Friend or Foe: Small Soldiers Toy Tie-Ins and Protests of Violent Toys
Developing a fresh new line of war toys is just what Hasbro did to accompany the release of Small Soldiers. Although licensed characters seem to have taken over stores' toy shelves in the past 10 to 20 years, connecting licensed characters to children's toys is as old in the United States as licensed characters are.
From Dick Tracy toy guns to Star Wars action figures and beyond, children have played with media-driven narratives throughout the twentieth century. The later years of the century and the opening of the twenty-first century, however, have seen ever more aggressive marketing and tie-in campaigns. These trends helped to lead the toy historian Howard Chudacoff to the claim that “commercial toys have almost completely colonised children's free time.”9 It is difficult to grasp the extent to which consumerism has laid claim to childhood. Experts estimated that in the year 2000, children between the ages of 4 and 12 were directly responsible for $170 billion in spending in the United States alone.10 Media critics and children's advocates worry that the colonization of children's time has been accompanied by the colonization of their imaginations. As with any colonial project, cultural forces do not gain control of even intangible regions like children's imagination without at least a show of violence.In the case of Small Soldiers, the show of force came in the form of massive numbers. Sixty licensees released what has increasingly become the standard list of related products in tandem with Small Soldiers, including a soundtrack, video games, action figures, miniature cars, bedsheets, clothing, fast-food toy premiums, and trading cards.11 While the movie was in vogue, its images and characters could rule a child's universe. The July release date for the movie made the toy line the number one boys' action toy for the summer and earned the movie a berth in Business Weeks product-placement hall of fame—recognition that would delight the film's fictional CEO, Gil Mars, but that audience members in on the satire would understand ironically.12
In their work Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment-Advertising, Jen Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen highlight how the market is able to communicate directly with children, decreasing the significance of family, school, or church as central social structures in children's lives.
This situation is even more alarming when one considers the trends in militarized entertainment violence and the glorification of war in popular culture. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has criticized companies and advertisers for marketing R-rated films to children.13 For example, the R-rated film Matrix had a corresponding teen-rated video game. Although less severe an age gap, the toy premiums associated with Small Soldiers and distributed with children's meals at Burger King were suitable for the two-to-eight-year-old market group while the movie was rated PG-13.14 Burger King did move their television advertising campaign from Saturday morning, a time slot that operates as prime time for children, to the adult prime-time hour and offered alternative toys. However, enthusiasm for a movie that had been deemed excessively violent by the Motion Picture Association still reached the under-13 audience. When this marketing information is taken into account along with the facts that Burger King had a final edit of the movie and Hasbro helped develop the characters, the media's role in promoting violence and militarization in children's culture is damning.15The case against allowing children to play with a media matrix like Small Soldiers is not to be taken lightly. Like many cultural critics, I too am alarmed by the degree of media saturation represented by product launches like that of Small Soldiers in our own and in our children's lives. Along with many critics of postmodernism, I believe that the saturation of images has led to an aestheticization of reality and a distancing of affect.16 In such a world of images, viewers are invited to grow numb to the felt experience suffered by those represented. A study of children's attitudes toward war toys that collected interviews and data in 1985 and again in 2002, showed a “dramatic decrease in statements that reflect awareness of the horrors of war and terror and a pacifist attitude.”17 In 1985, children who took part in the survey referred to the horrors of nuclear war, acknowledged the vast number of people affected in war, and voiced such vivid concerns as, “I don't like people shooting at each other, and then lying there with big wounds, still living for a little bit, and then dying.” By 2002, children interviewed only voiced bland and very general antiwar sentiments: “I think it's naff to fight, because mostly you kill everybody” or “Sometimes war is senseless.”18 As signifiers are heaped upon signifiers, any “authentic” understanding of the real becomes more unreachable, so that no source is to be trusted and eventually audiences lose interest in knowing, especially when imagining is easier and more entertaining.
Bringing an experience of war home to viewers is one of the critically important aspects of Small Soldiers. The blockbuster movie invited viewers to intimately imagine the power of the violence lying (temporarily) latent in their toys; once the Commando Elite punch their way out of their boxes in this film, the home front becomes quite literally a warfront.The critic Roger Ebert claimed that “Small Soldiers is a family picture on the outside, and a mean, violent action picture on the inside.”19 In spite of corporate sponsorships and back-end control, director Joe Dante, along with the cast of writers involved in the project, was able to create an intelligent, witty, and fun movie that challenges the very aestheticization and cultural numbing trafficked in war-entertainment. After all, this story's battle is waged by the coolest toys any kid could ever imagine, and it takes place not in some far and distant land but in a typical upper-middle-class U.S. suburban neighborhood in homes many U.S. viewers can identify with as their own. Because Small Soldiers brings the violence in war toys to life in its audience's own living space, the movie invites mainstream audiences, at least for a moment, to feel the destructive power that is taking over children's imaginations. Without shaming or berating consumers who enjoy today's militarized entertainment spectacles, Small Soldiers manages to convince even little Timmy Fimple that the best birthday present is not a cool toy soldier but new clothes.