Out of the garden: toys, TV, and children's culture in the age of marketing

Abstract

This study provides a detailed history of marketing to children, revealing the strategies that shape the design of toys and have a powerful impact on the way children play. Stephen Kline looks at the history and development of children's play culture and toys from the Teddy Bear to the globally popular Ninja Turles. He profiles the rise of children's mass media - books, comics, film and television - and that of the speciality toy stores, showing how the creation of large children television audiences was a pivotal point in developing new approaches to advertising. Contemporary youngsters, he shows, are catapulted into a fantastic and chaotic world of action toys thanks to the toy manufacturers' interest in animated television. Kline looks at the imagery and appeal of toy commercials and at how they provide a host of stereotyped archetypal figures which partially structure children's imaginations. He shows how the 1980's deregulation of advertising in the US led directly to the development of new marketing strategies which use television to saturate the market with promotional character toys. Finally, in a re-examination of the debates about the cultural effects of television, Out of the Garden asks whether we should allow our children's play culture to be primarily defined and created by marketing strategists, pointing to the unintended consequences of a situation in which images of real children have all but been eliminated from narratives about the young.