Event Description
Please join us for our next internal colloquium featuring Jonathon Lundy, PhD candidate in CCM. Lunch will be served.
Abstract: The popular Netflix documentary series, "The Toys That Made Us" (2017), explores both the commercial origins and sociocultural impact of eight iconic toy franchises. Given its title, the nostalgic series’ treatment of the latter is somewhat lackluster, however, even in title alone, TTTMU presents a timely thesis addressing the impact of toys on children and the adults they become. One need only look at current toy aisles to see the enduring success and industrial legacy of the toyetic transmedia franchises like Star Wars, Transformers, Masters of the Universe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Care Bears and My Little Pony.
However, the growing popularity of nostalgic or retro toy collection, curation, and commerce by adults who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, suggests a more deeply rooted connection to material forms of media marketed to children.
This project aims to move beyond mere personal reminisces to investigate what influence toyetic media has in fostering as sense of personal and social identity for adults of a common generation, not merely defined by kinship, age cohort, or historical events, but by mediated experience. In so doing, this work also hopes to address issues of media materiality, mediatization of culture, the commodification of nostalgia, mediated memory, transmediality, enduring fandom, and the central role of toyetic media in the socialization and construction of generational identity.
|
