Generation "R" for "Relaunched"

I was standing in the checkout line at the local PCC, listening in on the conversation between the guy bagging the groceries, who looked to be all of 16 years old, and the cashier who looked to be in his early 20s. The conversation went something like this:

"Transformers [the movie that just hit the theaters] really rocked! You know, it's kinda funny because a lot of the people who went and saw it were like, in their late 30s because that's the generation they were big with when they first came out, and people get surprised when they find out how much I know about them and am into them, and then discover my age. It's kinda like G.I. Joe. He came out in the early 80's and I'm really into that stuff too. I guess I just really find stuff from that generation interesting. People end up thinking I'm much older than I really am because of my tastes and interests."

Oh, so much was wrong there, but I was too busy holding in a gaffaw to be able to provide a pop culture history lesson much less a crash course on product marketing tactics 101. Instead I smiled, picked up my bags, and shuffled my fragile old body out to the car.

Just for kicks, I decided to do a little fact finding on the internet. Not because I was questioning my own knowledge of the era in which I grew up, and the toys that even then were being recycled from earlier generations and relaunched with big marketing hype, but just to provide some completeness to my story :-)

As most of us cronies know, G.I. Joe actually made his debut as a character in a comic strip for a US military magazine during WW II. (That's World War Two, for you young'uns. and no, I wasn't born until several decades after that war myself, thank you very much). 1964 is when G. I. Joe came onto the scene as a 12" action figure produced by Hasbro. In fact it was the product that coined the term "action figure" because Hasbro figured (and rightly so; it always all comes down to marketing) that calling it a "doll" wouldn't be really good for sales to their target demographic - little boys, and of course the fathers who earned the money that would pay for it. Because what real father would buy his son, or approve of his wife buying his son, a "doll"? An action figure of course, is perfectly masculine. Never mind the fact that whenever I got together with my friend David, who owned the 12" "action figures", we would invariably end up either marrying them off to my barbies, or having them take part in some courageous act of valor in rescuing these same barbies from some sort of captivity from underneath the bunkbed. G.I. Joe went through a series of relaunches, but the 1982 relaunch was the one that released the smaller scale figures, an animated tv series and a comic book series.

1982 was an interesting year because it was also the year in which the My Little Pony product line first launched, along with their own animated tv specials. These were relaunched first in 1997 which is when they started sporting their slimmer and longer-legged bodies, and but the 2nd relaunch in 2003 is what really revived them. 2003 was heralded as their "Celebration Year", and of course, this coincided with their 20th anniversary which meant that all of the 8 year-old girls who were collecting them in the 1980s were now 28 years old and starting to get married and start families of their own. Coincidence? Of course not. Opportunistic marketing? You betcha.

But that's not all that happened in 1982. The Care Bears made their debut as greeting card characters in 1981, and in 1982 they were announced as a toy line for production . 1983 is when the stuffed bears that we all know and... uh... know were introduced to the general public. Their marketing launch also included animated TV specials... what product launch at this point didn't? Hey... if it works, repeat it.

The care bears, like the ponies, were also relaunched in 1996 and 1999 but with much less success than the original. However in... can you guess... 2003 (their 20th anniversary) they were relaunched a 3rd time and this time they were successful. Why? well, because those same 8 year old girls who were collecting the My Little Ponies were also collecting the Care Bears and... yadda yadda yadda.

But the zaniness didn't stop there. No. In 1982 the Cabbage Patch Kids brand was "born" when artist Xavier Roberts created the name, and when Coleco signed the first licensing agreement with the Roberts company and began mass producing them for public "adoption" in 1983. As near as I can tell, the Cabbage Patch Kids actually managed to maintain a fairly steady level of popularity through the 90s, with a Kid actually journeying to outerspace on a U.S. Space Shuttle, being named the official mascot of not one but two U.S. Olympic teams, being selected in a nationwide public vote as 1 of 15 commemorative U.S. postage stamps. However they too jumped on the "Generation 'R'" bandwagon, and in 2001 for the first time ever, the original hand made Cabbage Patch Kids became available for adoption on the Web, with adoption fees ranging anywhere from $170 - $225 for regular editions, which includes the name and birth date of your choice. Because what Gen-Xer wouldn't shell out $225 for an authentic replica of the exact same prune-faced doll that she had as a young girl, for her own little precious princess?

But what about Transformers, you ask? There too, is more than meets the eye. They appeared on the scene originally in 1984 as action figures and comic book characters (if you were an action figure without an animated series or a comic book character, you were apparently laughed off the toy store shelves by your tv-star peers). They had several failed relaunches in the 1990s too, but again the one that really started taking off was the relaunch of Transformers in 2003-2005. The series launched in the latter part of that period (Energon Line) contained many homages to the original Generation 1 line. And of course, there is the movie that just launched that will undoubtedly spawn a resurgence of interest and popularity in the toys. The difference being where mommies are buying Little Ponies and Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids for their daughters so they can sit back and watch them enjoy the toys as much as they did at that age, Daddies will be buying Transformers for their sons (and hopefully some daughters too), but will actually end up spending large portions of their time playing with the toys themselves and reinacting battles and scenes from 20 years ago.

I have admittedly fallen for the tactic myself. Bobbin has a Fisher-Price Little People house (albeit the Little People don't bear any resemblance to the little block figures I played with), the Fisher-Price corn popper (albeit an electronic version), and many other toys that are similar to toys I had in my childhood. Of course, there is a fine line between "classic & timeless" and "relaunched"... or so I'd like to think :-)

In the end, the moral of the story is this: If you launch a wildly successful toy that is hugely popular with the 8-12 year old crowd and achieves iconic status for a generation, wait at least 20 years before relaunching, so that your original audience has had time to establish a dependable income, mate, spawn, and has entered the "nesting & nostalgiac" stage of their lives. And when you relaunch, make sure you release a feature-length movie at the same time, and try to get Steven Spielberg or George Lucas to direct it.

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