How Toy Promotions Took Over '80s Cartoons

"He-Man." "My Little Pony." "Transformers." "Care Bears." "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." 

These classic children’s television shows of the 1980s spawned countless toy and merchandise empires—or was it, in fact, the other way around?

Most people don’t know the commercial history behind these childhood favorites. In the early 1980s, in the midst of a massive pro-business movement championed by newly elected President Ronald Reagan, the rules and regulations governing children’s television were greatly diminished. With less oversight about how shows could market to children, networks pounced on the opportunity to produce product-led cartoons cloaked in technicolor smiles and feel-good messaging.

“Animation is an art form,” says Jerry Beck, an animator and professor of animation at California Institute for the Arts. “And it’s a commercial form.” 

When children’s television first hit the airwaves, networks clamored to fill the daytime hours with cheap, easily made shows for kids. By the 1950s, parents' groups had partnered with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to limit violence and innuendo from anything aimed at young audiences. In the following decades, popular programs like “Captain Kangaroo” (1955-84) and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” (1968-2001) combined education with entertainment value for children. 

Advocacy groups—particularly Action for Children's Television (ACT), founded in 1968—worked with the FCC to strictly regulate television advertising during children’s programming.

“They didn’t really take children’s capacity for meaning-making and interpreting media very seriously,” says Timothy Burke, professor of history at Swarthmore College and author of Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up With Cartoon Culture. “They saw children as being in perpetual danger from what they watched."

In one especially memorable example, ACT argued that Mattel’s 1969 cartoon “Hot Wheels,” served primarily to sell tiny cars to eager audiences, not to tell a story. Groups like ACT and regulatory agencies objected to this blatant advertising. "The FCC agreed and asked stations to log part of the show as advertising time," writes David Owen in The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning. Even today, the idea of monolithic companies selling products to impressionable viewers rankles parents and children’s advocates.

For a period of time, these forces were able to hold capitalism at bay—until the money got too good. 

When Star Wars hit theaters in 1977, the presumed sci-fi dud wowed audiences around the globe. And while the box office figures broke records, the true money—estimated to be more than $2 billion today—lay in the subsequent commodification of the intellectual property. 

Major toymakers Mattel and Mego originally passed on licensing Star Wars-related toys, mistakenly assuming George Lucas’ space opera would fade from relevance. When Ohio-based toy brand Kenner Products snagged the deal, they scored a golden opportunity. Even though they didn't come out until almost a year after the movie premiere, the Kenner-made Star Wars action figures flew off toy store shelves in 1978 and remain valuable to collectors to this day. In 2012, the National Museum of Play inducted the history-making figures into its National Toy Hall of Fame.

The success of Kenner’s Star Wars action figures changed the toymaking industry forever. It also fundamentally altered how studios and networks approached film and television production. 

“I don’t think we’ll ever see a moment like we saw with Star Wars, when no one was ready to make toys from it,”  Burke says.

Still stinging from the success of Kenner’s Star Wars toys, Mattel raced to find its own toy juggernaut—and an accompanying screen adaptation with which to sell it. 

Enter He-Man, the prince captaining Mattel’s Masters of the Universe toy line. In 1979, Mattel executives landed on what would later prove to be a winning formula. They created a 5.5-inch tall product in cooperation with a network television program that could serve as the pipeline for that same plastic figure. Mattel had missed the boat on Star Wars but nailed the timing of "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe."

When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, he brought with him a wave of business deregulation that significantly shrunk the FCC’s control over television programming. Reagan also appointed a new FTC chairman and the FTC Improvements Act of 1980 further restrained the Commission's authority to regulate children's advertising. At the same time, show creators and toy companies saw the emergence of a new demographic: the Gen X-era kids watching TV after school in addition to Saturday mornings. 

“You’ve got the deregulation of TV, you’ve got a latchkey kid who comes home from school and they turn on the TV because TV is the babysitter—it’s an explosion of cartoons, candy, fast food, junk food,”  explains Selma Purac, professor of information and media studies at Western University.

A flood of copycat cartoons poured forth. Animators spun up shows and specials starring Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears, formerly the dusty intellectual property of American Greeting Cards. Hasbro trumpeted the success of the “prepackaged fantasy” known as My Little Pony. Toys like G.I. Joe, Transformers and JEM and the Holograms got their own half-hour programs, complete with built-in product placement.

Showrunners embraced the now-mocked and memed “special episode” format. Careful of rattling the shaky success they enjoyed under Reagan, “He-Man,” “My Little Pony” and other cartoons made sure friendly messaging headlined shows to satisfy the educational component of federal regulation. 

“They recognized they were on the radar of watch groups so they included pro-social messaging on hot button topics so they could say you got something positive out of it,” Purac says. “This is also why so many 1980s cartoons end with moral epilogues: ‘G.I. Joe’ ending with ‘Here’s a lesson on bullying!’” 

When Congress passed a bill to limit ads during children’s TV per hour and require educational content standards in 1988, Reagan withheld approval. 

The Children’s Television Act of 1990 would ultimately require broadcast stations to air educational programming and limit commercial advertising for children. The comparatively bland, moralistic cartoons of the 1980s faced serious competition from forward-thinking creators in the 1990s and 2000s.

Beck remembers the excitement surrounding new shows like “Ren and Stimpy” and new kinds of animation seen in “Spongebob Squarepants” and others. “They were bucking the trend for commercial cartoons,” he says. “They didn’t want ‘toy attic’ cartoons. They wanted creator-driven cartoons.” 

However, the product pipeline Mattel, Hasbro and other toymakers built stays strong today. Netflix debuted a Hot Wheels-led show in 2024; He-Man is getting another silver screen treatment in 2026.

“In any given thing that becomes popular, there is money to be made in producing subsidiary media and clothing that’s connected,” says Burke. And of course, toys.