American Girl is bringing back its original dolls. Moms might be excited, but will your 7-year-old care?

Mattel is bringing back the original designs of eight characters for American Girl’s 40th anniversary. But the real question isn’t whether millennials will buy them for nostalgia—it’s whether kids will be excited by them again.

[Photo: American Girl]

In 1990, my mother discovered a four-year-old startup called American Girl, and she liked what she saw: Books about different eras in American history, told through the eyes of a girl roughly her daughter’s age, with an 18-inch doll based on each character. It was more educational and wholesome than Barbie, so she was happy to buy them for me.

My favorite character was Molly McIntire, a 9-year-old living through World War II in Illinois, whose father had been sent to the front lines and hadn’t written home in months. What I loved about the books was that they trusted children to process difficult things—slavery, mortality, war—that adults typically shielded us from. American Girl stories were meant to illustrate that difficult things might........

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