Toy Packaging

Over the holidays when I was writing I would usually put on a bulldog mascot yule log video like Butler Blue III, his "girlfriend" Addie of the University of the Redlands, or his buddy Jack of Georgetown University--or former Jack as there's a new one this year.

But one night I loaded YouTube and got sucked into watching a lot of videos from Toy Galaxy.  I mean, "The History of Robotech (Parts 1-4)" is something I couldn't really pass up given I did a whole A to Z Challenge on it.  It didn't tell me a lot I didn't know already except that Harmony Gold is even more fucked up than I thought with the sheer number of lawsuits they've had since bringing Robotech over.  One of their last ones was trying to sue Hasbro over a Sky Striker painted like Jetfire and not only was the case thrown out, they were unable to sue about that anymore, which maybe helped with releasing a couple of Jetfire toys since then, though neither is an actual Veritech fighter yet.

Anyway, while watching a bunch of those videos there was something interesting that was referenced in a few of them about the marketing of toys.  The thing is that in Japan you can basically make any kind of transforming robot, put it in a box, sell it, and someone will buy it.  But American audiences are a lot different.  Americans need a story, a mythology, to buy the toys.  So in Japan the toys that became the Transformers, GoBots, etc didn't really have a story or hardly even any names.  GoBots for instance just had designations like MR-01, -02, -03, etc.  When they were brought to the USA they were given names, albeit kind of stupid ones like Leader-1, Cy-Kill, Cop-Ter, Scooter, and Turbo.

The story of the Transformers being from Cybertron and fighting a civil war and even the factions of Autobots and Decepticons was all made up in the USA, mostly by Marvel writer/editor Bob Budiansky.  The stories for the GoBots and Voltron were also pretty much made over here.  Robotech was partially made up in the USA as Carl Macek had to come up with a way to combine three different series into one saga.

The most successful toy lines all had a marketing blitz to go with the toys.  He-Man, Transformers, and GI Joe all had TV shows and comic books to go with the toys and help to sell them.  A lot of cynical people say that those TV shows and comics were just extended commercials, though I like to think they tried their best to have stories and characters too.  Toys that didn't have that or didn't have that until the toys were already out, tended to do a lot worse.

What I can't decide is whether it's a good thing or bad thing that American kids need these stories/marketing.  I mean does it mean that American kids are just too unimaginative to create their own stories for their toys?  Or does it mean that Japanese kids just see toys as playthings while American kids form more of an emotional bond with their toys?  Or maybe it's both?

But the one thing this does highlight that is important if you're selling books too, is that not every country reacts the same way to something.  We've certainly seen that in movies the last decade or so as foreign markets gain importance.  Some movies like Venom or Aquaman do OK in America but do huge business overseas.  Whereas some movies like Black Panther do really well in America but don't perform as well overseas.  For writers then you have the ability to sell all over the world with Amazon, but you might find that some countries respond better than others.  Though the problem for most indie authors is that you don't really have the resources to actually translate the books into a bunch of other languages.

Anyway, there's some food for thought.