If you're a regular reader of AWM and/or a ceaseless toiler in the bowels of our beloved industry, and you've taken the time to read this review, then most likely you're already aware that the sine qua non of animation these days is filthy lucre. And most of that comes from, passes through, or is caused by what J. M. Barrie called the cruelest creatures - in other words, kids, those loving little tykes who hold in their hands the future of civilization.

While not news to us, this Entertainment/Marketing/Exploitation relationship is viewed as a recently evolved predicament by the wider society - the civilians who wind up paying for it. The result has been a rash of books on what to us seems to be the obvious: the symbiotic bonding of entertaining kids with marketing to them. These books have such catchy titles as Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, by Gary Cross, (Harvard University Press); Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie and the Companies That Make Them, by G. Wayne Miller, (Times Books/Random House); What Kids Buy and Why: The Psychology of Marketing to Kids, by Dan S. Acuff (with Robert H. Reiner), (Free Press); and The Business of Children's Entertainment, by Norma Odom Pecora, (Guilford). Still awake?

What do these books have in common, other than a predilection to use colons in their titles? Well, two of them are by academics, and another is by two Ph.D.s, so I guess we should be proud that we've come to attract such attention. Plus, they all sell for between U.S. $25 and $30, considerably more than most of the toys, etc., that they lovingly explore. I've read two of them (Acuff and Pecora), and it's the differences that make them interesting.

A Down-To-Earth Text
What Kids Buy is a fascinating book. Acuff details in a very informative and breezy style his explicit approach to creating for and selling to kids. Anybody who can write this sort of marketing treatise and quote sources as disparate as Piaget, Erikson, Santayana, Keats, James Baldwin, and Stephen Vincent Benet deserves our thanks - and our attention. Unlike most books from "inside the kid biz," this one does not presume the reader is incapable of understanding complex realities, nor does it treat a very serious subject in the "rah-rah" style of so many marketing books.

Both Acuff and Reiner (his colleague) have studied the emotional, intellectual and physical growth patterns of children, and their knowledge shows. They take what all too many people judge to be a simple monolithic market (Kids) and break it down into five component parts: birth through 3, 3 through 7, 8 through 12, 13 through 15, and 16 through 19. To anyone who has wondered why certain types of humor, adventure and character seem to "work" for one age but not another, their insight into age and gender delineate the differences in a clear and concise manner, even if the accompanying lists do run mind-numbingly long in a few places. Furthermore, unlike many apologists for the toy business, they acknowledge that all of us do have a societal responsibility to kids; they pull no punches in criticizing properties that do not serve the best interests of kids (disempowering vs. empowering), mainly for glorifying violence.