It’s one of those things, you know, when you fall asleep at 9 pm and then wake up at 3 am only to find you cannot go back to sleep. It’s like every browser tab in my mind is opened all at once and it’s keep me awake thinking about things.
As I sit, in the dark, bathed in the glow of my monitor and hammering away at my keyboard, The Cure, “Just Like Heaven,” plays softly in the background. It seem like a good song for setting the tone, at least to me. My hand brushes against my gaming mat that I use for a giant mousepad, for no other reason than I like a little bit of drag under my mouse as I move it around.
And now, “The big question…”
Will Toys R Us go out of business?
I wouldn’t say it’s keeping me up at night, but for the moment it seems I am wrong, as I keep coming back to it.
I think a big part of the problem is that kids just don’t play with toys anymore. Electronic media like iphones and video game systems has changed the toy industry landscape… forever. And even though I sell toys for a living, the very likely possibility that Toys R Us may close down completely seems like the end of an era. An extinction of something that is very old, though I dare not say that toys, as we know them and collect them is an age old thing. The practice really didn’t take shape until the 1970’s with Star Wars action figures.
“Collect them all!”
The Star Wars packaging declared on those old figures. It was, in a way, the first time anyone thought to say that and sort of the first time anyone really took it serious and thus an industry was born.
It was mostly FCC deregulation in 1982 that brought forth an industry nurturing the birth of an amazing era that would become huge, 80’s Toys. That deregulation would remove restrictions that made it illegal to advertise a product directly to children through television programming. The changes brought us television shows like GI Joe, Transformers, He Man and The Masters of the Universe, as well as MASK, Jase and The Wheeled Warriors and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Before all that, these same toys were advertised through comic books or a mini comic book included with each action figure.
The rulings ushered nearly a decade of excellent Saturday morning cartoons movies and specials whose sole purpose was to advertise the new lines of action figures, robots and dolls.
I feel that I would be doing the overall licensing industry a great disservice if I didn’t mention that prior to the toy based cartoons and deregulation period several Saturday morning shows were created about video game properties like Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Frogger, Q-Bert PitFall and Pole Position. I believe it was this walking of the line between licensing video game properties which were not thought of as toys, in fact most games were located in bars at the time and arcades were not generally thought of as places for young children. The console market was in its infancy and it really wasn’t until The Nintendo Entertainment System partnered with Worlds of Wonder (Teddy Ruxpin, Lazer Tag) in 1985 that console were truly considered toys. But that’s another story for another time…
The deregulation lasted until around 1990 and then parent and children’s advocacy groups groups pressured the FCC to bring back the regulations and force network channels to offer more educational programming, insisting that the youth of the 80’s would be negatively affected by the long form advertisements and consumerism. It didn’t matter Cable had taken hold pretty well by then and offered new cartoon channels like Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and USA Cartoon Express among others. The new regulations didn’t really affect cable but the Saturday morning block of cartoons had pretty much gone away forever.
As one might expect, children from the era were not negatively impacted by cartoon based toys or at least very little evidence exists to show that we were.
The very likely possibility of Toys R Us, the last remaining toy store, going out of business forever has forced us to take a look at the industry and wonder what will become of toys in general. As someone in the toy industry, I see for the most part toys have gone from a creative device that encouraged individual play sessions to more of a collectible market. It seems most modern non-learning toys rarely get opened and never get played with. Instead they are collected or displayed. The technology is at a point where the detail and articulation is simply amazing. Modern toys are inspiring and fun to collect. I know as an adult and an artist, I have always like to have a nice display of action figures to look at and give me inspiration.
I believe that toys have become mostly collectibles and I often wonder if the major players that make collectible toys like Hasbro will take note of it and cater more to a collector’s market. It seems Hasbro wants it both ways. I cite the Black series as an example. When they started the line it was very selective about which figures were made. Each one seemed to be important to the Star Wars universe. With the release of new movies, Hasbro went back to the old way of doing things where they create every character even the boring ones to give kids some way to replay the movie. I don’t believe it was kids playing with them that made the line popular. I think it was a new scale, great detail and more articulation that made collectors buy into the line. Most likely using that popularity along with Disney’s release of new Star Wars movies drove the decision to make every character as a playable movie reenactment, as Kenner once did from 1977 to 1985. The only problem is that kids are more interested in electronic devices, they don’t play like that anymore.
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