Three direct-to-video films feature Barbie adapting well-established nineteenth-century novels: Prince and the Pauper, A Christmas Carol, and The Three Musketeers, respectively. These texts are well-established in the Western canon and are remembered as novels with strong masculine presences. By making Barbie the protagonist or a featured character of adaptations (in 2004, 2008, and 2009 films), and establishing a female-centric focus, Mattel disrupts these novels’ canonical literary understandings. Using adaptation theory, particularly as codified in Linda Hutcheon, this chapter considers the motivations behind what was retained and changed from the original source texts to create new textual vehicles for the Barbie brand and align them with themes associated with Barbie, such as friendship and belief in oneself. These changes allow for more marketing tie-ins to the films, which reveals the tension between the progression of female representation in the Barbie films and the capitalist forces that encourage consumptive practices. This tension indicates the complicated textual motivations behind these adaptations, and these complications represent Barbie’s complex role in introducing these canonical texts and cultural touchstones to child viewers.