“Steel Monsters” in Out of the Garden (and why you can’t trust anyone)

I picked up Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing* when I was working on my two books about action figure marketing in the eighties — Each Sold Separately* and Action Figures Not Included* — and the book’s negative tone pretty much turned me off within the first dozen or so pages. It felt like an alarmist work — look out, toymakers are manipulating and brainwashing your children! — but it wasn’t until recently that I had reason to suspect the information in the book.

Above, you can see a section of the book where the author quotes Tonka’s Steel Monsters toy commercial. All well and good, but reading that the line “Games with action figures.” stood out as especially strange. Fortunately, I was able to compare this text to the actual commercial; seriously, that one line of text was so weird that I stopped to watch the 1986 Steel Monsters commercial.

Maybe it is just me, but not once do I hear the line “Games with action figures.” in that commercial, leaving me questioning the entire book. And if your goal is to highlight the dangers of toy advertising and television, wouldn’t you jump all over the line in the commercial where the announcer states “Evil never had it so good.”?

I guess this just again shows that we cannot trust any one source, and why we’re supposed to always track down multiple sources when researching a topic.

Related articles

• Tonka’s 1987 Steel Monsters Toys (battlegrip.com)
• Thank You, Action Figure Insider! (battlegrip.com)
• 1987 Newspaper Article on Tonka Buying Kenner (battlegrip.com)