Eight-year-old Ryan Keith is obsessed. Every day the Grade 4 student begins his quest as soon as he arrives home from Delta Manor Elementary—canvassing 7-Eleven stores and toy retailers by phone to see if any have received a shipment of his latest compulsion—Pokemon cards.

The wildly popular trading cards featuring Japanese "pocket monster" characters are flying out of B.C. stores before they even reach the shelves. They have turned elementary schoolyards into gambling dens and kids into card sharks, prompting principals throughout the province to ban them. "Please, please please," Ryan begs his mother, Karen Keith. "I just need one more." One 7-Eleven received a shipment of cards recently, she says, but by the time she got there, three other mothers like herself were on their way out of the store, frustrated. "They're all gone."

This is the sort of frenzy toy manufacturers dream about. Pokemon is also a phenomenon within a phenomenon: a manifestaton of the increasing commercialization of childhood. At younger and younger ages children are being targeted by sophisticated advertising campaigns within a stunning complex of pop cultural forces: television, music, websites, videogames, movies, comics, stuffed animals and lunch boxes. Even more than their materialist parents, children today are being primed to become slaves of a crass consumer culture.

The Pokemon phenomenon, now having reaped $6 billion worldwide and showing no signs of slowing, had a modest beginning. It originated in Japan three years ago with a new series of Nintendo Game Boy videogames featuring 150 alien-like digital critters with names like Pidney, Weedle, Dragonah and Squirtle. The aim of the game is to capture and tame the creatures which, in the wild forests and villages of Nintendo world, ferociously spew venomous gases, morph and shoot lightning bolts. Once tamed, however, they become cute furry computer pets.

A cartoon, featuring two evil humans and their cat monster boss who float in a balloon trying to steal conquered monster pets from children, was created to boost video game sales. The ploy worked—sales soared from 220,000 the first year in Japan to more than eight million since. Comic strips followed. Pokemon Centre opened in April 1998, flogging more than 1,000 products—everything from the giggling, shaking Pikachu to cellphone decals, lollipops and, of course, the trading cards that retail for $5 per pack of 11. Marketers with their sights set on North America worried about a bizarre 1997 incident in which 700 Japanese children developed symptoms including convulsions and nausea after watching the Pokemon cartoon. The "television epilepsy" was induced by an intense flashing light sequence, harmful to children who tended to stare at TV screens without blinking. The marketers need not have worried. Since its North American launch in September, 2.4 million Pokemon videogames have been sold (220,000 in Canada at $39.95 apiece), says Lesley Short of Nintendo Canada.

The television cartoon draws 535,000 pint-size viewers each week and is the top-rated show among children aged two to 11. The cards are in their sixth printing, having sold 850,000 sets of 60 in North America. Game card tours are drawing 4,000 to 7,000 people to malls throughout the U.S. Recently, Pokemon promoters had to turn people away when 14,000 showed up at a New Jersey mall.

Four new videogames are on the horizon. So is a bonanza of new Pokemon paraphernalia—watches, wheeled luggage for kids, watches, back-to-school supplies, Halloween costumes, ear muffs, etc. A full-length feature film is due this fall. "This is just the beginning," enthuses Ms. Short. An employee at Toys 'R Us in Victoria shakes her head. "Nobody's got them," she says, echoing sold-out Pokemon retailers throughout the continent. "There's a rumour we'll be getting a shipment in on Friday." The last one sold out within hours, she says. "It was crazy."

Crazy but not unforseen. Like virtually every new launch in the toy industry, the Pokemon pitch was based on exhaustive market research and careful strategizing—integrating of products and media—geared to maximize profit.

Michael Wolf, in his new book, The Entertainment Economy (Random House), describes how the modern market is driven by a quest for what he calls the "E-factor"—entertainment. "Culture, demography and technology are all pushing us toward one goal: extracting the last drop of fun out of every experience," he writes. The quest for amusement is insatiable too, and intensified by a mighty advertising force, using entertainment to dictate what car to drive, what jeans to buy, what airline to fly. But rather than lingering on the malignancy of a captive commercial culture, Mr. Wolf takes the buoyant, pragmatic approach of an entrepreneur: there is money to be made selling fun. He advises capitalists to concentrate on Generation Y, more numerous than baby boomers and like "Generation X on steroids."

"The Generation Y tsunami is already gathering force," writes Mr. Wolf. "They are 81 million strong, all born between 1977 and 1997...Whereas the older generation grew up with television, this generation has grown up with television and the computer. As young people become acculturated and socialized through the Internet, they are beginning to look for entertainment, or at least entertaining content, on their computers. Eyeballs glued to a screen are audiences; where there are audiences, there is advertising; and where there is advertising there is commerce."

Whereas baby boomers have some time and a lot of money, Generation Y has lots of time and more money than their parents or grandparents dreamed of having at their age. Already they are spending more than $130 billion annually in the U.S., according to Mr. Wolf, and are estimated to influence the spending of an additional $250 billion.

Half of that generation of affluent consumers Mr. Wolf describes have not even reached 13. They are diapered tots and tweenies. Nobody is more equipped to capitalize on their entertainment economy than the toy industry. Nobody—not sociologists, not educators, not parents—has been studying kids the way toy marketers have. Hasbro and Fisher Price have been watching them play behind one-way mirrors for decades.

They have also been studying their families. Stephen Kline, communications professor and director of the Media Analysis Laboratory at Simon Fraser University outlines in his book, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children's Culture in the Age of TV Marketing, how market strategists have capitalized on changing family dynamics. While working women of the 1980s were still denying their guilt about leaving their children for work, advertisers were noting the benefits to their own industry of having more than 50% of mothers in the workforce.

"They may have more money, but they have less time to spend with their children," the Television Bureau of Advertising noted. "To compensate, they may buy more things for their children." The same bureau celebrated the impact of increasing divorce rates on consumer patterns, "Divorced parents see even less of their children than do working parents. Spending for children's products often helps ease the pain." And of divided families: "Because they often do not live close to their grandchildren, they may not know their grandchildren...[and] feel less bound to give what is practical." And of shrinking families: "Today's woman is having 1.8 children as opposed to 3.7 children in the '50s and '60s. People spend more on a first child."

Family dynamics have not improved as a result "Children are increasingly set free by parents who don't have time for them anymore," says William Coulson, a psychologist at the Research Council on Ethnopsychology in Compatche, California. One 13-year-old student at Burnside Elementary School in Victoria, out browsing Toys 'R Us by herself at nearly 9 p.m. on a school night, says there is a community centre for latchkey kids from her school to go to after classes. "The kids all watch Pokemon there," she says.

Even when parents are home with their children, family togetherness in the 1990s is hardly the Brady Bunch. "We're afraid to let our kids go outside so we let them watch TV, cruise the net and play videogames," observes Prof. Kline. A 1995 survey for Advertising Age found 35% of people saying they spend more time at home as a family than they did three or four years ago. But Britte Beemer, chairman of America's Research Group which conducted the survey, described the families at home as "disjointed. The children are doing their own thing, the mother fixing meals and the father is in the office working." The survey found that the top two activities were watching TV and watching videos. The most likely event to have family members in the same room together was a movie rental.

The power of TV is evident in Canada too, where two- to 11-year-olds were ingesting an average 18 hours of Teletubby and Rugrats fare each week in 1997. That's down from 21 hours a decade ago but computer time is up. "Children in America have very very few material wants and have virtually every entertainment and amusement," says Christopher Check, associate director of the Rockford Institute, "and yet their lives are among the emptiest in human history. They don't interact with people. They're out of touch with reality."

"Parents are taught to listen and not to lecture," says Dr. Coulson. "Children are taught to be free and to express themselves. What better milieu is there for advertisers to capitalize on children?"

Capitalizing on children involves glorifying them and elevating them to full-fledged consumers in their own right, Christopher Lasch wrote in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism. "The 'education' of the masses has altered the balance of forces within the family...It emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority, however, only to subject them to the new paternalism of the advertising industry." Hence, Bonne Bell's traditionally adult makeup line runs magazine ads featuring a sassy precocious-looking little girl in sunglasses and "cosmic glitter" nail polish and lipstick over the message: "We are girls. We are the future."

The Gap successfully markets its adult clothing in miniature sizes on miniature models. Clairol and L'Oreal both launched lines of "kids" hair products recently. Calvin Klein launched his children's underwear line this year with controversial ads showing young boys frolicking in their underwear.

The Spice Girls phenomenon illustrates just how well the "downaging of comsumerism" has worked, says Prof. Kline. "They were targeted to 12- to 14-year-olds and they unexpectedly caught on with five- to nine-year-olds and tweenies." It's also evidence of the degree to which young girls have been eroticized, he adds. "Pelvic hip thrusts are now a common performance among elementary school girls."

Early sexualization fits with early autonomization of children as consumers. Wizard, a comic magazine available at kids-eye level at Safeway features ads for Austin Powers action figures and Star Wars Pez candy. It's also wallpapered with big-breasted cartoon women spilling out of sadomasochistic attire in erotic poses. They have names like Lady Death, Vampirella and Witchblade. It is peppered with crass sexual jokes and weird New Age comics of ritual suicide, one showing a devil roaming around in a priest's collar.

The spectacle of entertainment culture and its mingling of illusion and reality inevitably strips children of innocence and makes them cynical. Ironically, it makes them an increasingly tough sell as well. "Selling to a generation of cynics requires real finesse," argues Vancouver writer Bruce Grierson in Adbusters. "Advertisers must acknowledge their own naked calculatedness, acknowledge that the customer is wise to that naked calculatedness, and then still try to make the sale." Cartoon kid Calvin epitomizes the postmodern consumer, says Mr. Grierson. "The thing to remember about popular culture," he tells his tiger friend Hobbes, "is that today's TV reared audience is hip and sophisticated. This stuff doesn't affect us. We can separate fact from fiction...We're detached, jaded viewers who aren't influenced by what we watch." Then he stoops to inflate his basketball shoes.

It also explains the rise of shock advertising, argues Mr. Grierson. Traditional ad agencies are hemorrhaging business to competitors "who understand that you can't play chess with an attention-deficit disordered kid: he'll walk away from the board. It's got to be strip chess now, or chess for money. Or you've got to pelt the kid with the pieces."

Advertisers push normal boundaries to sustain their impact, says Prof. Kline. "It's not their intention to deliberately attack childhood innocence but there is nothing in the marketplace to protect kids from exposure to products not meant for them."

Or is it? An eight-year-old graces the cover of the January issue of Big Brother Skateboarding—a publication with a circulation of 100,000. The cover line is printed in letters resembling children's play blocks. The bottom of the page says "Kid's Issue." Inside, however, Talk Radio Network Host Guy Kemp found the standard gutter fare of the magazine's owner, Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler.

Interviews with 14- and 15-year-old skateboarders included questions such as, "If someone offered you a job as a porn star would you take it?" and "Would you ever f—your mom to be as good as 'the Muska' [a top skateboarder]?" "Tips for Girls" encourages girls to "show their boobies" at a party to impress the boys and to "Find two or three other girls...a fair amount of floor space and undress slooowly" and "put on a home show." There's worse. On his show, Mr. Kemp asked Dave Carnie, the magazine's managing editor, if Big Brother was not designed to deceive parents about what's inside. "Yes definitely," he replied.

"It's a losing battle if you expect people in the entertainment industry to make moral choices; they are interested in profits," declares Dr. Coulson. "Only parents can shield their children," he adds. If we want to save our children from the entertainment economy and its profiteers, there is no escaping the cost, says Prof. Kline. "We have to reflect on our own lifestyles. If we are slaves to the consumer culture—our kids will be too." BCR

BC Report is available at your favorite newsstand,
or save up to 43% with a subscription