Sky Dancers in Flight...
For this week's #deconstruction blog I am using the following ad for a toy from my childhood. I chose this one in particular because it's an ad I remember vividly, as opposed to remembering the toy itself. 90% of my desire for this toy was probably from the ad, not necessarily the toy itself. It was also a toy that didn't really live up to the ad's portrayal
I'm not sure who created the ad itself, I couldn't find that specifically, but Sky Dancers were made by Galoob, who much more famously made Micro Machines, and infamously made the Game Genie cartridge. Most of their products were marketed more to "boy" markets
Something that I think is doing a lot of heavy lifting here is the sky themed wallpaper. Not only does that fall in line with the "sky dancers" name, but it also sends the message that these are actually flying through the sky like a bird or a plane. If we saw these just floating on a plain wall background, it wouldn't have the same feeling as seeing them in "the sky". There's also some very interesting trickery going on to make the dancers look like they are going straight up (my guess is they maybe dropped them spinning, straight down, then reversed the shot). The narrating kids also make allusions to things like the dolls being pretty, or beautiful. There's also a lot of possessive language- these dolls are MINE- they are dancing for ME. This is even in the lyrics- "fly for me, dance for me, sky dancers fly for me!" and later "sky dancers fly...just for me!" There's an exclusive feeling to this- this is happening JUST for me!
As with many ads, these are marketed toward the markets depicted in both the product and the ad. Although anyone could play with a sky dancer, the only people playing with them are people coded as girls (and "pretty" girls by most of our standards of the 90's). They're typically abled, thin, white, cis passing, and they clearly like the fact that the dolls are pretty, therefore the girls also want to be pretty/like pretty things. The toys themselves are very much in line with "Barbie aesthetics"; they are thin, have disproportional hourglass figures, they are white with blonde hair. There's a huge gap in any sort of diversity; there's no racial diversity, body diversity, ability diversity (represented in either the toy or the kids playing with them). There's also a message here that this toy is for girls, and that girls are the ones who should like and play with this toy (this carries through in the imagery of the bedroom filled with pink, frills, etc. and the music sung by soprano voices).
I think someone who did not see themselves represented in this is going to see the absence of that representation really glaringly. I know that for me, as someone who thinks a lot about gender and the way those things are represented, those binary messages really jump out to me. I think someone who had a really positive with this toy might interpret this message more favorably; for me I remember how this toy didn't fully live up to my expectations compared with the ad.
Like most ads, the message is being sent to drive sales. I think this is a toy that doesn't sell itself on the shelf; its appeal is the movement of the toy, and commercials are going to be best at sending that message. Again, there was this weird phenomenon in a lot of 90's toys where there was a possessive theme to the appeal- there were lots of toys like "baby mine" or "My pretty princess" where the idea of the toy is that it is exclusive to YOU. I think there's an appeal there that if you own the toy, somehow you are unique, and I think that idea of exclusion is a big underlying message.