I was reminiscing with a friend the other day about things that have changed so much in our lives. The conversation came about because his daughter has already become very fussy about what she wants to watch on TV and because of YouTube and other such things she has this idea in her head that all things are just available at all times because that is the only world she has ever known.
I think it will be a fun conversation to have with her once she is a bit older to tell her about the days when we got like an hour of cartoons every afternoon and on Saturday mornings, we would get a wonderful something like 4 hours in a row.... and that was it
I'm talking the days before most people even really had VCR's and the concept of being able to just watch anything whenever you felt like it was the stories of a madman or someone that was really into science-fiction stories. It's crazy when you think about how much technology has changed in just a general sense and even more so when it comes to entertainment.
I was a fan of basically any cartoon that came on but it never occurred to me at the time that certain cartoons were likely made with the explicit intention of merchandising and one of those companies was a lot more successful than others when it came to the show He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
Because of this show, me and everyone that I knew had at least some of the toys that this show spawned, and little naive me at the time didn't really ever contemplate that the reason why they kept introducing more and more characters all the time was not for the sake of the stories, but for the sake of selling more toys, and boy did Mattel ever rake it in for about 5 years.
Above are some pretty common ones and I distinctly remember quite enjoying the He Man and Skeletor versions that had the "wounds" that would rotate on their chests. I have no idea how much these things cost at the time because they were almost always purchased for me as gifts for birthdays and what not, but they can't have been much. I believe that some of them are worth quite a lot as collectors items these days. An unopened Castle Grayskull, I was kind of surprised to find out is only worth about $2000 on the collector's market, an opened and mostly destroyed one like the one I had is worth next to nothing.
Myself and my younger brother had so much of this stuff and I think that the toys were designed with intense durability in mind because we definitely were rough on ours.
We used our imagination a lot back in those days and I think at least a couple of fights broke out over who was "cheating" in our battles. The fun of youth, eh? All of my friends had these as well and we would revel at the collections that they had when we would visit one another's houses.
But the real topic here, or at least the point of why I am writing this, is because of the conversation I had with my friend and I ended up looking up how much money Mattel made by selling these toys.
The He-Man toys were introduced in 1982 and the company projected that total sales would be around $13 million and they were delighted when they were wrong about that and ended up selling nearly $40 million worth. The following year things picked up again and they sold $80 million worth, the year after that was even better at $110 million and by 1986 they surpassed $250 million in sales.
Then something happened and I don't know what it was, but people just completely lost interest in He-Man quite quickly because the total sales in 1987 was $7 million. There are a lot of theories about why this is but a lot of it included other toy manufacturers entering the market with their own cartoons and toys and action figures and the associated tons of other things like castles and vehicles saturated the market and I guess kids had just moved on at that point. You might be able to point the finger at videogames because home consoles were kind of the "toy of choice" at that point for birthdays and Christmas.
I went back recently to look at some old He-man cartoons seeing as how all of them can be viewed for free on YouTube for the most part, and this was one of those situations where I think the memory of the show should have been left alone because I was bored pretty quickly. It probably doesn't help that I am 40 years older than when they first aired but I don't think that the young people of today would stay interested in this stuff for very long either, certainly not enough to beg their parents for hundreds of dollars worth of collectible toys anyway.
If you are close to my age you probably remember lying on the floor in front of your 800 lb television and suffering through commercials because there was no such thing as "on demand" and I can only imagine how much money the people who had successful show must have made. We were subjected to commercials but there was a lot of rules about what the items could be. Mostly I just remember the commercials being about other toys and breakfast cereal... nothing too complex and not at all controversial.
These days I don't really know what collectibles kids are even going for if anything at all. But there was a time and apparently it was about 5 years in total that the idea of making a cartoon specifically to drive toy sales was all the rage. My own household was filled with these things such as GI-Joe, He-Man, She-Ra, My Little Pony, Care Bears, and well, a bunch of other things as well.
I don't think this is really all that possible anymore but I think that Pixar and Disney try to do a bit of it. I truly enjoyed those days but kind of look back on the rather huge waste of money that my parents endured getting us this crap.