Picture this: you’re a strait-laced, ordinary South Carolina mother, living your perfectly normal South Carolina life when one November day, in the weeks before Thanksgiving, you purchase your daughter a doll made by toymaking giant and Barbie creator Mattel.
Your purchase is to coincide with the release of Wicked, the $145m blockbuster adaptation of the smash-hit, long-running musical of the same name starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. The production is intended to be Universal Pictures’ huge bet for big 2024 profit and wholesome end-of-year family extravaganza.
For those who’ve not seen the film or watched the musical, it’s a singing, dancing, feelgood plea for tolerance told in the world of The Wizard of Oz and focusing on the backstory of the much- maligned Wicked Witch of the East who was crushed to death when Dorothy, Toto and their Kansas house flew into Munchkinland and landed on her.
If you’re that everyday, American as apple pie South Carolina mom, then it’s the kind of film you probably won’t have any problem with your daughter enjoying and loving so much she begs you to bring home the inevitable toy merchandising.
The problems arise when, because this is the digital age and everything comes with a URL or QR code that’s supposed to offer youngsters further online engagement with their toys and the companies who make them, your daughter decides to visit the site listed on the box of her Wicked doll: wicked.com.
For any readers about to skip the rest of this article and visit wicked.com, forewarned is forearmed because as Mattel quickly realised last month, when stories first began to appear, the site they had meant to send young toy buyers to should have been WickedMovie.com — a pretty underwhelming website that lists US showtimes for the film and allows you to take pictures and create your own Wicked movie poster, while offering trailers, clips and interviews related to the film.
Wicked.com, however, is another story entirely — the home of the pornographic film company Wicked Pictures, which as its “about” sections proudly informs visitors — after they’ve clicked the mandatory and completely ineffective over-18 declaration box, of course — was “Established in Canoga Park, California on March 1 1993 ... with a firm commitment to producing quality parody porn movies, a decision the company has stayed true to since its beginning”. Now the company is offering a $5 a month discount membership fee for those porn parody enthusiasts who appreciate its “Hollywood-like production quality and variety of content”.
While Wicked Pictures has over the years produced pornographic parodies of beloved children’s tales and films, including Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty, and NSFW versions of popular superhero fare like Justice League, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Men in Black and Deadpool, it’s obviously not a site for children as that poor South Carolina mother was shocked to realise when her daughter showed her where her toybox URL had sent her.
What her daughter thought of Wicked titles like Kenzie Loves Girls 2, Talk of the Town and The Hunger and the company’s very different movie stars such as like US president-elect Donald Trump’s favourite Stormy Daniels, is anyone’s shocked guess.
Her mother, however, was furious and is now the first plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit brought against Mattel this week, claiming that she and her daughter suffered “emotional distress”, as a result of the misprint and because of what they saw.
“These scenes were hard-core, full on nude pornographic images depicting actual intercourse,” reads the lawsuit, and if the plaintiff had been aware of such an inappropriate defect in the product she would not have purchased it,” reads the lawsuit.
This writer did not see any fully naked women or depictions of actual intercourse on the home page when visiting it (for research purposes), but that may be because Wicked Pictures is aware of the Mattel blunder and is doing its bit to protect the eyes of younger viewers.
Mattel had already pulled the dolls off its shelves, after the initial snafu was revealed last month, but that was too late for South Carolina plaintiff #1 and her daughter. The company’s advice that consumers who had already bought dolls should, “discard the packaging or obscure the link” had apparently not arrived in South Carolina in time.
The Wicked movie has been smashing US box office records, making a huge $112.5m in its opening weekend and driving on to north of $260m US gross this week.
That enthusiasm has meant that Mattel can’t afford to lose out on the potentially multimillion-dollar profits that its tie-in dolls could make, so they’ve been returned to the shelves, “with correct packaging at retailers online and in stores to meet the strong consumer demand for the products.
“The previous misprint on the packaging in no way impacts the value or play experience provided by the product itself in the limited number of units sold before the correction,” the company assured the public in a statement.
The lawsuit does not make any claims against Universal or the makers of the film and as one executive told Variety, it’s unlikely that the Mattel lawsuit will negatively affect the film at the box office.
Whether a US judge decides that poor South Carolina mother has a case will probably have to wait until next year.
But for now, if you’re a mom and your daughter is wild about Wicked and wants a doll for Christmas, it may be best to err on the side of caution and ensure that you “discard the packaging” or “obscure the link” and hope that you never have to have a conversation about wicked.com.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.