User:Mathayelh

Initially, toy companies in the U.S. were prohibited from sponsoring TV shows for kids, but after the deregulation of children’s TV by President Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s, the floodgates opened to a wave of tie-in programs, where the toys industry would tag along with various networks to help shift their products. Heljakka (2015) points out that since its inception as a crucial part of American life in the 1950s, TV has reflected and nurtured cultural values and mores. From the 1960s escapist dramas that consciously evaded controversial issues, glossing over the harshest realities of life in favor of idealized portrayals, to today’s copious reality television programs, where participants engage even the most personal and taboo issues, TV has upheld a mirror to today’s society. However, the relationship between TV and social attitudes remains reciprocal, with broadcasters often demonstrating their power to influence viewers, either consciously via slanted political discourse or subtly by portraying controversial associations as socially acceptable. Indeed, the symbiotic nature of culture and TV is represented in all broadcasts, from family sitcoms to serious news updates. The mediatization theory, in particular, shows how media spreads and influences other social entities and cultural phenomena, including politics, religion, and play.

Somewhat, creating a children’s consumer culture is fueled by the need to gain and disseminate economic risk across two fiscally-volatile industries, entertainment, and leisure. Due to the challenges in predicting success, these two industries are specifically sensitive to the marketplace whims. The industry continues to be driven by the desire to make profits, even though TV is still subject to a regulatory government authority. For instance, some of the economic imperatives shaping the current relationship between entertainment and leisure industries include competition for advertising and programming time in the TV industry and efforts to stabilize the perilous toy industry. The two industries have united in a symbiotic relationship that blurs TV program and product lines for some time. On TV, programs provide the toy-industry with ads for characters, while the toys offer the entertainment industry readily identifiable characters.

Overall, many TV entertainment programs in the 1950s overlooked most current events and political issues, with major networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC developing prime-time programs appealing to a general family audience. Meanwhile, children’s toys were more of a material nature, with play being likened to physical activity. According to Stig (2014), today, the play has substantially turned into a form of mental activity involving communication, imagination, simulation, planning, and even roleplaying, among other elements. Also, play is now entwined with the manipulation of audio and visual cues and narratives, with children’s toys nowadays becoming a significant part of an imagined world.