Whoever made that commercial deserves a medal.

I love it! "We are all more than just a princess..."

Use of Beastie Boys song is a bonus!

Behind the scenes:

YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/user/GoldieBlox

GoldieBlox is suing the Beastie Boys to use the parody of their sexist song:

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24599872/oakland-toy-startup-goldieblox-sues-hip-hop-group

This is awesome:

The original Beastie Boys lyrics are: "Girls to do the dishes\ Girls to clean up my room\ Girls to do the laundry\ Girls and in the bathroom." The song, off the band's 1986 album "Licensed to Ill," became a quick hit among adolescent-age boys.

The Beastie Boys responded on Monday with an open letter that said the band members "strongly support empowering young girls" but that GoldieBlox's "video is an advertisement that is designed to sell a product, and long ago, we made a conscious decision not to permit our music and/or name to be used in product ads.

"When we tried to simply ask how and why our song "Girls" had been used in your ad without our permission, YOU sued US," the letter said.

Yes it's a commercial but yes it's a parody. Seems like fair use to me.

The GoldieBlox version is an upgrade, of course. The old lyrics were always disgusting. The new use is definitely pointed and puts the old version on its ear. As for saying that they BB "strongly support empowering young girls" not with their references to whiffle ball bats.  They were good for certain purposes in the hip hop world but that statement is laughable. No one calls them out on that crap. It's weird.

Yes, it's good to see the Beastie Boys being held accountable for their sexist lyrics.

I'm on the GoldieBlox side of this argument.

http://pandawhale.com/post/32461/goldieblox-fair-use-and-the-cult-of-disruption

Felix Salmon says you gotta fight for your right to parody:

If you google “disrupt the pink aisle”, you’ll get 36,800 results, all of which concern a San Francisco-based toy company named GoldieBlox. The company first came to public attention in September of last year, when it launched a highly-successful Kickstarter campaign which ultimately raised $285,881. Like all successful Kickstarter campaigns, there was a viral video; this one featured a highly-photogenic CEO called Debbie, a recent graduate of — you probably don’t need me to tell you this — Stanford University. And yes, before the Kickstarter campaign, there was “a seed roundfrom friends, family and angel investors”. When the viral video kept on generating pre-orders even after the Kickstarter campaign ended, GoldieBlox looked like a classic Silicon Valley startup: young, exciting, fast-growing, and — of course — disruptive.

Not wanting to mess with a proven formula, GoldieBlox kept on producing those viral videos: “GoldieBlox Breaks into Toys R Us” was based on Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, and got over a million views. But that was nothing compared to their latest video, uploaded only a week ago, and already well on its way to getting ten times that figure. This one was based on an early Beastie Boys song, “Girls”, and deliciously subverted it to turn it into an empowering anthem.

Under what Paul Carr has diagnosed as the rules of the Cult of Disruption, GoldieBlox neither sought nor received permission to create these videos: it never licensed the music it used from the artists who wrote it. That wouldn’t be the Silicon Valley way. First you make your own rules — and then, if anybody tries to slap you down, you don’t apologize, you fight. For your right. To parody.

I love that they sued the Beastie Boys. Seriously.

The Queen parody is excellent, too:

By the way, I did buy GoldieBlox for my niece back when they were just a Kickstarter project:

http://pandawhale.com/post/6400/can-a-kids-toy-bring-more-women-into-engineering-rebecca-j-rosen-the-atlantic

You can buy it these days on Amazon or their website: http://goldieblox.com/

The marketing of GoldieBlox has been quite brilliant. Kudos to them!