Haim Saban turned on the television in his hotel room and couldn’t believe what he saw. It was 1985, and the Israeli-American entrepreneur was in Tokyo on a business trip: he was a self-described “cartoon schlepper”, who bought the rights to Japanese children’s animated shows and released them in the West with new English voice tracks.
It was a decent living — enough to sustain his production company. But what he was watching now would make him a billionaire. It was another children’s programme, called Super-Electron Bioman, about five brightly coloured warriors who fought giant monsters with a giant robot. But it wasn’t a cartoon.
The robot and monsters might have been swathed in rubber and plastic, but beneath the suits were real actors. Saban knew that by re-dubbing a cartoon, its foreign origins could be concealed easily. His billion-dollar brainwave was realising that a live-action show — specifically this live-action show, with its jumpsuit-clad and therefore completely unidentifiable heroes — could be handled the same way. Back in California, he shot new story scenes with an American cast, edited in the fight scenes from Super-Electron Bioman, and touted the result around the television networks. None of them would touch it.
But Saban knew he was on to something — and six years later, tried again with Dinosaur Squadron Zyuranger, another series from the same Japanese franchise in which the robots were prehistoric beasts. This one clicked.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (as Saban renamed it) became an international hit. For a kids’ show, it was staggeringly more violent than anything else around at the time. But its three-and-up audience found the violence thrilling, rather than scary. The monsters might have knocked over skyscrapers as if they were shoeboxes, but they weren’t threatening in the slightest. They looked like toys.
Last week a new $100 million (Dh367.21 million) Power Rangers film arrived in cinemas, and if it weren’t for the original show’s toylike quality, it probably wouldn’t have happened. Ever since the TV series was first broadcast in the UK in 1994, Power Rangers action figures have consistently been best-sellers. Statistics from the market research group NPD show it’s currently the second most successful action-figure brand in the country, after Star Wars.
Power Rangers and the toy business are a good fit. Every instalment brings with it a new set of characters, robots and monsters — around 20 film tie-in toys are already in shops — but they all fit in the same world its young target market already knows.
There’s a word to describe this attribute: toyetic. As Bernard Loomis, the Mattel worker who coined the word in the Sixties, realised: if you can sell toys based on cartoons, it is just as feasible to make cartoons specifically to sell toys. Loomis’s first swing at this was an animated series based on the Hot Wheels range of die-cast model cars, broadcast from 1969-71. This was followed by Transformers, My Little Pony, Masters of the Universe and GI Joe. But Loomis’s masterstroke came with Star Wars in 1976. After reading an article about the blockbuster, which was still being filmed out in the Tunisian desert, Loomis asked Twentieth Century Fox if there was any potential mileage in a toy line.
The studio thought that maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t.
But Star Wars director George Lucas was more confident. He agreed to forgo his $500,000 fee from Fox in exchange for the licensing and merchandising rights. The studio happily accepted, a decision which cost them — and earned Lucas — more than $4 billion. The toys wouldn’t be ready until the year after Star Wars’ release, but consumer interest got so big so fast that Loomis started selling empty boxes.
Each one contained a certificate which the owner could swap for a toy whenever they were ready. The rest of the industry thought he was crazy. He sold half a million of them. With so much money there for the taking, Loomis’s philosophy became Hollywood dogma — and today, the blockbuster and toy businesses are irrevocably tangled. In 2015, the British toy market grew by 5.9 per cent, thanks largely to a corresponding box office surge of 15.2 per cent, driven by ultra-toyetic films such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Minions, Jurassic World and Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Incentives that powerful inevitably lead to creative compromise. During the making of Batman & Robin, director Joel Schumacher was constantly urged by Warner Bros to make his film more “toyetic”: “There was enormous pressure on us to create more inventions in the film that could be turned into toys,” Schumacher says on the film’s DVD commentary track.
Batman & Robin’s tie-in line featured 18 different Batman figures, 10 different Robins and five Mr Freezes. The film itself, famously, was a baboonish fiasco. Increasingly, these considerations are holding films back.
The original script for Iron Man 3 featured a female villain, but the character was rewritten as male — Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian — on Marvel’s command, thanks to an ingrained toy-industry belief that boys don’t buy female action figures. Even when the films do let girls play too, the toys rarely follow suit. Black Widow figures were a rarity in the beefcake-heavy Avengers toy range. Rey, the immediately iconic young heroine of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, was absent from that film’s tie-in Monopoly set. And in the UK at least,
Ghostbusters figures from last year’s all-female reboot weren’t easy to come by. If you’re wondering why Marvel’s first female-led solo superhero film is still two years away, there’s your answer. Bernard Loomis died in 2006, the year before the release of Transformers, a film that pushed his industry-changing realisation to its logical extreme. He’d understood that films could behave like adverts: Transformers was the first advert that behaved like a film. Its audience understood — and embraced — that they were watching something that was primarily designed to make toys look good.
That development eventually led to The Lego Movie — a masterpiece of the form, which captured with enormous wit, beauty and warmth why the venerable Danish building blocks were a cornerstone of so many childhoods — and also to this year’s spin-off, The Lego Batman Movie, which achieved with a kind of effortless panache everything Schumacher’s film hadn’t 20 years before.
Hasbro set up their own Hollywood film studio on the back of Transformers’ success, and relocated some of their toy designers from their Rhode Island headquarters to help ensure maximum toyeticism in their output. Their fifth Transformers film opens this summer, with My Little Pony: The Movie, following in October — plus features based on Hungry Hungry Hippos, Tonka trucks, Play-Doh, Beyblade spinning tops, Monopoly and Furbies on the way. The movies will be toying with us for some time yet.
