Merchandise Driven Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

Susan Davis: The titles are so similar that it's superficially easy to confuse the two, but the JMS series was Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future, not Captain Planet And The Planeteers.

Looney Toons: Well, yeah, that was my bonehead error when I first wrote up the page. I certainly knew better. Much later I'd realized I'd made that mistake somewhere, but I never went looking for it; I should have.

Looney Toons: Wiki, what is it you're trying to say with

If Ben10 automatically comes off as a toy deal series by first glance, wait till you see its sales.

I'm not sure if you mean the sales figures are so low that they bely the appearance of a Merchandise Driven show, or that the figures are far higher than expected.

Wiki: Sorry bout that, I guess I was a bit obscure. I mean if you really watch the thing, it really displays strong toy deal comes first traits, and the noteably high sales compound to it. Basically they achieved what they were going for.

Cassius335: Memo to Wildvine; Get a new agent.

Scrounge: He has a better agent than any of the new aliens from Season 3 or 4, apparently. Think any of them will ever get a Transformation Sequence? LATER: They never did. Some of them never even got used again. Isn't it sad, Eye Guy?

Seven Seals: There was a sizeable list of parodies and aversions of this trope that was completely cut. Is there some new policy I haven't been informed of that they're no longer in fashion? (Like any ego-based editor I am, of course, ticked off that one of my examples was cut, not genuinely interested in the overall quality.)

Ethereal Mutation: I'm going to put them back in. Looks like they were a kneejerk deletion. If somebody feels the need to delete a large section of an article, bring it up in discussion first.

Nlpnt: The picture demands some sort of Dick Cheney joke, but I just can't think of a good one at the moment.

Vampire Buddha: I took a chainsaw to this page. Here's what I removed and why (Haruhi bless folders):

open/close all folders

Irrelevant crap

* Most Anime will have a catchy or marketable theme song simply for the point of selling it.
** An even better example of this is the numerous Image Songs that some shows will generate.

Um, what?

*** "Yuusha" series actually came before TF in 1975 with Yuusha Raideen.
*** The name, certainly, but not the series. Raideen used the Yuusha name as part of the title, while the Yuusha series is built around a different concept entirely.

Natter

** Warner Bros.' interest in a kid-friendly approach to move toys might well have been the result of Batman Returns getting a lot of flak for Misaimed Marketing when the film itself was unusually dark and violent.

Irrelevant.

* Madan Senki Ryukendo, like its other Toku brethren, is driven by merchandise. How so? When an entire episode revolves around Kenji, the eponymous Ryukendo, and a group of kids trapped inside a digitally-generated world by the villains... in at the end of the episode comes Sidekick Fudou with a very convenient new power-up form.

There was a second bullet point directly underneath this one that, on its own, explained the example far better. I've promoted that one to main point and cut this one.

*** There is also the fact that it's a long homage to Ben-Hur, but the point stands.
** And anyone who remembers anything of 1999 in toy stores will likely see Episode One as being entirely merchandise driven. Aisles and aisles of toys and candies and books and more toys and everything else.

Irrelevant.

** This troper recently noticed that the beginning of each segment of How It's Made on Discovery Channel sounded like an infomercial for the product being shown...

Yeah, but they don't actually say the brand names. Also, How It's Made tends to show common, everyday objects such as mirrors and paintbrushes which aren't heavily advertised.

** Of course, the G.I. Joe toy line preceded the TV show by quite a few years, but the line did significantly expand to coincide with the series.
** Your Mileage May Vary, but GI Joe subverts this in many ways as well, even more than the arguments for Transformers below (in my opinion). Both the tv show and the comics were beloved by legions of fans who took the product placements in stride.

Both irrelevant and natter. The second bullet point is also nonsensical.

**The original series was the definition of Merchandise Driven, with the needs of the toyline being the first priority. In fact, the toys already existed, as part of toylines in Japan that didn't sell too well. They were repainted, and given to The Powers That Be to turn them into characters, in hopes of selling them. Loads And Loads Of Characters were introduced at a great rate, as more and more toys were carried over, and when they became So Last Season, a bridge was dropped on very nearly the entirety the gargantuan cast early in The Movie so it (and the following third season) could focus on new toy characters. (Fan opinion on this seems to be divided between "WTF?! They killed off Optimus Prime?!" and "Ooh! People actually *die!*") The third season doesn't introduce new characters at the rate the second season did, but the three-part series finale makes up for it, introducing thirty or so new characters, with some new gimmicks. Meanwhile, over in Marvel Comics land, Bob Budiansky, the first writer (and the one you have to thank for most of the finalized names and characterizations) mentioned having to constantly shoehorn in one new group of characters after another as he's trying to give existing ones some focus, and it being a main factor in his burning out on the series. (If you read the comics, you'll notice every few issues, a new team of five or so would drop in to do something existing characters could handle.) The Loads And Loads Of Characters page estimates the final character count of the Marvel Comics series at over three hundred.
** Beast Wars nods at the existence of the toys (from the original series at least) with Rattrap's description of the Ark ("That ship wasn't built, it was poured") and Primal's response ("Die-cast metal, it's a lost art"). Many of the original Transformers toys were made with some die-cast metal parts rather than entirely plastic.
*** This in part comes from the fact that while the franchise has gone for long periods without media, they have not gone for long without toys on the market. Note, for instance, the long gap between Generation 1 and Beast Wars, with only the slightly changed Generation 2 episodes aired during that time.
*** That and the toys have generally always been well made, interesting, priced at various ranges and unlike anything else on the market. Or to put it short, they're good toys.
*** The Merchandise Driven aspect is less noticable in the well-written-and-planned shows (Beast Wars, the 2007 movie, Transformers Animated) and less so on others (basically the whole Unicron Trilogy). That Hasbro has begun to be less intrusive also helps.

I love Transformers, but this cruft is irrelevant, nattery, and tedious.

** A popular bit of net-lore claims that Mattel had actually produced a large quantity of Conan toys, but when the 1980 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger came out, Mattel didn't want their toys associated with it. They cooked up a new plotline and characters to go with their creation, and the He-Man cartoon was thus supposedly born so they wouldn't take a loss on their inventory.
*** And like much net-lore, all of the above is false. The first He-Man toys predate the Conan The Barbarian film by at least a year.

The natter says the second above point is incorrect. So I deleted them, as the responder should have.

** This troper actually read about the significance of the Batwave before the show premiered, and was so disgusted that he didn't even watch the show until it came out on DVD. Truthfully, it didn't play as big a role over the course of the series as it seemed it would in the pilot, but this goes to show how old time brands like Batman and Superman (or even Ninja Turtles) don't really work when redesigned to be "toyetic"; the merchandisers are better off simply making up new action figures on their own without tying the producers hands ("Arctic Flight Batman", anyone?).

Irrelevant.

** While managing to be one of the most socially irresponsible and repugnant creations ever spawned. Huzzah!
** And now removed from store shelves by court order, thanks to Mattel successfully arguing that Bratz was a ripoff of Barbie. Definitely huzzah?

Natter.

Close Irrelevant crap

Incorrect examples

In comics, the Spider-Mobile and Supermobile, two vehicles introduced for characters who really don't need them, purely because you can only sell so many model Batmobiles. Lampshade Hanging with the Spider-Mobile: Spidey is persuaded to have a car by advertising executives in-story, and spends most of his time crashing it or complaining about how impractical it is.
- And then he finally drives it into a river. Classic.
Even though the comics weren't made to sell merchandise (and we all know why), various Marvel superhero franchises have sold toys. One noteworthy example includes a comic book series where Doctor Octopus steals Iron Man's designs for Humongous Mecha so he and Doctor Doom can, you guessed it, take over the world. (Of course!)
Arguably, the Goosebumps series evolved into this over time. Not only were they churning out books like nothing, but they were also releasing tie-in products with them. It ultimately became a Franchise Zombie when R. L. Stine got sick of it all.
The Harry Potter series embraced this when it became a runaway success. It's testament to the skill of J. K. Rowling that even with the demands for more plot elements to turn into merchandise, they didn't impact on the quality of the books themselves.
- This troper remembers her doing an interview in which she explained that there was only so much merchandising she could stop, so she just tried to put the brakes on anything particularly outrageous. Moaning Myrtle toilet seat cover, anyone?
Most manufactured music, especially of the Boy Band variety. Read the history of many of these groups and you'll find that almost all of them involve a producer calling auditions based around marketability.
- The Monkees are a notable example of this actually working out pretty well in terms of general quality.
The Merchandise Driven motive for airing the Victoria's Secret fashion show is actually the more respectable of the two major reasons for having it on TV. (It goes without saying that supermodel Fan Service is the other reason.) Shows for kids are required to refrain from advertising their own merchandise, but since this is a very "adult" show, that trope is massively averted.
In Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy thought Spock wearing an IDIC pin, the highest honor in Vulcan society, was a cheap way to market junk to Trekkies. (It was — Gene Roddenberry established a separate company called Lincoln Enterprises solely to hawk Trek merch. The IDIC was one of the first things they offered.)
Warhammer and Warhammer 40000. GW makes no bones about it.
The Sonic The Hedgehog video game series did this a lot. They had programs like SatAMSonic, The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Underground, a Sonic the Hedgehog movie, and Sonic X. And they also had the comics by Archie for the USA, and Fleetway for the UK.
- Note that writers had a lot of free rein with their shows and comics, although for the purpose of making money Sonic is, was and always will be the hero of such animated spin-offs.
While Sluggy Freelance was not designed with merchandising in mind, creator Pete Abrams does get most of his income from Sluggy t-shirts, mugs, and other paraphanalia. Something of an odd case, since the guy writing/drawing the strip is the same guy who shills the merchandise. How much he lets marketing side affect the creative side is probably something only Pete knows.
Some comics, such as PvP, User Friendly, and Ctrl Alt Del, are pretty straight examples. Like Sluggy Freelance, they may not have started out this way, but they've certainly embraced it.
- Let's be honest here: Almost any webcomic of notoriety has some amount of merchandise, if only because it's one of the main ways to sustain a business (and certain merchandise is more "accessible" than the webcomic itself may be, making it a more lucrative option as well.)
Lampshaded in this Order Of The Stick. The strip is itself titled "Hey, I Need to Sell Them Somehow."
Gargoyles subverted this a bit — they were occasionally ordered to put in merchandise, but worked hard to make it fit the story. For example, the Eye of Odin, a jewel that bestowed superpowers, was created for the Genesis videogame, but creator Greg Weisman adapted their idea to make it fit into the show. The Eye was a very interesting part of the show, and eventually was revealed to be Odin's actual eye. They had less success with the helicopter. It's hard to see why airborne creatures would need a helicopter, but they were ordered to put one in to advertise the Kenner toy. So they worked as hard as possible to fit it in organically, and it still felt artificial. But they did their best- and then Kenner decided not to make the helicopter toy after all, which was something of a slap in the face. And then there was the motorcycle, which would be completely impossible for them to use on any regular basis. So Weisman and Co. had the characters build a motorcycle, and then blew it up five minutes later.
When this troper was a little girl, I had a doll called Mirabelle that was very expensive for the time (retail about $175). The doll had a sensor in its chest and came with a video tape that it could interact with; you could but more video tapes direct from the company for about $20 apiece. I didn't pay that much, since my grandma got it for me on a yard sale; I also didn't play with it more than about once because the doll was pretty creepy-looking and the voicebox started to fail, which scared the crap out of me. A very merchandise-driven toy, though.

Close Incorrect examples

The thing with most of these is that simply having merchandise, even a whole lot of merchandise, does not mean it's merchandise driven. Having one or two items, as in the comics and Gargoyles examples, is about as far from merchandise driven as you can get while still having toys.

The webcomic examples also don't fit because the creators originally wrote them for fun, and The Merch accumulated gradually. It would only count as this trope if the creators had the merchandise first, and wrote the comic to fit.

As for Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, and Mirabelle... those are fricking toys! A toy cannot possibly be merchandise driven, because it is merchandise. Now, if Mirabelle had her own cartoon, then yeah, that would fit the trope.

Perhaps it might be an idea to make a whole new Merchandise page for discussion of merchandise in general? (23:46 GMT, 16/4/2009)

Daibhid C: The Gargoyles example, as well as the Super- and Spider-Mobiles, seem to be looking at it from the wrong angle. Not "This franchise exists to sell merchandise" but "Elements of this franchise exist purely to be merchandise, due to Executive Meddling, and don't really belong in it at all".

Madrugada: Chainsawed incorrect examples. Open to discussion if someone thinks they should be replaced. Keep in min, the definition of this trope is not"Shows with a heavy merchandising tie-in" but "Shows which were produced in order to sell merchandise." In other words, The merchandise is the only reason the show even was made in the first place.

Futari Wa Pretty Cure has been accused of existing primarily to sell show-themed virtual pet/cellphones and card decks to young teen girls.
Marmalade Boy and Hana Yori Dango both had merchandise items inserted into their plots (reportedly to the detriment of those plots); these items were sold by the primary sponsor of the programs, Tomy.
The original Macross series was not particularly merch-driven but ended up doing very well; its successor Macross 7, however, is very obviously driven by its need to sell toys given how often the elaborate transformation sequences are shown, as well as the very kid-friendly level of violence in the series.
The amount of Executive Meddling that turned Sailor Moon into this by the last two seasons is legendary.

If it wasn't merchandise driven from the very beginning, it isn't merchandise-driven, since this trope relies on the conditions leading to the creation of the show..

To hear it from accounts of Jon Peters' tenure on Superman Lives, he wanted to make the film as toyetic as possible. L-Ron, a robot personal assistant from Giffen's run on Justice League International, would be brought in as "Brainiac's gay robot sidekick." In the J.J. Abrams script, Superman's mom and dad (oh yeah, Krypton doesn't blow up in that script) have an alien dog that was explicitly designed to be turned into a toy. And when Tim Burton was brought on, there was talk about giving Superman a reliance on "Kryptonian gadgetry," making him Batman, only invincible.
The same thing happened with Batman & Robin, when Joel Schumacher was told by the Warner Bros. executives to make Batman & Robin "as kid-friendly as possible" and to make it "more toyetic", following the success of his last film, Batman Forever. Co-star Chris O'Donnell joked that making Batman & Robin was like "making a toy commercial".
- Possibly lampshaded by Poison Ivy in the film:
  Poison Ivy: I'm a lover, not a fighter! That's why every Poison Ivy action figure comes with [Bane]!
Star Wars. The original trilogy has a shitload of merchandise (Boba Fett action figures, anyone?) due to George Lucas deliberately making the setting as toyetic as possible. It is also rumoured that he replaced Wookies with Ewoks in Return of the Jedi because it would be easier to make a toyline. It was only, with the prequel trilogy, however, that he worked directly with toy manufacturers to work in as many action figures and vehicles as he could. Just about anyone will agree that the paddingtastic pod racing scene in Episode One was only inserted to let Lucasarts make a tie-in racing game.
- In an interesting inversion however, Lucas has control over what toys the company makes while the company (Hasbro) has no control over what potential merchandise appears in the film. After the sucess of the first Star Wars film, Lucas created a board of people to oversee and approve or deny the creation of toys, which at the time were made by Kenner, as he was disgusted by one of their original proposed products which was a group of generic space alien action figures placed in a bag with the Star Wars logo attached.
Arguably Extreme Makeover Home Edition belongs in this category, due to the show's intense focus on Product Placement. The show has been called an hour-long Sears commercial.

Making a work that allows for merchandise tie-ins is not the same as making a film solely to promote the merchandise line.

The Little Orphan Annie radio show from The Thirties offered decoders, mugs and other merch by mail order. In addition to payment, kids were required to send in proof-of-purchase of the sponsor's product. That, of course, makes it Older Than Television.
- Brilliantly portrayed in A Christmas Story, where Ralphie finally gets his long-sought and -desired decoder badge, painstakingly works on the code given at the end of the show, believing with childhood innocence he was honestly going to help little Annie... only to find a crummy ad for Ovaltine.

Examples of The Merch or Product Placement. Not Merchandise Driven.

Older than you think. Several cartoons from the 50's were like this. Specifically I can only remember the Peter Potomus series but there were others too.

Nope. There was no Peter Potamus merchandise until after the show. Ideal Toy Company was the sponsor but had no input into the content.

''Spongebob Squarepants" after the series had been put on hiatus for about two years the show was revived after executives saw how well sales were going for toys, dvds, clothing, and other merchandise relating to the show, unfortunately the show was never as good as it was after it came back and they just won't seem to let it end.
Cars.

Again, the merchandise had to come first. That is not true of either of these examples.

Deleted the entire Aversions/Parodies section:

Parodied in Freakazoid!. During a scene where Freakazoid is using his Super Speed to chase a villain down the highway, the writing crew of the show drive up next to him and suggest that he use the Freakmobile instead, in order to increase toy sales.
- And it was quite successful, too!
The Cheat Commandos cartoons on Homestar Runner are an explicit parody: locations are referred to as "playsets" by the characters, one commonly-used vehicle is "The Action Figure Storage Truck", and the show's theme song ends with "Buy all our playsets and toys!"
- They even have their own brand of breakfast cereals: "Cheat Commandos-O's, ridiculous breakfast! Buy all our playsets and toys!"
Another parody comes in the movie Spaceballs, where all of the "merchandising" is shown in the movie. All of the merchandise is named "Spaceballs the (name of item)"... including both the standard (breakfast cereals, dolls) and the absurd (toilet paper and flamethrowers). The joke was extended on the original VHS release, as the cassette's box carried the title "Spaceballs the Home Video". Sadly, the DVD has no such tag, though a voice does bellow, "Spaceballs the DVD Menu!" when you start it up. In the film, a character also references a "sequel" named Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.
- Perhaps ironically, some of the items — notably the coloring book and the lunch box — are Transformers merchandise with Spaceballs labels on them!
Yogurt: We put the picture's name on everything! Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made.
Parodied ruthlessly in The Simpsons, with the "Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Choc-O-Bot Hour", featuring chocolate-themed Transformers-type robots. In response to the question of whether it could be made longer to satisfy the demand for "educational programming", an executive calls the show "barely legal as it is".
Twisted in the webcomic Shortpacked!, as there is a definite merchandise influence... But it's stuff the creator buys rather than sells.
Shonen Tournament Arc series based around invented, marketable games are common enough that Hikaru No Go and Akagi's use of ancient public domain games (go and mahjong, respectively) counts as subversion.
Director Guillermo Del Toro resisted attempts to give Hellboy a toyetic car or dog (along with a lot of other Executive Meddling).
- If you can't successfully market a BPRD toy line, you're in the wrong line of work.
Parodied/satirized in Watchmen, where Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias has capitalized on his own success as a superhero, and the books explicitly show his own action figure sitting on his desk. Now for the fun part — with the upcoming Watchmen movie, they've already started making Watchmen toys including, of course, Ozymandias. But he's not wearing purple.
- For added irony value, in the comic Adrian Veidt sends his toy people a memo saying he feels it would be a bad idea to market a Rorschach toy, presumably because Rorschach is a brutal, misogynistic, racist, sexist, homophobic vigilante who brutally murders people. Guess what's hitting the shelves to tie in with the film?
  - There are also Watchmen condoms. In glow-in-the-dark blue. With "We're society's only protection" emblazoned on the packaging. It's pretty clear that the movie merchandise is itself an elaborate parody.
Similarly satirized in The Specials, in which a B-List superteam starts coming apart at the seams after a merchandising deal produces action figures of them rife with deliberate and outrageously extreme Adaptation Decay.
Parodied in Monty Python's Flying Circus, where E. Henry Thripshaw discovers a new disease (a verbal disorder), names it after himself, and sets out to make lucrative licensing deals.
The concept is brought up during Warren Ellis's run on Thunderbolts. Norman Osborne explains to Songbird that she's staying on the team, despite her moral objections, because of her "toyetic" nature, so that the Thunderbolts can more easily be marketed to the American people (that, and he has blackmail photos of her and Baron Zemo).
Parodied in Wildguard where Wannabe created variations of her costume for a number of different purposes: Artic, Deep Sea, Hazmat, etc.
- Also, Road Rash has an action figure of himself that shots water from its hands. Only problem is his power is invisibility.
Mike Mignola said he came up with the idea for The Amazing Screw On Head after wandering through a toy aisle, seeing all the different Batman figures and how they were essentially the same head on different bodies.
The Jurassic Park franchise has milked its share of toy products, video games, and the like, but there is also in-movie merchandising alluded to largely in the first movie, by Gennaro in one scene ("We can charge anything we want, two-thousand a day, ten thousand a day, and people will pay it. And then there's the merchandising..."), and by a close-up shot of a shelf full of merch later on (before panning to Hammond pondering over some ice cream)

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