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Comment by feverishaaron | Hacker News Reader

Naw, kids from Netflix homes are just watching long-form commercials. Dino Trucks, Nexo Knights and Ninjago all dominate my boys' Christmas wish lists this year.

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Ha. Reminds me of reading stories about Japanese children's robot hero tv shows in the 90s where the merchandise planning came before the tv show creation itself!

That's kind of an inversion of who's leading things, but kids television and the toy industry have always gone hand in hand. Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers and HeMan were cartoons before they were toys (I think...) but it was all about the merchandising.

He-Man was an action figure made by Mattel. TMNT started as a comic book, but from what I understand was a parody of popular things; Teenagers, Mutants, Ninjas...not sure why turtles were thrown in there. TMNT didn't get gain popularity until they started making action figures.

I hadn't ever thought of TMNT as being a parody, at least not in original Eastman and Laird form - I missed most of it, but parts of it were pretty dark, particularly Raphael's character IIRC.

I got introduced to it by way of Palladium's adoption of the world/setting as an RPG, who expanded the world with a whole bunch of amazing sourcebooks that never went anywhere near the silliness of the later incarnations involving "COWABUNGA DUDE!".

real money is in merchandising. george lucas understood that. even elon musk understood that recently ;)

If you haven't seen it, Musk was quoting a great scene in Mel Brook's Spaceballs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgRFQJCHcPw#t=36

at least Lego is a reasonably healthy toy, right?

I'm a little disturbed how far in they've gone on the licensed content. But I'm a child of the 90s that grew up with the classic System themes; I guess kids aren't into non-Star Wars space, castle, pirate and Wild West Legos anymore.

Lego city is still popular, and playmobil do a large selection of various castles.

The kits with multicolored bricks and no instructions are healthy. Everything else LEGO puts out are just action figures.

Source: grew up with both Bionicles and the multicolored bricks. Bionicles sat put together on a shelf while I reconfigured the bricks every day.

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