Ebay Pulls Django Dolls

EBay pulls Django Dolls

Django unboxed: Doll tie-ins from Tarantino movie
Django Unchained pulled from sale

If there was ever a set of toys worthy of the tag "not suitable
for children" then it would have to be the official merchandise
produced in conjunction with Quentin Tarantino's much-lauded
spaghetti Western-meets-blaxploitation epic Django Unchained.
The dolls depict the film's main characters: revenge-seeking
freed slave Django (Jamie Foxx), bounty hunter Dr King Schultz
(Christoph Waltz) and brutal slave owner Calvin Candie
(Leonardo DiCaprio), none of whom would be particularly
comforting to snuggle up in bed with.

Following criticism from civil-rights groups, production of the
dolls was swiftly brought to a standstill by film producers the
Weinstein Company, but they could still be found being sold at
massively inflated prices on eBay – some going for thousands
of dollars. Last week, however, eBay also made the decision
block sales of the dolls, stating they were "in violation of eBay's
offensive-materials policy".


But despite the dolls being withdrawn, the film which inspired
them continues to show in cinemas. For Andrea Plaid, associate
editor of Racialicious, a US blog that looks at the relationship
between race and popular culture, this is because toys quite
literally "play with slavery".


"It's one thing for an adult to spend money to see a racially
insensitive film. The assumption is an adult has the capacity to
understand it is historical fiction.

"But a toy is viewed as something to give a child who is
developing their understanding of the world. I suspect the toys,
and their associations with children, became a controversy that
the film studio just really didn't want to get into."