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Bizarre toy from Taiwan: Benign Girl

Mark Frauenfelder at 3:31 pm Thu, Jun 29, 2006

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Benign Girl is a Barbie knockoff from Taiwan. The name must be due to a weird translation hiccup, like maybe they were looking for a synonym for "sweet" or "kind."
200606291529I was standing near the register looking at the assorted things when all of a sudden I spotted "Benign Girl" and suddenly I heard the mermaids singing. Two Latina women were looking at Benign Girl and reaching forward as if to grab it and in a flash I knew this was something extremely precious and rare and that I needed to act fast!

So I reached around the women and snatched BG. And before they knew what happened I had paid and fled the scene, adrenalining all the way.

On the side of the package were the bullet points:

*BATTERY
*OPERATED
*CREATIVE
*VARIOUS MUSIC

The instructions on the package:
"Beautiful girl, press any button!"

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Reader comment: Moon Custafer says:

My local drugstore/post office has a number of odd imported toys whose packaging bears the results of too thorough a search through the translation dictionary. My favourite is the mechanical tortoise labelled "Magical Chelonian."

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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