Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 30

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Popular Culture Review

My Little Pony’s floor-length mane, and Lady Lovely-Locks' "magic
hair" and "Pixietails." The toys are dismally similar, and new toy
lines merely perpetuate the similarity. Clearly, toy manufacturers
rely on a "closed loop" of themes that already work in order to create
new toys. As Engelhardt notes:
If, for instance, you ask little girls what they think
fairies are, as Tonka Toys' researchers did in
preparing for Star Fairies, . . . and discover that
fairies are "beautiful, magical creatures who live in
the sky and ride unicorns," what have you found out?
Perhaps no more than that most little girls, already
assiduous buyers of similar lines of dolls and watchers
of similar TV shows put on by similar toy companies,
have noted that the magical little girl characters
tend to live in magical cloud-cuckoo lands and tend to
ride magical horses or unicorns. In other words, such
research by companies already in the business of
prefabricating children's culture may not so much be
uncovering archetypes of desire as creating them. (80)
Modem American girls, who still live in a culture that praises
them for being passive about their desires, simply repeat what they
have been told Aey like best. Meanwhile our culture, in the name of
liberation, holds them responsible for their preferences.
Another backlash strategy against feminist consciousness has
involved complex attempts to control gender differences while
seeming to promote equality. Under the Reagan Administration's
FCC deregulation of children's television, which "in effect,
sanctioned the program-length conunercial" and overturned policy
guidelines from 1974 (Engelhardt 75-6), the mid-1980s brought a
p o p u la r
to y / c a rto o n / m e rc h a n d isin g
a fflic tio n
from
Mattel/Filmation/Golden in the form of the Masters of the Universe
collection. Inspired by the success of films like Conan the Barbarian
and Red Sonja, no doubt, this invasion into children's culture featured
rather violent and very loud half-hour cartoon shows: He-Man and
She-Ra. Opening narration for the shows' credits provided basic
introductory information for the central character of each: