Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book.

This is a fascinating book to read. It reminds me of the Netflix docuseries The Toys That Made Us. It was especially interesting to read following all the hype surrounding the Barbie movie.

Somehow it's both a look at '80s nostalgia and a critique on corporate messaging with how it utilizes propaganda to worm its way into our subconscious.

I thought this graphic novel would be a good match for students interested in, "The Toys that Raised Me" on Netflix. Upon reading, it seems more geared towards adults. That said, the writer does a phenomenal job of explaining how capitalism and marketing work together and have persuasion power. Overall, the read was fascinating and could be used in teaching the effects of marketing on children.

There are not enough graphic novel nonfiction titles for adults, so I was thrilled to see this one. And what an interesting subject! Looking at how marketing turned into an exploitative science that transformed American culture through its children, Brown is an attentive guide through the major IPs of childhood for Millennials - and even for many of today's children. If you've ever thought about how children's shows can turn into multi-million dollar juggernauts - or better yet, if you've NEVER thought about it - take a look at this graphic novel.

"Brian "Box" Brown brings history and culture to life through his comics. In his new graphic novel, he unravels how marketing that targeted children in the 1980s has shaped adults in the present."

It's well established in how many of his books I've read and reviewed, that I adore Box Brown! He and I are of the same generation so I am always delighted to read one of his graphic novels that puts Non-Fiction topics into a format that I love. The He-Man Effect, effected me as well. I am a huge fan of She-Ra. He-Man, Jem and the Holograms and the list goes on. While this novel focuses around the toys and marketing that appealed to the author, the marketing for "girls toys" at the time were not much different. I was fascinated with the history of the toys of my childhood and just how....brain wash- like the commercials really were. Who knew? Thankfully Box Brown knows and has created an amazing graphic novel to inform those of his generation and beyond. Amazing work! I can't wait to see what's next from Mr. Brown.

The He-Man Effect is a nonfiction graphic novel about how toy sales and kids' TV and movies became one. It moves chronologically through a brief history of propaganda, through the boom of TV-sponsored toy sales, and into the modern day. It is a disturbing reminder for fans of brands such as Disney and Star Wars that the media that brings us comfort and joy is meant to sell us things.

Brands, Disney in particular, are masters of nostalgia. They create "cradle-to-grave brand loyalty" by making children lifelong fans of properties that will make them feel childhood nostalgia once they are adults and still consume the same brand. They've been able to succeed in this with the help of the loosening of laws surrounding childhood media.

When kids were identified as a potential audience for both Hollywood and advertisers, regulations were in place that prevented animation in ads (most children's media at the time was animated). It was well known that children cannot distinguish between advertising and entertainment content. However, He-Man, the titular action figure, use Marvel to circumvent these regulations as they did not apply to comics. Ultimately, President Reagan was the one to loosen regulations and He-Man became a television show as well. Hollywood and advertisers teamed up upon realizing that toys + comics + TV shows meant big profits. And today we are inundated with TV and movie content that we can find on every backpack, t-shirt, and cereal box in the store.

The He-Man Effect presents this story with simply animated panels that clearly depict toys, TV shows, and interviewees. It's a fascinating and clearly told story. At times, the detail is sometimes too great and the date markers too few. He-Man himself becomes a very small part of the story and pales in comparison to properties like Star Wars, which is frequently mentioned. Noticeably absent is the rise of Marvel and Marvel Studios. Why? In fact, superheroes receive barely a mention. While they are not needed to tell this story, Marvel certainly seems like low-hanging fruit to illustrate the example.

This graphic novel left me with a sense of dread. It's one thing to implicitly know you are trapped in capitalism, it's another to have it so clearly spelled out for you. My fandom feels hollow and I have the desire to run to see an independent film. I'll see it and I'll love it, but I'll still snuggle into bed in my Star Wars pajamas under an Avengers: Endgame poster. I've been tricked by capitalism into associating branded properties with the comfort and joy that help me persevere through the worsts of capitalism itself. It is the spoonful of sugar that helps the "medicine" go down.

A fascinating examination of the psychological effect of advertising from childhood through adulthood. This is a very timely release as we are weeks away from the first film from Mattel's cinematic universe. The artwork in this graphic novel highlights how disruptive advertising can be, and the importance of regulating it to reduce the effect on developing brains. It is no wonder that toy companies have found ways of circumventing this through advertising nostalgia to parents.

Kids like action figures that depict family structures or make them feel powerful. Little plastic action figures were marketed via cartoons that were workshopped in focus groups and launched as hybrids of what appealed most to young kids. Even when toy companies couldn't advertise the toys directly, they found ways to introduce kids to the characters.

In The He-Man Effect, Brown tells us TV has always presented false nostalgia, and now that generations have grown up with TV and film and with the toys marketed alongside the shows, speaking to our nostalgia means reviving our TV and film childhood. No show’s remake will ever satisfy everyone. We individualize a story in our childhood play, we internalize it, and later we incorporate it as a political myth to underpin our adult beliefs. For each of us, any remake will feel “wrong.” Yet we are lifelong customers.

I like that this was told through cartoon panels. It's as if we're watching the story, which is actually a political narrative. What political narratives make us feel as if we're watching a story?

Thanks to NetGalley, First Second and Box Brown for the preview to this work of graphic non-fiction, The He-Man Effect.

"We were psychological terrorists, with He-Man, [Mattel exec] Mar Ellis said at the time. We burned it into their little pea-brains. And we did"--Paul Cleveland, Mattel

I am a fan of Box Brown's work, and have read most of it. He follows his passions, the things he likes and grew up with. Tetris, Andy Kaufman, and toys/films. This book is pandemic-delayed by at least a couple years, Brown tells us in an afterword, mostly completed in 2019. It's a comics essay about advertising, mass media and the commodification of children's imaginations. His, too.

I have the feeling most people essentially know how to connect the dots now between capitalism, mass media and the selling of toys through mass media--tv, films, comics, cartoons, but in case you don't, Brown layes it out for us. He begins focusing on political advertsiing campaigns featuring Edward Bernays, who helped mount an American public opinion campaign to help the American right "fight communism." in Central America. Then the marketing of toys through movies, maybe beginning with Disney, the now unstoppable juggernaut, with its continuation of the Star Wars universe.

Brown is a nineties guy, so he gets deep--sometimes too deep--into the nerdy details of product development and placement. My eyes unfocused a few times later in the book after we are introduced to product after product. How do adults keep buying all this stuff? Nostalgia. We are already hooked on the drugs we began taking as children. We are programmed.

I thought I had begun to see a chink in Brown's anti-capitalist argument, as he increasingly reveals how he himself was bought and sold. by the mass media, entertainment and toy industry. He's losing his edge! But in a way that is the point he might have made much more explicit, that he likes all this stuff. He likes who he has become, a comics/cartoons/film/tv/toy consumer. He likes these stories--no, loves them and he likes who he has become through it all, though he shows us why he and we shoud be uneasy about it all

This is more a boys's toy book than a girls's story, I am aware in this summer of a Barbie movie. Girls stories and products barely mentioned, which might not have been as big a deal if Brown had made this more explicit. You'd think this is about the shaping of hyper-masculine, super-muscled American males, and it begins that way with Reagan and John Wayne and Schwarzenegger, but this angle gets largely lost through the deep and geeky love data dump of products later in the book.

I like how First Second details its marketing strategies up front. After all, they are engaged in a multimedia book promotion blitz of which I am now a part. Can a Box Brown action figure be far behind? Please? :) The fact that its produced and produced well by First Second means this is in part a YA book, to help young'uns see how they are being manipulated; in other words, enjoy, kids, but just know that your enjoyment was manufactured by corporations who care more about money than them. But do young people today care about He-Man and She-Ra? I guess we will see if they do. There are highly attended conventions for them. Can we be made to love and buy them? I think these corporations have well-demonstrated that they can and will.

Like I said, He-Man feels pretty much like old news to me, a three star book, but Brown is a great cartoonist and if I think of this as coming to young people for the first time, I think it is a 4 star book.

A fascinating look at how media, toys and government changes swirled together to get us to the state of advertising to kids we have now. Chilling to read as an 80's kid, to realize how calculated it was.

While we were all a little perturbed by how long this book took to mention He-Man considering the title, it was regardless incredibly thorough, entertaining, informative, and of course relatable. One of our favorite non-biography non-fiction titles of the year so far.

I was interested in the premise, but I felt the scope was too ambitious and too slow to get to the point I was interested in. I'm glad this kind of work is being done, but this wasn't the right read for me.

I really enjoyed Brown's examination of how media & toy companies use nostalgia to profit off of the american public, more specifically American children. However, I find the scope extremely limited and white-washed in terms of the toys the author chose to highlight and their history-- but I understand that the author probably chose the products that best fit the narrative he wanted to tell. Interesting read nonetheless!

This book did a great job of explaining historical and current business practices and how they interact(ed) with children’s psychological development. I really appreciated how it explored the importance of imaginative play as well as how corporations take advantage of those processes. The writing tackles the subject in a way that leaves readers amused and horrified at the same time. The voice does a great job of keeping the reader's interest.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publishers First Second Books for an advanced copy of a graphic novel about the intersection of toys, television children, and how the commercialization of afterschool programming has effected the art and media of today.

My bus would leave school at 3:45 pm getting me to our bus stop usually at 4:05 pm give or take. I would run, probably the only time I would really run, being portly, home say a quick hi, grab something to snack on turn on tv and start watching Transformers. At the first commercial I would turn on my Commodore 64 and load a tape drive game, that would take almost the time of GI Joe to load. From there computer shenanigans, dinner, homework, more TV, bed in a room filled with toys of the shows I was watching. Weekends the same, up until 12:30 pm ending with Flash Gordon. I loved these halcyon days of cartoons, sugary cereal, and toys, toys, toys. And yet like everything in else in this country I was being manipulated by commercial interests to like plotless shows that were ads to buy crappy plastic characters. And this continues today, with plenty of people screaming this isn't my Transformers, Star Wars, Disney movie from my youth. At the end of this graphic novel I suddenly understood things a lot more than before. The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood by Brian "Box" Brown is a look at how the toy industry, with a willing media and even more willing governmental body, created childhoods for children, which is keeping quite a low from being decent adults today.

The book begins with an advertising genius who saw the potential in both opening and creating markets for products that hadn't been thought of before. Like pushing women to smoke. Or for items that really weren't necessary, but you'd be a fool, a loser, and not with it if one didn't have it. This worked so well, soon that man was creating revolutions in a country that shockingly didn't want to be under an industry's thumb. For a short period after the rise of television, stations had to show educational show for kids, not shows that basically pushed items to be bought. This ended when Reagan, of course, was elected, and deregulation became the norm, which is why things are so bad right now. Stations and Media groups began to work with toy makers to create huge blocks of shows, that would promote toys, and toy lines. Toy shows that still infect people of a certain age with a sense of nostalgia, and also a sense that they own the property and it can't change without their permission. Hence the fan service that seems so prevalent today.

A fascinating graphic novel, that looks at so much about what happened to kids in the Eighties. The rise of latchkey kids, the babysitter that was the TV, the need for people to idolize, the latching on to characters on TV as role models. The toy companies and the rise of oversea animation and production. And the book never drags, or never has something on each page that makes a reader go, darn it, that's me. Brown does a fantastic job of distilling information from all over into a solid storyline, that really should be studied. The art work is great, fitting perfect with what is being told, and working in tandem in a way few of these kind of works do. A labor of love, and a really important book. One that explains the rise of trolls on the Internet talking about their shows and how everyone doesn't understand it like they do. Also why the media companies are pushing so much dreck into films. People don't want new, they want familiar, and as bad as the world is getting, probably from the 80's, people will run even further to the familiar.

This is the first book that I have read of Brown's, and I can't wait to read more. Brown has a great way of presenting his arguments, and showing what happened, while at the same time not trying to make people feel bad for what they loved as kids. Heck I would love to go back, eat cereal and watch cartoons. I just wish I was more aware of why I liked these shows, and saved my parents money on plastic toys, which I still hang on to. Really great graphic novel, and one that should be read by a lot of people.

This was so intriguing and kept me interested the whole time I was reading! I now look at my childhood media favorites in a completely new light. Highly recommend especially for anyone interested in anti capitalism and Star Wars.

Going into this book, it's important to know it's not *really* about He-Man. He-Man is a blip in this story. It's about how capitalist propaganda is destroying children's imaginations and has been since the '70s. It presents a very clear path from the start of military propaganda, to how Chiquita bananas used propaganda to launch a coup in Guatemala, to Disney changing our laws and ruining our minds. Brown definitely isn't saying we shouldn't enjoy this programing, he's trying to get us to see how it's manufactured to manipulate us into buying merchandise. I wish it was longer so it could have the chance to go more in depth. This is a necessary graphic novel for our current climate and I absolutely recommend it.

This well-researched and entertaining graphic novel dives deep into the way our childhoods have been commodified by corporations for generations and provides extensive background into how advertising/propaganda as we know it really began. Brown’s unique, black-and-white art style adds to, without distracting from, the big ideas in the book. This is an excellent nonfiction graphic novel on an important modern topic.

WHAT I LIKED
I have not read graphic nonfiction for adults before, but I love this format and hope to read more like it. The closest book I can think of is How to Fake a Moon Landing, which is YA and not one I really loved, TBH.

The He-Man Effect starts out describing a brief history of government propaganda and how it accelerated with WWI and WWII. This stuff just makes me so mad to hear about, and I’m even more irritated that it works as well as it does.

I’ve lived outside the US since 2014, so it’s quite easy for me to tune out US media and the propaganda that goes with it. But I’d be naive to think that I’m totally immune to it. I may not be as exposed to it as I would be if I still lived in the US, but it definitely still trickles down to me through the social media I use, the books I read, and the movies I watch. This manipulation of people’s thoughts is just plain wrong, and I truly hate that it’s so pervasive in today’s media.

Anyhoo, while the propaganda stuff made me mad, I loved the 80s cartoon sections! Apparently, my beloved 80s cartoons were created to sell action figures. How sad to learn that!

My sister and I loved watching He-Man, but I don’t remember either of us ever wanting any He-Man action figures. It made me wonder if, as girls, we weren’t really the market the ads were targeting. Or maybe our parents were just not going to buy this stuff for us, and we didn’t ask because the answer was always a big fat “NO, because I said so.” Christmas at our house was always games and puzzles and books and clothes. We did get one (and only one) new Barbie each at Christmas. For the most part, heavily-marketed children’s toys were considered “junk” in our house. Kudos to my Mom and Dad for being right about that!

There were several references to a show called The Toys That Made Us. I need to watch that because it sounds like more about this interesting topic. It’s unreal how well cartoons-as-marketing worked, even if I didn’t have any action figures. My friends and their siblings certainly did.

There are lots and lots of references in the backmatter. This was well-researched and will be interesting for any child of the 80s and 90s. All the nostalgia certainly brought back some memories!

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE
I loved the whole book! I read it in one sitting and read several parts out loud to my husband, who is also an 80s kid (and who had loads of “collectible” action figures…hmm…).

DIVERSITY
Many of the people depicted are white males, but that’s who the real people in the story were. Non-specific children (many are male) are diverse in skin tone and hair texture.

There is mention that a lot of the marketing at this time targeted white males, age 6, from middle class families. I felt this because as much as my sister and I loved the He-Man cartoons we never had any desire for action figures. They were “for boys,” after all.

ARTWORK/ILLUSTRATIONS
All artwork is black and white pen-and-ink drawings. Lots of drawings of real people, including former US presidents, actors and actresses, film directors, political figures, and marketing executives. My favorite illustrations are of the many cartoons from the 1980s and 1990s.

THEMES
children’s television, marketing, history of propaganda, toys, 1980s, 1990s, nostalgia, cartoons

LIBRARIANS WILL WANT TO KNOW
Would adults like this book? YES, especially if they are age 40+

Would I buy this for my high school library? Maybe, but I’m not sure today’s high school students will understand many of the cartoon references. The propaganda history could be useful though.

Would I buy this for my middle school library? No. I don’t see middle schoolers really getting into this one unless there is some propaganda unit in a social studies class.

Would I buy this for my elementary school library? No.

MATURE CONTENT
Language: I think there was some profanity, but I don’t remember anything specifically. It wasn’t gratuitous.

Sexuality: very mild; some discussion of scantily-clad females and female seduction in G.I. Joe.

Violence: very mild; some references to 80s cartoon violence

Drugs/Alcohol: none

Other: no concerns