This ain’t your mother’s Dreamhouse. Or yours, most likely. In fact, until Greta Gerwig came along to escort Barbie to Oscar territory, I’m not sure they ever made a Dreamhouse like this one.

Created at the zenith of the Obama era, the animated web series Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse anticipated the fourth-wall-breaking, consumerism-lampooning, Ken-mocking comedy of 2023’s Barbie by over a decade. It’s smart, it’s funny, it has a 12-episode run on Netflix right now, and if you’re looking for more of the movie’s cheerfully subversive magic, it’s all right here.

Written primarily by David Wiebe and Robin J. Stein and produced by Mattel as a series of web and YouTube shorts — collected by theme into the 12 Netflix episodes — from 2012–15, Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse has little in common with the glut of other CGI Barbie animated shows littering the big red streaming service. This isn’t a straightforward comedy-adventure kids’ cartoon, though it’s certainly kid-friendly (no jokes about Ken’s flesh-colored bulge in this one). Much like the movie, it’s an admittedly gentle but extremely sharp satire of the doll it’s supposed to be marketing. I’m not sure what Barbie creator Ruth Handler would think of it, but Don Draper would be pleased.

Wiebe, Stein, and their crew of talented writers, animators, and voice actors (led by Kate Higgins as Barbie herself) mined decades of Barbie iconography and stereotypes to get adult-size gags out of the children’s toy. In the process, they wrote a partial playbook for the approach the film would take years later. At this point, you may be looking at the shocking pink plasticity of the series and thinking I sound crazy. Trust me, ever since my kids found the series ten years ago, I’ve been getting that on a regular basis. Until people watch, that is. Life in the Dreamhouse, like the Matrix, is something you have to experience for yourself. If you liked the movie, you’ll see the two have a lot in common.

It’s a dream come true for me: I finally got to write about one of the funniest kids’ cartoons I’ve ever seen, Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse, for Vulture!