#WheresRey: A (missing) toy story
ALL THE SPOILERS AHEAD.
My daughter is five and a half. Last night, I took her (and the whole family) to see The Force Awakens.
Me: Lila, what was your favorite part?
Lila: When Kylo Ren threw those tantrums.
Me: Who was your favorite character?
Lila: Rey. (pause to think.) She was stronger than Kylo Ren. She even knocked him down!
I want to take her to the toy aisle and let her pick something. But it’s not quite as straightforward as that.
#WheresRey should never have happened
Ever since Disney paid $4.02 billion to buy LucasFilm, every tiny detail surrounding The Force Awakens has been managed with extreme care. Every. Tiny. Detail.
It’s easy to understand why. Star Wars is an unparalleled revenue juggernaut. But after Episodes I-III left fans cynical, a misstep here could have been disastrous.
Across the board, details were carefully planned and executed for maximum hype. But sure, maybe the overtly sexist merchandising was a simple mistake.
Or, as every piece of credible evidence suggests, the team that saved Star Wars — in large part by challenging what female heroes can be in movies — was unwilling to challenge gender norms when it came to merchandise.
The lack of vision is bad enough. Worse, if they’d been paying any attention at all, they would have seen this coming. It already happened once, after all.
When Disney released pics of the first read-through, people noticed quickly that the cast was mostly white and mostly male. We asked them to do better.
And it seemed like they heard. They expanded the cast, with an eye towards inclusion. While we may never know how much different it looked as a result, we know it did look different.
I’ve written about my relationship with Star Wars, and how I hoped The Force Awakens would give kids like my daughter and my nephew a chance to see themselves more visibly represented as heroes.
On opening night, I spent most of The Force Awakens crying. More often than not, it was because of how much that hope was rewarded.
Inside the theater, little boys and girls — and not so little ones — got to see the hero we expect in a Star Wars film. Someone courageous. Someone dreaming of a better life. Someone kind. Someone with inexplicable skills, mysterious powers and deep strength. Everything we expect. Just this time, the hero was a woman.
The merchandisers had a chance to reinforce this once-in-a-generation opportunity simply by making merch the same way they would if the lead hero was a man.
Unfortunately for all of us, they’re failing.
The real dollar value in Star Wars isn’t the movies, it’s the merchandise. Between 1977 and Disney’s acquisition, Star Wars sold more than $11.5 billion in toys, lunch boxes, shirts and licensed products. Analysts are predicting $5–6 billion in merchandise revenue this year alone. It’s so powerful a marketing vehicle, they’re using it to sell fruit.
The people behind the toys, the shirts, the costumes, the swag…they had chance to use unparalleled market power build on the new territory charted by the script. But they didn’t.
Outside the theater tonight, cardboard cutouts lured you in to take a photo, then pushed you towards the official merch tables. There was Han. There was Finn. But no Rey.
In the toy aisles and online stores around the country, Rey is mostly missing.
Where the movie challenges toxic, gender and race-based assumptions about who can be a hero, the merchandise leaves those ideas untouched.
#WheresRey
Imagine a classic Star Wars set with three heroes and three villains that came WITH Darth Vader but NOT Luke?
Ridiculous, right? If you have the lead villain, you need the lead hero.
Finn — great as he is— is not the lead. Nor are Chewie or Poe, the other “good guys” included. There’s the problem. They only included good “guys.”
So our main hero missing. Not just in this set, either.
A Millennium Falcon playset features BB-8 and Finn, but no Rey. Out of 265 Force Awakens toys available at ToysRUs.com, three are Rey toys. Three.
The Disney Store is a bit better. But even there, of the 22 items that come up in a search for “Rey,” there are clear gender expectations.
Stores are claiming Rey is sold out because they can’t keep up with strong demand. They’re telling The Daily Beast there’s more Rey merch to come. People who want to give them credit say things like, Rey wasn’t shipped because she comes with a lightsaber and that would be a big spoiler.
But you can see what’s really happening in this little quote (from the Daily Beast story):
According to a Disney rep, the company started making efforts to expand its licensed Star Wars offerings beyond traditionally boy-targeted toy lines when it acquired Lucasfilm. That means creating more female-skewing items like home and apparel products aimed at women and girls that feature The Force Awakens’ Rey and Captain Phasma…
This isn’t an accident.
The merch teams think little girls (and grown women) want shirts and kitchen gear, not action figures. And they think little boys (and grown men) won’t play with a toy of a female hero, wear her on their shirts, or ask for her poster for their walls.
Hope is not lost here today
The good news is, kids are resourceful. They’re taking their cue from what they saw on the screen, not what they’re seeing in the toy aisles.
Despite what the merch teams assumed, plenty of little boys know a hero when they see one. And they want to be the hero.
There are many little girls who saw Rey in action and understood that could be their story, too.
But instead of supporting that paradigm, the merchandise stifles it.
Where Luke was on shirts and in toy sets and everywhere else — because he was the hero of the movie and you market the hero — Rey isn’t.
Decisions like this don’t get made by one guy at a desk. They go through rounds of approvals, lengthy efforts to maximize sales…The decisions that caused #WheresRey to begin were not the result of an accident.
A bunch of very well-paid people, ostensibly experts in their field, looked too carefully at assumptions built on the past and wrote a merch plan without realizing they had a chance to write a different future — a chance handed to them on a gold-plated film-reel for a platter.
Our kids are doing their best to show us how the merchandising plan should have been written.
I only hope the merchandising executives see them.
