Not Pandering to Children is Like Leaving Money on the Table
Did
you know that there was a time you could watch some children’s programming, and
then could not go straight to the toy
store and spend several hundred dollars on related merchandising? Two
generations of children grew up with regular television shows targeted at their
demographic that did not requisitely have oodles of games, toys, and bed sheets
connected to these shows. Oh, you there were some commercial toys—superheroes,
for instance, had been targeted for trinket sales pretty much right after Action Comics #1 debuted. Hanna-Barbera
cartoons like the Flintstones and the Jetsons (which were not even
targeted solely to children) might license their images to Colorforms or
Shrinky Dinks, but you couldn’t get every Flintstones
character in several outfits as action figures that fit perfectly within a Flintstones playset. It simply wasn’t
done. And the reason for that is because American companies actually cared about the
well-being of children at one time, instead of perceiving them as conduits to
their parents’ wallets.
For
most of the 1940s and 50s, much of the lack of licensed material for children’s
television was owed to the fact that the entire world didn’t revolve around
catering to fucking kids. There were plenty of toys to be had and games to be
played, but the local toy store was most likely just a shop, filled mostly with
bicycles if it was large enough; stuffed with teddy bears and Radio Flyer
wagons if it was not. There were but three television networks, and they
weren’t blocked with vast chunks of programming solely to inundate boys and
girls with need. Indeed, if a household even had a television in those days,
they almost certainly had but one—and so the flickering images usually
attempted to appeal to entire families, instead of individual members and age
groups. Housewives had their afternoon soap operas and chat shows, but there
wasn’t really a ton for kids to watch alone.
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| "Not now honey. Mommy is watching her stories." |
By
the mid 1950s, the Baby Boomer generation was becoming autonomous, and armed
with fistfuls of cash earned by their fathers in this prosperous American
economy. This is when we start to see shows like Captain Kangaroo, Lunch with Soupy Sales, and J. P Patches in the mix. These programs were often madcap skits
and puppet shows, sometimes with cartoons thrown in, and while they did have
their own merchandise, they existed primarily to sell breakfast cereal and BB
guns through product placement and endorsement. By 1958, Hanna-Barbera was
cranking out animated shorts based on the most ludicrous premises that would
possess the minds of several generations to follow—these shows, also, had their
toys but nothing on the level you see today. Still, moms were concerned that
their offspring were becoming inured to targeted advertising, and so in 1968
Peggy Charren and and Judy Chalfton of Newton, MA founded a grassroots campaign
called Action for Children’s Television (ACT). They petitioned the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) to establish rules for television shows aimed
at boys and girls, and to establish a foundation of educational programming
partially subsidized by Federal grants.
Starting
in 1970, ACT systematically petitioned the FCC to institute all kinds of
curtails on television being aimed specifically at children. They were able to
change the nature and amount of advertising during children’s programming, even
getting the vitamin industry to pull their commercials during these slots since
vitamin overdose can be harmful, especially to children. In 1973, the ACT got
the National Association of Broadcasters to limit commercial time during
children’s blocks to twelve minutes per hour, and prohibited children’s
television hosts from appearing in other commercials. And then in their coup de
grace, they petitioned the Federal Trade Commission in 1977 to ban advertising
aimed at children too young to understand the concept of selling, which seems
almost like some fantasy in a today’s landscape, where kids dream of going to
Disney World before they can even say the words.
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| "Buy me that mommy! I want the Vietnam War!" |
And then Ronald Reagan happened…
When
Ronald Reagan took presidential office, he quickly set to deregulating as many
trade restrictions as possible. In 1983, he appointed Mark S. Fowler to the
head of the FCC. He’s most famous for repealing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987,
which meant networks no longer had to present a balanced viewpoint of
controversial topics, but he also rolled back pretty much everything the ACT
had set out to do in its mere decade of existence. This extended not only the
number of commercials kids could see in an hour, but the nature of those
commercials—this is the era when cereal would become blitzes of noise and
craziness, hyping up sugar-induced mania instead of presenting them as
something wholesome. And not only could they cram more toy commercials during
these programs, but the shows became toy commercials themselves! Plots for
shows like G.I. Joe and He-Man were conceived in marketing
boardrooms to ensure that new action figures and accessories were shown in the
cartoon.
I
believe Thundarr the Barbarian was
the last American cartoon produced in this era that did not have a strong
merchandising presence, beyond a board game and some puffy stickers. After that,
it was just commercials all the way: the
Smurfs, Transformers, the Care Bears, My Little Pony—and let’s not forget
the lesser toy cartoons like Mobile
Armored Strike Kommand (M.A.S.K.), or the insect-humanoid Sectaurs—all of these cartoons depicted
corresponding toys for sale, buffeted by commercials of other toys for sale, to
be watched by eating fortified, sweetened corn mush. And it was during this
time that one of the most blatant, idiotic cash grabs in the history of
cartoons-as-commercials was created by budget animators Ruby-Spears: Rubik, The Amazing Cube.
Debuting
in 1983 at the peak of the Rubik’s Cube craze and the fever for E.T. the Extraterrestrial merchandise,
this cartoon was about a Rubik’s Cube that fell off the wagon of an evil
magician, which, when unscrambled, would grow a hideous troll face and two
stout legs and do magic. I was eight years old when this show came out, and my
reaction was “give me a fucking break.” They anthropomorphized an inanimate
object in order to capitalize on its popularity, and not just any inanimate
object but a fairly clever puzzle cube. It would be like if there was a cartoon
based around the popular time-wasting game Candy
Crush—without a narrative that brings the candies to life and places them
in some conflict, but instead anthropomorphizes a smart phone with Candy Crush displayed on its belly and
which shoots lasers out of its fingertips. It was just so wrong, and worst of
all it really only advertised one product: the Rubik’s Cube. There were other
Rubik’s shapes on the market (none of which I recall being shown on the
television show), but there were no playsets, no figures for the three stupid
kids Rubik ran around with. And while it certainly capitalized on the
popularity of E.T., Ruby-Spears made
no money from the film’s merchandising sales, so it might as well have given a
full half of its advertising power away. This show ran for one year as one-half
of a Saturday morning block on ABC that it shared with the Pac-Man cartoon, and then was mercifully removed as being perhaps
too pandering, even to dumb children. At this juncture, at least.
In
1990, the FCC enacted the Children’s Television Act, which sought to stem the
deluge of commercialized programming being beamed at children on Saturday
mornings and weekday afternoons. This resulted in some cartoons like Tiny Toons
and Animaniacs that, while having their own licensed merchandise for sale, were
not purely examples of what next to purchase to complete the set. It also
brought in shows like Saved By the Bell
and Beakman’s World, which were
designated “educational/informational” and carried an “e/i” logo in the lower
right-hand corner of the screen when aired during appropriate blocks. Kids
today are still pandered to, still treated condescendingly, and they can buy
practically anything manufactured with the face of Dora the Explorer plastered
on it, but at least when they watch Dora the Explorer, they might learn a
little Spanish. Though I’m not sure that “compra mis jugetes” is something that
young children should be learning.
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