Gast from the past

Our childhood heroes are increasingly walking on to our screens, jokes and superpowers intact

- REYA MEHROTRA

In Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie, something unthinkable happens—the appearance of cellulite on Barbie’s thigh. It is blasphemous to think that Barbie could be anything less than perfect, because then, what of the millions of girls everywhere in the world who hung their dreams on Barbie’s rounded hips and golden tresses. If Barbie cannot have a happily-ever-after, then

what hope do they have? Yet, Gerwig dared to turn the ideal on its head and in doing so, she challenged us to revisit our childhoods and redefine what perfection meant to us. It was a formula that worked wonders. Three weeks after hitting the theatres on July 21, the film, with an estimated budget of around $145 million, made an astonishing $1 billion at the global box office, making Gerwig the first solo female director with a billion-dollar movie. All the Barbies and Kens of Barbieland must be pumping their plastic fists.

And it is not just Gerwig who is taking us to the back alleys of our childhood. If Barbie can be resurrected, so can others like Shaktimaan and Archie, who are returning in a bigger and grander way. Anyone who grew up between the 1970s and 2000s would call it an idyllic era, when reading was still a valid pastime, and stories still lay inside storybooks and comics, and not on mobile phones and short-form videos.