Mattel's Wicked dolls recalled due to issue with website printed on boxes

[Ponyfan]

Mattel has recalled all of their Wicked movie dolls due to an inappropriate website being printed on the boxes.




Ponyfan

[lovesbabysquirmy]

*golf claps*  I cannot believe they made such a mistake.  The adult entertainment company in question has had that name for decades... and all movie websites almost always have "-movie.com" in their titles.

[BlackCurtains]

A friend tried to buy one of the dolls from Target but it was flagged in the system and they wouldn't let her buy it.

[Ponyfan]

Once's they're in the store computers as recalled. the stores can't sell them.  That happened with a retro Barbie case.  It was street dated, but was coded in some Walmart's computers as recalled so the stores couldn't sell the cases.

  Most of the dolls didn't interest me, but the one that did was the Elphaba that sang "Defying Gravity" 

How can someone not double check a website before you print it on millions of boxes?


Ponyfan

[Zapper]

Absolute blunder. Now there's hardly any dolls on shelves for the movie premiere. Incredibly stupid and bad for PR.

Not to spread any rumors, but for this to make it to production there must have been some employee somewhere to notice it and letting it slide to cause chaos or because it would be "funny" to subject kids to x-rated material.

I have lost trust in toy companies after finding out how many people working there absolutely hate kids, little girls in particular. I have sadly had enough in-person experiences to come to this conclusion.

[Beth3346]

yeah whatever QA process they have over at Mattel needs some serious review. no one thought to just visit the link to check the website?

i've definitely worked on websites where placeholder content managed to get into production. especially if it looks like it could be real. at least websites can be updated. i would think physical products should have a more robust quality review. if anything because it costs the company so much if something goes wrong.

[CharmsPonies]

Not to spread any rumors, but for this to make it to production there must have been some employee somewhere to notice it and letting it slide to cause chaos or because it would be "funny" to subject kids to x-rated material.

I believe this was actually done on accident because they used AI to generate information on the boxes, and then did not double check it thoroughly enough.
Here is an article from earlier this year where Mattel expressed interest in using ai to make designing boxes faster: https://www.fastcompany.com/91146702/how-mattel-is-using-ai-to-bring-your-next-barbie-box-to-life

There are a lot of issues with companies embracing AI and using it for every single thing they do, but this is an example of how that can go wrong. Ai can't actually think for itself, it just uses keywords and makes up information that sounds like it would be correct. Hence, it saw the keyword "Wicked" as the movie title, and it just decided to make up the website Wicked dot com without really knowing that it is not the real movie website.

[Zapper]

CharmsPonies, yeah I don't doubt they did this by accident. I was implying someone must have noticed some time along the way because even AI needs to get curated and checked. My implication is that someone or more people just ignored the mistake. Most movie websites have "themovie" or "-movie" in the title. It would have been easy to notice or check by just going on the website.

yeah whatever QA process they have over at Mattel needs some serious review. no one thought to just visit the link to check the website?

This exactly.

[Ponyfan]

I think it's terrible that there's no dolls out now.  I have a feeling by the time boxes are fixed that most kids will have lost interest in the dolls.

Edit:  Saw some Wicked dolls today and the way they fixed it was putting a black sticker over the website.  Someone scrapped the sticker off of one of the boxes and it still said Wicked.com on it.


Ponyfan

[Zapper]

They probably didn't want to go through the process making new boxes and repackaging the dolls. It would have been a waste of money, so stickers it is! But them still coming off to reveal the link is some low quality crap. It's like they shot themselves in the foot.