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Title of Case Study: ‘More than Meets the Eye’: Consuming Licensed Media
Martin Charlton, South Tyneside College.
Aim:
The purpose of this study is to familiarise students with the key issues
& arguments surrounding the relatively new concept of ‘licensed’
media, specifically ‘toy tie-in’ media, which initially addressed
children as an audience, providing students with some historical background
to the issue as well as providing examples of texts representative of
this media form. Arising in the early 1980s, ‘licensed’ media
is any media, be it a TV show, movie, video game exists primarily to promote
another product, be it a video game, a toy line or otherwise. At its most
basic level, licensed media can be seen simply as another form of intertextuality.
What is of primary interest to this session however is the development of television shows based specifically around pre-existing toy lines. Pre-1980s the media form was banned in America following the ‘Hot Wheels’ show of the 1950s, condemned for essentially being ’30 minute long commercials’. The argument against this media form relies heavily on ‘media effects’ based judgements implying that these texts are effectively adverts, and also implying that children are unable to clearly distinguish between adverts and scheduled programming, with the conclusion being drawn that media institutions are being given dangerous levels of access to a highly impressionable audience. Furthermore, cursory examination of these texts suggests that they lack much of the ‘educational, spiritual or moral’ value of traditional children’s television.
However, this does not account for children’s individual interpretations of these texts, something which this session uses as a focus for discussion. This session, then, as well as using existing texts for discussion, relied on the students integrating their own situated culture into the argument. This not only ensures that the session will take vastly different directions every time it is delivered, but also offers an opportunity to discuss nostalgia regarding childhood. The focus on nostalgia for childhood is of pivotal importance in an increasingly media centred society, where many of the students involved in the session, upon being asked to reflect upon their childhood reflected not upon the experience of being a child and of growing up, but rather on their childhood media consumption. That much of this discussion concerned itself with these ‘licensed’ forms of media enabled students to see that this topic needed debate and also that ‘licensed’ media can be seen as significant cultural artefacts. These media products, then, raise valid questions around the nature of childhood in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Background:
This session was delivered via a 90 minute session incorporating a 45
minute lecture and a 45 minute seminar to a third year undergraduate group
on a module entitled ‘Popular Children’s Fictions’,
which included students from a range of degree programmes including Media,
Cultural & Film Studies, Journalism, Public Relations & New Media,
as well as a range of students on Joint Honours courses, allowing for
a range of disciplinary approaches to decoding this media. Prior to the
session students also had a 90 minute screening of ‘Transformers:
The Movie’ to contextualise the session. Of primary interest was
the small number of students involved in Business related courses, as
they were ideally situated to provide a useful counterpoint to the social
science opinion of the child as autonomous readers of texts. There is,
as yet, little discussion of this issue in academic texts, but those available
are interesting, accessible and useful for those wishing to work with
students in investigating this media form.
The key readings could be considered to be Kline (1993), who discusses the changing nature of children’s media, concluding that ‘licensed’ media is having a negative effect on those who consume it and Fleming (1996), who provides a number of useful case studies into the social context of many examples of ‘licensed’ media, including the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ & ‘The Transformers’. Both Kline and Fleming also provide dissections of the changing nature of children’s media consumption through the 20th century, providing sufficient background for anyone wishing to run this session or to direct students to further reading around this subject.
Activity:
Students were shown ‘Transformers: The Movie’ as a prime example
of the structure & purpose of ‘licensed’ media, and in
seminars were given copies of a Transformers comic story entitled ‘The
Legacy of Unicron: part 5’ to provide counterpoint to the screening.
While ‘Transformers: The Movie’ follows the intentions of
licensed media very closely, ‘Legacy of Unicron’ provides
an interesting juxtaposition, discussing the concept of religion in a
sufficiently neutral context as to offer its intended audience (which
at the moment of production was children aged approximately 5-12 years
old) a multitude of potential reading positions.
Using this text and context as the basis for the session, students were asked to form small groups of four or five and discuss exactly with whom the ‘meaning’ of this text lay, be it the companies responsible for their conception, the creators involved in producing these texts or the children involved in consuming them (See questions below).
They were also asked to assess, from their own media consumption, the validity of the declaration that ‘licensed’ media lacked ‘spiritual, moral and educational’ substance, going on to discuss whether children’s media as a whole had a duty to include such content.
To conclude the session, they were asked to propose reasons why franchises such as ‘He-Man’, ‘The Transformers’ & the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ had enjoyed nostalgic returns to popular culture of late, returns denied other contemporary texts which were not based on licenses and which often specifically did attempt to include ‘spiritual, moral & educational’ substance.
The importance of student’s
own media consumption:
Although much of the existing literature around this subject offers viewpoints
around the impact & effect of this specific media form, the aim of
this session was not to ensure that students prescribed to an existing
viewpoint, but rather that they formulated their own. Therefore, when
discussing texts rooted in the student’s own childhood, it is important
to allow students to reach their own often contradictory conclusions,
as well as facilitating the discussion of nostalgia in this session. For
instance, this session provided students with a number of discrepancies
in their own readings of texts, where the majority of students considered
the ‘licensed’ media they consumed as children (mid to late
1980s) to be morally ‘superior’ to ‘licensed’
media available to children of 2006, but were often unable to articulate
why. Likewise, students spent a great deal of time considering whether
it was required of ‘licensed’ media to have educational value,
using their own examples, disregarding the disparate points of view offered
by academics as not applicable to their own situated culture.
Advice to others wishing to
run this session:
Although the majority of lecture content would remain unchanged, the age
range of students involved in the session should ultimately determine
the examples used in lectures, as previous students on this session responded
more positively to textual examples they were familiar with.
However, the examples used in the screening and seminar are considered universally known examples of the form and can be used irrespective of the age of the cohort. ‘Transformers: The Movie’ is readily available on DVD from most retailers and although it has been released in a number of packages; the product remains the same in all iterations. In this session in particular, Metrodome distribution’s ‘Transformers: The Movie Reconstructed’, available from online retailers at prices around £5 was shown. The Legacy of Unicron: Part 5 is available in the Titan Graphic novel ‘Transformers: Legacy of Unicron’, which is currently in print and available from most online bookstores.
Evaluation:
Students were overwhelmingly positive about this session for a number
of reasons. Firstly, they appreciated the opportunity to revisit texts
which they had considered to be situated in their childhood, in both nostalgic
and academic contexts. A number of students commented that they had never
considered the multiple viewpoints surrounding both the production and
consumption of this media form and its texts. Of particular interest was
the way in which students quickly moved to justify the texts they were
most nostalgic about, seeking out the positive influences of these texts
upon themselves, instantly personalising their readings and fragmenting
the decoding of these texts. Unfortunately this session didn’t have
the facility to fully investigate exactly why these texts were so vehemently
defended by those who consumed them, but this is certainly an avenue for
investigation in future sessions.
References:
Fleming, Dan (1996) Powerplay : Toys as Popular Culture Manchester: Manchester University Press
Kline, Stephen, (1993) Out of the garden: toys, TV, and children's culture in the age of marketing London: Verso
Sutton-Smith, B (1986) Toys as Culture, Psychology Press
Sweet, R (2005) Mastering the Universe: He-Man and the Rise and Fall of a Billion-Dollar Idea, Emmis Books
http://www.electric-escape.net/node/767?PHPSESSID=e1fe03dd0ce4d5eb63cd943b21dbfe8f
Resources used:
Furman, S, et al. (2003) Transformers: Legacy of Unicron Titan Books
Transformers: The Movie Reconstructed (2005) Metrodome distributors
Questions:
• Is it the responsibility of the media to provide children with ‘spiritual, moral and ethical’ substance, or is it sufficient that they simply ‘do no harm’?
• To what extent does ‘Transformers: The Movie’ function solely as an advert for a toy line? Think about your own readings of this text.
• It has been argued that many of these licensed media texts, whilst under no obligation to do so, still provide some educational value to children. Why might this be?
• ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ were the number 1 selling Christmas toy of 2003. ‘The Transformers’ is to be the next movie directed by Michael Bay. Why might licensed media enjoy such a degree of nostalgia from adults who consumed these texts as children? (You should discuss whether you consider yourself to be nostalgic about any texts rooted in your childhood…)
Charlton, M. ‘More Than Meets the Eye:
Consuming licensed Media’ in the MEDAL Casebook, MEDAL Consortium
(2006).
http://medal.unn.ac.uk/casestudies/consumemedia.htm