The XX Factor

New GoldieBlox Video Reps Beyoncé, Hillary Clinton, RBG, and Other 2015 Feminists

This little Beyoncé is going places.

Screenshot/GoldieBlox

Last year, GoldieBlox sent the Internet into a tailspin with its viral commercial set to a Beastie Boys parody. The toys were meant to get girls interested in engineering (yay!) but relied on a pink-and-purple color palette and a princess storyline (boo!). The company used traditional feminine signifiers to up-end prescriptive feminine toy culture (yay!) but sued the Beastie Boys to preempt any claim of copyright infringement (boo!).

Anyway, GoldieBlox set itself up to appeal to mainstream feminist sensibilities, and its newest video follows squarely in that mold. The commercial is a roll call of big names in 2015 feminism—Misty Copeland, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Abby Wambach, Amy Schumer, Viola Davis, NFL coach Jen Welter, Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé—as impersonated in their triumphant moments by young girls. A tiny Clinton in a blue blazer signs important-looking documents on Air Force One. The future RBG eats a gay-wedding cake while smirking from the bench. Mini Minaj and Bey do their besties thing à la “Feelin’ Myself.”

The video’s commitment to accuracy is impressive: The girl repping Davis, the first black woman to win an Emmy for best actress in a drama, accepts the award in a near-knockoff of the one Davis wore. Little Wambach even sports a credible version of one of the soccer star’s better androgynous hairdos. It’s a feel-good, damn-cute rundown of the high-achieving women of the year, set to a kind of Kidz Bop version of Fifth Element’s “Worth It.”

Where does a set of building blocks fit in? Isis Anchalee—the software engineer who’s had to convince too many people that she can be both a software engineer and an attractive woman of color— shows up with a gaggle of girls holding the hashtag she started, #ILookLikeAnEngineer, a neat summation of GoldieBlox’s stated goals. The other impersonators get their own hashtags, too: #ILookLikeAComedian for Schumer, #ILookLikeAnEntrepreneur for Bey. Good on GoldieBlox for expanding the very effective #ILookLike construction to other male- and white-dominated fields that could use a shake-up. But the bigger props go to the young actresses who do their role models serious, adorable justice.