The toys taking over Hollywood

Many of today’s blockbusters make as much profit from selling toys as they do from selling tickets. Robbie Collin investigates “Why sell toys based on cartoons when you could make cartoons specifically to sell toys?”

Haim Saban turned on the TV in his hotel room and couldn’t believe what he saw. It was 1985, and the Israeli-american entrepreneur was in Tokyo on a business trip: he was a self-described “cartoon schlepper”, who bought the rights to Japanese children’s animated shows and released them in the West with new English voice tracks. It was a decent living – enough to sustain his production company. But what he was watching now would make him a billionaire: a children’s programme, called Super-electron Bioman, about five brightly coloured warriors who fought giant monsters with a giant robot. But it wasn’t a cartoon. The monsters and robot might have been swathed in rubber and plastic, but beneath the suits were real actors.

Saban knew that by re-dubbing a cartoon, its foreign origins could easily be concealed. His billion-dollar brainwave was realising that a liveaction show – specifically this one, with its jumpsuitclad, completely unidentifiable heroes – could be handled the same way. Back in California, he shot new story scenes with an American cast, edited in the fight scenes from Super-electron Bioman, and touted the result around the television networks. None would touch it. But Saban knew he was onto something – and six years later tried again with Dinosaur Squadron Zyuranger, another series from the same Japanese franchise. This one clicked. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (as Saban renamed it) became an international hit. For a kids’ show, it was staggeringly more violent than anything else around. But its three-and-up audience found the violence thrilling rather than scary. The monsters might have knocked over skyscrapers as if they were shoeboxes, but they weren’t threatening in the slightest. They looked like toys.

This week, a new $100m Power Rangers film will arrive in cinemas – and it owes its existence to the original show’s toylike quality. Ever since the TV series was first broadcast in the UK in 1994, Power Rangers action figures and play sets have been bestsellers: it’s now the second-most successful action-figure brand in the UK after Star Wars. Power Rangers and the toy business are a good fit. Each instalment brings a new set of characters, robots and monsters – around 20 film tie-in toys are already in shops – but they all fit in the same world its young target market already knows. There’s a word to describe this attribute: toyetic.

And to understand it, you have to understand the extraordinary man who coined it. He was Bernard Loomis, the Bronx-born son of a first-generation Russian immigrant, and probably the greatest toy salesman who ever lived. In the 1960s, while working at the toy company Mattel, Loomis realised something that would change the relationship between films and toys forever: it could be turned backwards. Why sell toys based on cartoons when you could make cartoons specifically to sell toys? His first swing at this – an animated series based on the Hot Wheels range of die-cast model cars, broadcast from 1969-71 – was so successful that rival companies lobbied to have the show legally reclassified as advertising. In a few years, this was followed by Transformers, My Little Pony, Masters of the Universe and G.I. Joe.

But Loomis’ masterstroke came in 1976. He had being reading about a film which some young punk called George Lucas was

shooting out in the Tunisian desert, and something about its title – Star Wars – grabbed him. So he asked Twentieth Century Fox if there was any potential mileage in a toy line. The studio thought maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t, but Lucas was more confident. He agreed to forgo his $500,000 directing fee from Fox in exchange for the licensing rights. The studio happily accepted, a decision which cost them – and earned Lucas – more than $4bn. The toys wouldn’t be ready until the year after Star Wars’ release, but consumer interest got so big, so fast, that Loomis started selling empty boxes. Each contained a certificate which the owner could swap for a toy when they were ready. The rest of the industry thought he was crazy. He sold half a million of them.

With so much money there for the taking, Loomis’ philosophy became Hollywood dogma – and today, the blockbuster and toy businesses are irrevocably tangled. In 2015, the British toy market grew by 5.9%, thanks to a corresponding box office surge of 15.2%, driven by ultra-toyetic films like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World and Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Incentives that powerful inevitably lead to creative compromise. During the making of Batman & Robin, director Joel Schumacher was constantly urged by Warner Bros. to make his film more toyetic. “There was enormous pressure on us to create more inventions in the film that could be turned into toys,” he recalls. Batman & Robin’s tie-in line featured 18 different Batman figures, ten different Robins and five Mr Freezes. The film itself, however, was a baboonish fiasco. And it is considerations such as these that continue to hold films back. The original script for Iron Man 3 featured a female villain, but the character was rewritten as male – Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian – on the studio’s command, thanks to a toy industry belief that boys don’t buy female action figures. (A 1986 study showed that boys as young as four rejected toys in “female” packaging, regardless of the actual toy the box contained.) So even when the films do let girls play too, the toys rarely follow suit. Black Widow figures were a rarity in the beefcake-heavy Avengers toy range. Rey, the iconic young heroine of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, was absent from that film’s tie-in Monopoly set. If you’re wondering why Marvel’s first female-led solo superhero film is still two years away, there’s your answer.

Loomis died in 2006, the year before the release of Transformers, a film that pushed his industry-changing realisation to its logical extreme. He’d realised film could behave like adverts: Transformers was essentially an advert that behaved like a film. It was primarily designed to make toys look good. That eventually led to The Lego Movie, a masterpiece of the form, which captured with wit, beauty and warmth why the venerable Danish building blocks were a cornerstone of so many childhoods – and to this year’s spin-off, The Lego Batman Movie, which achieved with effortless panache everything Schumacher’s film had failed to do 20 years ago. The movies will be toying with us for some time yet.

A longer version of this article appeared in The Daily Telegraph © Robbie Collin / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2017