The Flavor Paste Beckons
Bootleg Toys & Entertainment at the End of History
Next time you’re drawn, unable to resist, to your local big-box retail store, take a brief detour down the toy aisle. If you, a childless Millennial, feel self-conscious about conducting this experient, try borrowing a niece or nephew to escort you. Don’t worry, just act natural and no one will think it’s weird.
Take a few minutes to peruse the toy aisle. You’ll probably find that the majority of toys you see there are based on licensed properties. This is nothing new; in fact, mass-produced toys based on licensed properties date back to the early-Twentieth Century, at least. Kids coming of age in the 1930s might have played with dolls modeled on the likeness of Shirley Temple, or with the Red Ryder BB Gun made legendary by the endless replays of A Christmas Story every December. Of course, these early examples of mass-produced toys would feel impossibly quaint by 1983, the year in which A Christmas Story hit theaters.
Deregulating Saturday Morning
In 1981, the newly-elected US President Ronald Reagan appointed Mark Fowler as the new head of the Federal Communications Commission. Fowler took a slash-and-burn approach to regulations governing television programming for young viewers. He was especially interested in adding more flexibility to the manner in which programmers could advertise to children.
Suddenly, educational programming in the style of School House Rock or The Eletric Company, which dominated children’s entertainment in the 1970s, was on the outs. The new era of properties like Transformers, Strawberry Shortcake, He-Man, G.I. Joe, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was in. This move would have ramifications that continued to echo far beyond the golden years of the saturday morning cartoon block.
For anyone who remembers anything about these properties, the first order of mental assocation it probably “toys.” There were incalculable tons of plastic devoted to profiting off these cartoons. But, as we already noted, licensed toys had already existed to marketize and profit off of intellectual property for decades. So, what’s the difference? The distinction is that, post-deregulation, the toys were not made to marketize the programming. Instead, the programming was made to advertise the toy.
With the deregulation of childrens’ entertainment, intellectual properties could, for the first time, be created with the express purpose of advertising a product. These cartoons were essentially 21-minute commercials, interspersed with additional 30-second commercials that functioned like calls-to-action in the larger context of the ad copy that was the show itself. The arrangement worked for the producers of programming, too, as the toy manufacturers would gladly finance production. By the time this trend in “toyetic” properties reached its peak around 1986, the situation had evolved to such a point that a show didn’t get made if it didn’t have a ready-made toy tie-in on its way to production.
This was a dark time for childrens’ entertainment in retrospect. Still, we have to acknowledge that there was a degree of possibility to be wrung from the entertainment landscape. This was before The End of History; in contrast, we now live in an age in which all culture is reduced down to a vaguely-paletteable, yet undistinguished mush. It’s a backwater that is directly downstream from the frenetic, frenzied eighties, where all symbols and signifiers are stripped of meaning as soon as they’re produced and rendered as parts of the blob to be marketized and resold to the very people who created them, context-free.
In effect, we now live in the era of The Bootleg Culture.
The Bootleg Culture
Every reader will have some vague recollections of their first encounters with online culture. One of the first facets of the online which I can remember really capturing my attention was the memification of bootleg toys.
For those who have not delved deep, bootleg toys are unlicensed toys, typically produced offshore and brought to market through an opaque chain of illicit subcontractors. You might see them turn up at Dollar Tree, Big Lots, gift shops that sell desktop water fixtures and samurai swords, or most likely, at your local flea market. I typically try to steer clear of subjectivity on this blog; however, I cannot deny the fact that I earnestly love these cheap plastic knock-offs, often much more than the properties from which they steal.
These bastard chimeras possess a certain inherent humor. There is more to appreciate here than just the absurd nature of the humor, though.
I talked a bit about the uncanny absurdity of symbols deliberately divorced from meaning in an earlier post. These bootleg toys evoke a similar experience. You, as the viewer, understand the absurdity of this object, yet it is presented to you as if nothing were odd or strange about it. This calls even more attention to the absurdity, heightening the contradiction that lies at the heart of the object itself.
Much like vaporwave art and music, the juxtaposition of incongruous elements instills in the viewer a kind of limited, hyperreal experience. The toy forces you to take it in as it is, thereby forcing you to confront the absurdity of not only the object, but of the context that is the system which produced it.
Nothing New Under the Sun
Since the first story was told, the first chord struck, and the first line etched in stone, all human artistry and creative expression has been a process of borrowing from, and reinventing, what already exists. No creative work comes into being in a genuine vacuum; all works bear the mark of some earlier influence, whether it’s inspiration from another work of human hands, or from nature. This is the definition of a dialectical process at work.
Of course, how closely a work resembles those things which influenced it-aesthetically, intellectually, and ideologically-can change. The material conditions that exist outside of the work itself will, inevitably, shape how that work is created, and how it is perceived by a viewer. Just as the Medici family’s money determined the casting of Donatello’s David, so are the works of contemporary artists determined by the money of their patrons.
Reflected in the phenomenon of the bootleg toy, we see the final destination of all culture as it is fed into the maw that is the black hole propelling the market in our present moment. I earlier described culture in the age of capitalist realism as “vaguely-paletteable, yet undistinguished mush.” This is the fate of all cultural products in this era; all culture is destined to be stripped of context and mashed into a flavorless nutrient paste. What better representation of this do we have than the bootleg toy?
The profit motive under capitalism butts up against the widely-documented phenomenon of the tendency of profit to decline over time. As a result of these two forces, the cultural works produced under capitalism tend to be whatever are most likely to generate profit, regardless of artistic merit. This is why reboots, remakes, rereleases, and continuations of proven properties are so dominant in present culture.
Human artistry has, for thousands of years, been a practice of taking influence and borrowing from what exists, but rearranging the elements to create something entirely new. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, we arrived at the age of peak global cultural hegemony, and the pressure exerted by the market has caused the poles of creativity to reverse. There is not only a financial incentive to repackage past cultural products and sell them back to people; there is a genuine perverse incentive to avoid creating anything new.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” — Karl Marx
“Re-issue! Re-package! Re-package! Re-evaluate the songs. Double-pack with a photograph, Extra track (and a tacky badge).” — Morrissey
Our Future in the Bootleg Culture
The tendency toward remakes, reboots, and cynically “woke” reimaginings of preexisting intellectual properties is not, as reactionaries suggest, the work of some conspiracy aimed at poisoning Western culture. Rather, like the manufacturers of children’s entertainment in the eighties, the gravitational force of the market is such that studios cannot afford to make anything else.
With the push for bigger productions, and the bigger budgets they necessitate, Hollywood studios can no longer afford to take chances in the way they might have in earlier decades. Studio executives, desperate to stave off the declining rate of profit and deliver greater value to shareholders, can’t afford to gamble on any property that isn’t already bolstered by reams of market research suggesting it is highly likely to turn a profit. Thus, the most attractive subject is one which already has a built-in audience and has been proven in the past.
The result is that cultural products become increasingly homogenized. They incestuously draw from the same sources, time and again, until we eventually achieve a kind of grey universality; limitlessly diverse in window dressing, yet nondescript in content and substance. All curiosity, spontaneity, and vigor will be driven from mass-produced art to ensure that it is maximally-palatable, yet exciting to none. It will drawing on a thousand half-remembered points of reference, but transform none of them.
If you want a vision of the future, don’t imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. Rather, imagine chewing on a flavorless mound, paying $15 a pop for the pleasure, as the world outside the window slowly sinks into the sea.
Originally published at https://arguechat.substack.com.
