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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Upbeat_Ruin on 2024-12-16 03:18:26+00:00.

As soon as this incident happened, I knew I had to make a Hobby Drama post about it. “Ain’t no way I’m letting some other goober do a write-up on the situation. It’s my time to shine,” I thought. Thus, I started drafting the writeup ASAP. However, I had to wait for the requisite two-week period to pass before I could post it here. Now that the time window is correct, here it is.

CW: Because of the nature of this episode of hobby drama, sex and pornography will be discussed, albeit non-graphically.

Wicked is a 2003 stage musical by Stephen Schwartz, based on the 1995 book by Gregory Maguire. Which is itself a reimagining of the 1939 Wizard of Oz film, adapted from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel—okay, you get the idea. It stars Elphaba Thropp, a green-skinned girl with magical abilities, and the plot is the origin story of how she became the Wicked Witch of the West. Within the story, Elphaba is first rivals and then friends (possibly girlfriends, depending on how you read the subtext) with Galinda, who goes on to become Glinda the Good. The original Broadway cast had Idina Menzel playing Elphaba, which is why all those animash music videos from 2014 put Elsa in Elphaba’s role.

Although critical reception has been somewhat mixed, audiences adore Wicked. The show kicked ass and took names at the box office, putting it in the top three alongside Lion King and Phantom of the Opera. People loved the new perspective on a classic villain (Wicked was doing the sympathetic villain thing a decade ahead of Disney’s live action remakes), the complex set pieces, and the bombastic, catchy, somewhat cheesy soundtrack. The iconic poster, a minimalist piece showing Glinda whispering into Elphaba’s ear as she glances down and grins, has become a shorthand for Broadway. Okay, I admit it, I’m a fan. Fight me.

Fans have clamored for a movie adaption for two decades, and now, Universal Pictures has finally delivered. Starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, the film is split into two parts, with 1 releasing in November 2024 and 2 coming out in November 2025.

That’s just the background information. The actual drama surrounds the dolls that Mattel produced as tie-in merch. Now, if you were here for my post on Miniverse, you’ll recall that I work in the claims section of a department store. I also walk past the toy department multiple times a day en route to my area, past a display of Wicked goodies. And a large cardboard cutout of Ariana Grande dressed as Glinda, that I somehow failed to recognize as Ariana Grande. Anyway, this endcap display first appeared at my store around August or mid-September. I don’t really recall (pun intended, you’ll see why.) It featured costumes and the aforementioned Mattel dolls. Although I thought they were neat, I’m not a doll person, so I didn’t buy any. Except now I kind of wish I did, because I think I could have scored myself a collector’s item.

In early November, around 11/10, the dolls suddenly had to be recalled. No, there wasn’t anything wrong with the dollies themselves. No finger-eating mechanisms or skin-burning resin this time. The reason is far dumber and more entertaining than that.

That day, I was walking to my area, when a coworker pushing a cartful of them stopped me and said, “Hey [Upbeat_Ruin], do you know why these are recalled?”

Taking her literally and thinking she was asking the dutiful claims guy for his insider information, I said, “Huh, I don’t know. I haven’t checked my email for a product removal alert.”

She chuckled and replied, “You see the URL?” as she turned a doll over and pointed out a small line of text printed on the box.

I looked and beheld what it said: www.wicked.com.

Confused, I said, “Is there a typo?”

“No,” she replied. “That’s a porn site!”

A look of shock and mild horror crossed my face. Oh, no. Oh, dear. What was supposed to be www.wickedmovie.com printed on packaging for a children’s toy, meant to take them to an innocent movie site, instead became a portal to SIN. The URL takes you to the homepage for Wicked Pictures, a long-running adult site. That one little web address, that tiny 10-point line of text, was sure to be a headache that started at Mattel’s headquarters and trickled all the way down the supply chain to my humble store. As a small silver lining, wicked.com stops you with a “You must be 18 or older to proceed” splash when you first arrive at the site instead of throwing you in, raw-no-rubber, like some adult sites do.

We pulled all our Wicked dolls (the other merchandise was safe) and boxed them up to ship back to the manufacturer. Hopefully, they’re just going to repackage them in boxes with the correct URL, and not start from scratch, because that would be a big waste otherwise. Also, we had a hiccup where we’d thought we’d sent back all the offending dolls, just in time for another box to arrive on the freight truck. My poor manager paged me in a panic, asking for help because he didn’t know what to do. But we got things worked out in the end.

For the material consequences involved in this drama, I do not doubt at all that some poor copywriter got read the riot act. And promptly fired. Not to mention that stores carrying the dolls are missing out on sales, right as the Wicked film released. It was a box office smash, and no doubt plenty of people would want to go home with a Glinda or Elphaba of their own…if they could! As of writing (15 December 2024), the dolls are still off the shelves, with no word on when they’ll return.

Really, I’m wondering how you screw things up so badly. A ten-second google search to make sure the correct URL was being printed on the box could have saved all this trouble.

Rumor has it that AI is to blame. Because it’s the corporate world’s shiny new toy and everyone is shoving it into everything unnecessarily, Mattel wanted in on the fad. Back in June, the company began distributing a version of Adobe Firefly to their product designers across all their subsidiaries. The intention was to use the software’s image generation feature to assist with designing products and packaging. The higher-ups assured the designers that the generative AI was only trained on stock images already owned by Mattel, likely to ward off any misgivings about the ethics of its use. Nor would the images cooked up by a robot end up as the final product. The AI-generated imagery would only be for the work-in-progress stage, they said. Despite it all, many designers preferred to use their traditional pencil and paper.

Now, I should be clear that there’s no concrete proof that this flub-up happened because of AI. I’m not going to jump from point A to point Z like that. Still, I can see how it could happen: some overworked product designer plugs in a few prompts to Firefly, it spits out an image, the results are shaped into the final product without looking too closely at the details. With how many new products (4,000 or so according to the article I linked) Mattel churns out each year, it’s not out of the question that the designers might try to cut corners.

I think the funny thing is that the Wicked novel, upon which the show and movie are based, is actually a fairly adult book in its own right. It’s not straight-up porn, but sexuality and unfaithfulness form the backbone of the plot. People fuck all over the place in the novel, both heterosexually and homosexually. A character named Tibbet fucks an anthropomorphic tiger. Elphaba and Fiyero fuck, and then she gives birth to their son Liir while comatose. What point am I making by saying this? I dunno.

Oh yeah, and as a bit of trivia to make this situation even dumber, Wicked Pictures is the adult site that helped launch Stormy Daniels’ career. Yeah, that Stormy.