Mattel has made a major oopsie. On the packaging of the dolls, Mattel has linked to the porn site www.wicked.com (owned by Wicked Pictures, a porn production company) instead of Wicked movie's real site, www.wickedMOVIE.com.
The wrong website appears on the box of all the Mattel range of Wicked dolls, including the Glenda doll, the Deluxe Elphaba Fashion Doll, and the Madame Morrible doll (pictured below).
Madame Morrible doll (credits: Leah Kissinger on Facebook)
This isn't isolated to the US. Dolls sold in the UK are also affected as shown by the pictures obtained from dolls purchased from Amazon UK.
Glinda Fashion Doll (credit: Thu Win/The Techy)
Deluxe Elphaba fashion doll (credit: Thu Win/The Techy)
In addition to the errant misprint on the packaging, the error also appears in the manual of both the singing Elphaba (archived via Wayback Machine) and singing Glenda dolls (archived via Wayback Machine).
Picture from Mattel's PDF user guide of the singing Elphaba doll
Picture from the user guide of the singing Glenda doll
As of the publishing of this post, Mattel has published an apology but has not issued a recall of the dolls.
Mattel had sent a statement to The Techy saying:
"Mattel was made aware of a misprint on the packaging of the Mattel Wicked collection dolls, primarily sold in the U.S., which intended to direct consumers to the official WickedMovie.com landing page. We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this. Parents are advised that the misprinted, incorrect website is not appropriate for children. Consumers who already have the product are advised to discard the product packaging or obscure the link found on the package, and obscure the link found on any instruction materials."
This would be a costly fix for Mattel because the domain www.wicked.com belongs to Wicked Pictures and was registered on July 19, 1994. The first appearance on Wayback Machine was on December 19, 1996. Therefore, Mattel couldn't simply buy the domain.
Wicked is a film by Universal Pictures and will be released on November 22, 2024.
If you are wondering about the title, Defying Gravity is one of the main theme songs in the Wicked musical.
See this version by Idina Menzel:
The author would like to credit iamwomanhearmepour on Reddit for breaking this news.
Update: Added statement from Mattel.
