12-Inch Scale Star Wars Bounty Hunters in 2001
I mentioned last weekend how I wasn’t quite clear on what the plan was in 2000/2001 when Lee’s Action Figure News & Toy Review (Amazon.com search*) kept running article pages that almost looked like ads. Did a toymaker pay for these as if they were ad space, or was the draw of such material so great that customers bought the magazine even though pages like this were more ad than content?
I suspect I’ll never get an answer, but today I’d like to demonstrate what I’m talking about by sharing these two-page spread from the January, 2001 issue of Lee’s Action Figure News & Toy Review (Amazon.com search*). These are article pages and not ad pages . . . even if it looks like one big advertisement to me.
Related articles
- July, 1997 “Star Wars Update” (battlegrip.com)
- “Your Inside Source for the Most Powerful Force in Toys!” (battlegrip.com)
- 1997 “Get Them Before The Scavengers Do” Kenner Star Wars Ad (battlegrip.com)
I believe the 90s were a turning point in modern journalism, where rewriting press releases became the general policy. (See also the subsequent death of investigative journalism.) Why write your own copy when an outside company will do it for you, for free?