True. I have read that the original Barbie Doll was modeled after some kind of 'doll' that the Germans made for their troops, based on the idea of a perfect German woman. While I don't know if that's completely true, it is true that it was certainly based on some one's idea of a perfect female.
Maybe the reason she is so skinny was so the manufacturer could save on plastic.
I don’t see her as so skinny, Wikipedia says that she was estimated as 36-18-33, well she is a doll so this stuff is meaningless, besides, even those numbers are not so far from the reality of my ex.
Do people do this with male “action figures”? I never owned a GI Joe and all that, but are they all supposed to be proportional to a preferred human, (are humans all proportional to some ideal?), aren’t cartoon figures drawn with 3 fingers because the proportions don’t work with cartoons or representations of human figures crunched down to 11”, like Barbie is?
Was your German doll this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild_Lilli_doll