Out of the Garden Toys and Children's Culture in the Age of TV Marketing

by KLINE, STEPHEN

• ISBN13: 9781859840597
• ISBN10: 1859840590
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-12-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

This timely and innovative book 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 and Lego to the Barbie doll, Care Bears and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He profiles the rise of children's mass media - books, comics, film and television - and that of the specially stores such as Toys 'R' Us, revealing how the opportunity to reach large audiences of children through television was a pivotal point in developing new approaches to advertising. Contemporary youngsters, he shows, are catapulted into a fantastic and chaotic time-space continuum of action toys thanks to the merchandisers' interest in animated television. Kline looks at the imagery and appeal of the toy commercials and at how they provide a host of stereotyped figures around which children can organize their imaginative experience. He shows how the deregulation of advertising in the United States in the 1980s has led directly to the development of the new marketing strategies which use television series to saturate the market with promotional "character toys". Finally, in a powerful 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 strategies, pointing to the unintended consequences of a situation in which images of real children have all but been eliminated from narratives about the young.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction: The Sovereignty of Consumerism: Children in the Age of Marketing	1	(21)
Communication Analysis for the Age of Marketing	22	(22)
The Making of Children's Culture	44	(33)
From Literacy to Comics: The Origins of Children's Fiction	77	(30)
Thralls of the Screen: The Rise of Mass Media for Children	107	(36)
Marketing Toys to Children and Youth	143	(31)
Building Character	174	(34)
Limited Imaginings	208	(28)
The Parables of Play; Policy, Strategy and Advertising Design	236	(41)
Technicians of the Imagination	277	(39)
Conclusion: Playing with Culture	316	(38)
Appendix	354	(14)
Thematic Bibliography	368	(28)
Index	396