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Growing up, I always imagined that the shows I enjoyed watching simply had enormously detailed toy lines spring up from no-where after the show had become popular. "Look at that successful cartoon!" I imagined toy scientists saying to each other from behind a two-way mirror. "I bet if we sold toys depicting those easily-merchandisable figures, we could make a lot of money!"
Of course that wasn't the case, and in fact it happened exactly the other way around: the toys preceded the cartoon. He-Man, Gi Joe, the Transformers. Cultural touchstones for a generation. The equivalent would be if the moon landing was staged in an effort to sell Tang. The gaining of this knowledge, and the cynicism that came with it is probably the greatest tragedy of my adolescence, even more so than the 12 years of puberty.
Evidently this heroically shameless feat of advertising was pretty controversial at the time, and the grown-ups of the day expressed great concern that their children would grow up to be ravenous consumers of pop-culture garbage, which actually turned out to be pretty prescient. At the time, the producers of the cartoons threw a sop to these parents in the form of little morals or
"life lessons" which could be delivered at the end of each cartoon. Which is how an entire generation learned the truth about "bad touching" from a man wearing furry underpants.
Turning lessons about not drinking poison and respecting your elders into something commercial is pretty horrible, and is probably why I'm so suspicious of old people to this day. Because this element of my childhood was so badly warped and mistreated, and on the advice of