I have become quite enamored by the YouTube channel aptly named Toy Galaxy. As someone who fondly remembers the cartoons and comic books of my preteens and early teen years, I connect with the show because it expounds and reveals so much background information about some of the TV shows and cartoons I hold dear. From Marvel’s X-Men, C.O.P.S, Galaxy Rangers, Bionic Six, G.I Joe, Spiral Zone, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Jace & the Wheel Warriors, Centurions, Silver Hawks, Bravestar, Transformers, just to name a few.
This channel does a stellar job in giving you insightful knowledge of the creators, ideas, and intentions behind these shows and takes the extra step on expounding on other products (if there are) and possible availability in the public domain or on sale. The sheer amount of shows itself speaks to one about what capitalism has given us.
As a child, my best friends were my TV shows, my comic books, and that yearly Argos catalog. You would always find me going through page after page of the latest edition I could lay my hands on and be rest assured the page I would look forward to the most was those in the toy section. I bring this up because I recently came to a realization a couple of weeks ago while enjoying another episode on Toy Galaxy. You see, all the time I had believed the cartoons were the reason the toys were created ALL THE TIME, but as this episode played on it soon dawned on me that I had missed the point completely. These cartoon companies were ultimately funded by Marketing companies, the products weren’t the cartoons at all, the actual products were the Toys. That was where the big money really was. For all these marketing companies cared the cartoons were ads, playing in front of the influencers of the people with disposable income. This whole time I was sitting through a marketing class for toys and action figures.
At the time of realization the first feeling that began to flood me were negative, the shows I had listed in the first paragraph, many of them barely lasted more than 23 episodes despite how well received they were. As a kid growing up in Africa I never fully participated in the full marketing process of discovering the toys and then being immersed in the TV shows when the shows started airing so the only point of contact was the shows, which one knew better than to be strongly attached to because one season would pass and the next season would never come without explanation. All people like me learned to do was to easily learn who the good guys were and root for him/them while the show lasted.
As I sat there watching the YouTube channel my thoughts gradually went to the creators of these products and for a moment I wanted to hate them for what they did to my childhood, despite acknowledging that I owed them more of gratitude, but then I remembered that one year I spent with Supa Strika, how I was involved in a lot of creative processes that helped tied our corporate sponsors to our product (which was the comic) at the time, then I recalled one of the last things I did was to give my comments on action figure prototypes for our product. This made me realize I would have been one of the major moving cogs in possibly introducing something similar to a Nigerian market.
Well then, I guess I am not so innocent after all.
