Ken, earned a lengthy feature in the New York Times about his apparent transformation into a gay raver (Ken had a sex toy dangling from a chain around his neck, which a Mattel spokesman desperately described as a "necklace").

Pixar has kept Ken in the closet but he is, ultimately, a walker. They have turned him into the perfect companion for the little girl in 2010 who idolises any female star seen with a ritzily dressed, tanned young man at their side.

LOWDOWN

Who: Ken, Barbie's longtime companion

Where and when: Toy Story 3, screening now

- Independent