Class of '84: Turtles, Transformers and Toys Takeover TV

Imaginary Worlds

Eric Molinsky

Arts, Science Fiction, Fiction, Society & Culture

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2024

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the final episode of our mini-series Class of '84, we look at two iconic franchises that launched in 1984: Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They came from opposite ends of the business spectrum. Transformers was a top-down marketing synergy between American and Japanese toy companies along with Marvel Comics to compete against He-Man -- another TV toy behemoth. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle would eventually rival them in cultural dominance, but it began with two indie comic book creators making a black and white comic as a lark. But Turtles and Transformers both ended up wrestling with similar questions around what happens when you put the cart before the horse in creating content to sell products. Documentary filmmaker Isaac Elliot-Fisher and Cartoon Art Museum curator Andrew Farago talk about the incredible rags to riches story of the Turtles creators, and how success changed them. And I talk with Bob Budiansky, who created many of the original Transformers characters for Hasbro and Marvel Comics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to imaginary worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.
0:05.0	I'm Eric Malinsky.
0:07.0	I have often talked about how much I love action figures.
0:11.0	When I was a kid, they were my gateway to another world. After a while I didn't even have to play with them.
0:17.0	I just hold my Luke Skywalker action figure and go into a catatonic state.
0:22.0	My parents used to say I was looking out. As far as I knew, movies and
0:27.5	TV shows aimed at kids always came with action figures. That's the way things were. But when George Lucas pitched the idea
0:36.0	of Star Wars action figures to toy companies in 1976, a lot of companies turned him down.
0:43.0	Except for one company in Cincinnati, Kenner.
0:47.0	Kenner ended up minting money with those Star Wars toys.
0:52.0	The other companies must have been jealous. But Star Wars was a phenomenon. I mean, how do you reverse engineer that? They could wait until the next Star Wars fell into their laps, but there's only one George Lucas.
1:05.0	And the toy companies were getting burned by filmmakers claiming to have the next Star Wars.
1:10.0	But the movies were flops, and the toys sat on shelves. If only the toy
1:16.3	companies could make their own media, you know TV shows that star the toys that they
1:21.6	want to sell, well they're about to get a helping hand from
1:26.2	Ronald Reagan. One of Reagan's main goals was deregulation. In 1983 and 84, government agencies that monitor advertising and content in
1:36.6	children's television declared that the marketplace should decide what gets
1:41.0	put on the air, not the government.
1:43.0	But even though Reagan was creating this very corporate-friendly environment,
1:48.0	the toy companies didn't know how to take advantage of it at first.
1:52.0	They didn't have a master plan on how to conquer the minds of kids to get us to convince
1:57.9	our parents that our entire happiness depended on getting that new toy.
	...

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