Anytime Playdate by Dade Hayes

Author:Dade Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

TOYETIC

How the Toy Aisle Became a Preschool Battleground

Imagine lying on the beach on a blazing hot summer day. When you close your eyes, you hear a swirl of sounds: children shouting, people chatting, waves crashing, seagulls crying, music pulsing, paddleballs making their muted thwok as they hit wooden racquets.

Now imagine that discordant mosaic of sound reverberating in a vast space, the volume dialed up substantially, and the aroma of hot dogs and nachos filling the stale air, and you have some idea of the experience at the American International Toy Fair. The 103-year-old trade show is held in New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Geographically, the aircraft-hangar-like halls of Javits are just a mile or so from the city’s historic epicenter of toys, the International Toy Center, which long sat on 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue across from the landmark Flatiron Building at the southwest corner of Madison Square Park. Spiritually, however, it’s a world away. A neoclassical building, the toy center is as old–New York as it gets. In the early years of the fair, yo-yos and red wagons were the draw, and it seemed more appropriate to invoke Baudelaire’s famous observation that toys are “a child’s first initiation to art.”

At Javits, it ain’t about art. Strobe-lit thirty-foot banners hang from the rafters, while electronic bleeps and bloops and floor-rumbling video clips on plasma screens trumpet the latest product launches and tie-ins with film and TV properties. These licensed products account for about 25 percent of the toy industry’s $22 billion in annual sales. There are 100,000 toys at Toy Fair, of which 5,000 are brand-new. Retail buyers from thirty countries schmooze with everyone from mom-and-pops to multibillion-dollar conglomerates. As marketing expert Erik Clark puts it, Toy Fair is “a unique feature of the toy business—a group of grown men and women deciding ten to eighteen months in advance what a three-year-old will want to buy when he is five.” No one under eighteen is admitted to Toy Fair. Perhaps because of the clarity that affords—no photo ops of babies playing with specially designed rattles or toddlers doing battle with the latest videogame—one can learn a great deal about modern baby and preschool entertainment here…if one can focus amid the din.

Ni Hao, Kai-lan was not one of the stars of the 2007 or 2008 Toy Fairs. New shows on Nickelodeon and many other channels are customarily on the air for eighteen to twenty-four months before toy lines get rolled out. The purpose of that lag time is to avoid incurring manufacturing costs for a show that doesn’t connect with enough viewers to turn a profit.

Nevertheless, Toy Fair is crucial to those seeking an understanding of the business and cultural realities of a preschool program. For most consumers in the United States and abroad, the toy aisle is where the Kai-lans of the world will live forever, or at least until next Christmas. If she succeeds, Kai-lan will be played with by many more people than will watch her. At the same time, Toy Fair is also known as a place of discovery.

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