Modernism/modernity

Two questions to start. First, is there sufficient warrant to write a book about “toys and children’s culture in the age of TV marketing”? The rather obvious answer is yes, maybe two or [End Page 110] three books in fact. Second question, is Stephen Kline’s book the one that will define the field? The answer, unfortunately, is no, although Out of the Garden is a useful case study, both for what it accomplishes, and also for the ways in which it fails. As to the failure, this is perhaps the result of Kline’s trying to do too many useful things at the same time. His book is—all at once—a review of extant research, an analytical critique of knowledge about kids and TV, and a work of primary social-science scholarship. Or at least it tries to be. But in a field as large as this—comprehending the history of toys, consumer marketing, and television—any one task would be more than enough to occupy a single study. Taking them all on at once means that none will get done very well.

That said, Kline deserves high marks for foregrounding a subject—toys—that has too often been relegated to the afterthought category of academic scholarship. “Cultural studies,” the hot button project of 1990s academia, has typically concerned itself with “Others” other than North American kids, whose cultural construction remains a largely uninterrogated source of political intelligence as well as a leading indicator of social practices generally. “I have focused my inquiry, therefore,” Kline writes, “on the growth of children’s cultural industries in order to think more broadly about the particular malaise within market-industrial society that arises when the privileged position we give to marketing within media begins to undermine and threaten our aspirations for a more civilized society which would promote the full development of children.” (viii) Though hardly an elegant stylist, Kline makes a useful point. However, his characterization of “malaise” is indicative of a general tendency to represent all cultural practices as monolithic and totalizing. His book, which proposes a developmental history of marketing, the rise of TV, and the various discourses of childhood, is hampered by a good-guys-versus-bad-guys approach, with the bad guys always having already won.

Which is not to say that they haven’t, but only that the winning is neither so simple, nor uninflected, as Kline portrays it. For example, there is his discussion of the Masters of the Universe action figures—He-Man, She-Ra, and company. (These were, for a couple of holiday seasons running, the most successful toy line in the U.S.) It’s as if Kline assumes his readers already know the interesting—and important—story of He-Man, and how Mattel coordinated the start-up of a toy line with a series of syndicated cartoons that would function as half-hour commercials in the newly deregulated FCC environment under Ronald Reagan. The story of He-Man’s rise is poorly told, scattered as it is in a number of places throughout Kline’s book. He accords little value to the narrative, apparently, because of his presumptive conclusion that “they” will win no matter what, and “we” all know it.

Perhaps this is why Kline seems so uninterested in analyzing specific episodes of the cartoon, or in examining the various figures in the series, their commercial packaging, and the ways in which large toy chains marketed He-Man. “The He-Man series brilliantly blended advanced technology, medieval magic and bulging muscles into a postmodern heroic that is meaningful only as a pastiche of modern mythologies,” Kline concludes (299). But meaningful to whom? And how? In other words, one wonders whether Kline is familiar with academic discussions of ideology, or of culture, as terrains of contestation, misreading, and negotiation. (One also wonders if he knew that when the He-Man movie came out, its box...