American Girls Collection/Trivia
- Acclaimed Flop: The feature film Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, while critically well-received, barely made a profit at the box office. It did not help that theatres at the time were understandably leery about showing "another doll movie" after the disaster that is Bratz.
- Dawson Casting: Some of the lead actresses from the films were a few years older than the characters they portrayed, namely Shailene Woodley, who was 13 when she played Felicity, and Erin Pitt who was also 13 when she portrayed 9-year-old Isabelle Palmer. In some films, this would be averted like with Abigail Breslin who was ten years old when she played Kit, and Alyvia Alyn Lind who was actually a year younger than Maryellen. This was taken Up To Eleven with the cast of American Girl Live, who are in their late teens to early adulthood, presumably to save both the production company and American Girl the trouble of having to deal with child labor laws as they were on a nationwide tour, with different states having differing legislation concerning child performers.
- Fake American: Maya Ritter and Erin Pitt, who played as Molly McIntire and Isabelle Palmer respectively, are Canadian. Ditto with English actresses Rebecca Mader and Julia Ormond playing the role of Samantha's aunt Cornelia and Kit's mother Margaret, respectively.
- Fake Brit: The actress who plays Emily in Molly's movie is actually an American of Australian descent.
- Irony as She Is Cast: Caitlin Waite, the former child model who lent her likeness to Kit, mentioned in a Reddit interview that she isn't actually much of a doll person.
- Market-Based Title: An American Girl: McKenna Shoots for the Stars was released internationally as American Girl: Shooting for the Stars, likely as the brand is better-known amongst foreign audiences than the characters themselves.
- Mid-Development Genre Shift: Of the medium shift variety. Barring WellieWishers, all theatrical/television media featuring the characters has been in the form of live-action productions; the film featuring 1980s Historical Courtney Moore was released as a stop-motion featurette in 2020 in lieu of a live-action production likely due to complications brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made work for child performers difficult if not hazardous due to obvious health risks.
- Old Shame: For a time, Cecile and Marie-Grace was shoved under the rug following the dismal failure of their joint collection. This changed however when the George Floyd protests renewed and further intensified calls for greater racial diversity, leading to American Girl re-releasing their books featuring African-American characters for free.
- Promoted Fanboy: Abigail Breslin, fan of the American Girls Collection, played the main role in Kit's movie. Breslin mentioned in an interview that she had the complete Historical doll lineup, which given her status as a child actress at the time is no surprise.
- Vaporware: Rumors of a new American Girl doll, Rebecca, began to surface in the adult collector community as far back as 1998, when Mattel trademarked the name of the character. Eventually details leaked that she'd be the first Jewish historical, and after that, she seemed abandoned, with dolls such as Native American Kaya and '70s girl Julie (and the entire "Best Friends" line) appearing instead. Rumors of prototypes of Rebecca being seen by company insiders floated the entire time, with various descriptions given of her appearance, but most of the collecting world had given her up as an idea dumped on the drawing room floor. Following the retirement of Samantha in 2008, American Girl finally confirmed they were producing Rebecca, who was released in May of '09.
- What Could Have Been:
- Kit was originally intended to be wearing a differently-coloured meet outfit, along with a straw cloche hat as part of her accessories. The change to a knit-cloth cloche was done as it was found out that the initial batch of straw hats made as part of the accessories fell apart rather easily, and as explained by redditor and former model Caitlin Waite–who originally lent her likeness to Kit–in a post at /r/americangirl, they did the photo shoot for Meet Kit in its entirety with the pre-release meet outfit, but they later redid the shoot following the straw hat issue.[1][2]
- Leaked renders of Maryellen's prototype meet outfit designs surfaced months before the doll's announcement; this was later shown in a coffee-table book by American Girl.
- Mia St. Clair was originally designed as black.
- Felicity originally was known under the working name "Lucy".
- Prior to release, McKenna went under the codename "Velma".
- An activity book for Rebecca shows a prototype doll for what appears to be her best friend Ana. Whether this was meant as a placeholder or plans for an Ana doll were made was unknown, but as the Best Friend line was discontinued, the Ana doll was scrapped.
- Tenney was apparently intended to be the Girl of the Year for 2017, but following calls for better racial diversity and representation in the doll line, Gabriella, an African-American character, was released in her place, based off an existing Truly Me doll with a repurposed collection from off-the-shelf American Girl accessories as an Author's Saving Throw. Tenney was used to launch a stopgap line called the "Contemporary Characters", which were similar to the Girls of the Year, but are not intended as a limited-edition character, followed by a boy doll named Logan and a Korean-American character named Suzanne "Z" Yang, who previously appeared in a series of promotional videos which cashed in on the AG stop-motion craze. Tenney was also hinted to have a movie based on teasers and production photos released on social media, but the film was silently canned long after Tenney was released.
- The Wiki Rule: Here.