How an Obscure Collection of Japanese Action Figures Changed the Way We Play
So many things we cherished in the 1980s sprang from dazzling collaborations between two giants. Apple: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Physical fitness: Jane Fonda and Olivia Newton-John. Wham!: George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. And for the beloved toys called Transformers, you can thank Ronald Reagan and George Lucas. Not literally, of course. The Gipper and the father of Star Wars never actually sat down in a room together, downing Mountain Dew and brainstorming until Optimus Prime burst from their skulls like Athena. Although that would have been cool.
No, what happened was more subtle, but it explains why fanboys this summer are alternately slobbering over and scoffing at Transformers, the first blockbuster film to be based on a line of toys.
It wouldn't have happened without Uncle George's deft licensing of the rights to make Star Wars dolls or Ronnie's deregulation of television advertising to children. And we wouldn't have the movie had toymaker Hasbro not become a purveyor of must-have accoutrements for the hip and happening 13-year-old at the dawn of the modern Nerd Era.
Next time you're in a cubicle farm, take a look around. You'll see your Nerf guns and your lightsabers, your Spider-Men and your Vulcan ideological iconography. But that's mostly over in IT. Among the straights — the non-Jedi crowd — you'll see Transformers. A Constructicon here, a Dinobot there. And everyone can sing the theme song.
That's not by accident. Transformers is a movie in 2007 because of the toy-media industrial complex invented in the 1980s. That's when sprawling lines of figures started to be marketed as characters in a ready-mixed narrative, making them must-have collectibles. This new way to play would be supported by ads, yes, but also by entire TV series. And the toys would be aimed not just at nerds but at everyone. If you are deeply psyched to see a live-action Optimus Prime beat up a live-action Megatron, you are not necessarily a sci-fi dweeb. It simply means that everything went exactly according to plan.
New toys don't come along very often. New ways to play — what people in the business call play patterns — are even rarer. In 1959, Barbie introduced a new play pattern for American girls: a doll that was a glamorous woman to be emulated instead of an infant or child to be mothered. The 1964 introduction of G.I. Joe by Hasbro was another. As toy historian Gary Cross puts it: "Between 1900 and World War II, boys played with machines, girls played with dolls." Then G.I. Joe arrived, and boys had dolls, too. Oh, sorry: "action figures."
Joe was a 12-inch-tall tough-guy loner (scar, beard). The rest of the action-figure market was dominated by a company called Mego, which made 8-inch-tall versions of everyone else. Comics characters. Star Trek characters. Apes from the Planet of same. It was a consolidation of licensed properties that could never happen today.
In 1976, Mego passed on the Star Wars license. Bad move.
An upstart company called Kenner grabbed it. But in the late 1970s, the price of oil was rising and the toys were made of vinyl — a petroleum product. Kenner was afraid it couldn't sell enough giant figures, vehicles, and play sets (X-wings, TIE fighters, Death Stars), to recoup costs. The exact size of the first Star Wars toys, according to the book Toyland, was determined when Kenner president Bernie Loomis turned to one of his designers with his thumb and index finger about 4 inches apart and said, "Luke Skywalker should be this big." That made them cheap enough that every character, no matter how minor, would have a figure. Kids bought them all.
Meanwhile, G.I. Joe was on life support, outgunned and outsold. Hasbro took the line in for repairs. "Our whole approach was learned from Star Wars," says Kirk Bozigian, Hasbro's product manager for the revamped G.I. Joe in 1982. The new figures — dozens of characters — were highly poseable, stood 3.75 inches tall, and had gear Darpa would shoot a puppy for. And there were bad guys — a vast terrorist conspiracy called Cobra. "Kids were looking to buy more than one figure," Bozigian says. "They wanted the vehicles and play sets that encompassed this whole world."
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By Chris Suellentrop
Source: www.wired.com
posted by Pedro Silva @ 2:31 da tarde
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