Word: toying
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Woody (voiced again by Tom Hanks) confronts toy mortality, the temptations of celebrity and, yes, the possibilities of sexual adventure (with Joan Cusack's Jessica the cowgirl). That's a lot for an earnest little cowhand to handle. But the gang from Andy's bedroom (led by Tim Allen's Buzz Lightyear, naturally) offers him daring, good-humored support during his multiple crises. Just getting Slinky the Dog, Rex the Dinosaur and Mr. Potato Head across a busy street is a task of Schwarzeneggerian proportions--but funny. Pixar's improved computer animation is up to all the demands of this...
...Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers. What may be harder to survive is the relentlessness of Pokemania, a multimedia and interactive barrage like no other before it, with children mesmerized into cataloging a menagerie of multiplicative monsters, with trading cards linked to games linked to television shows linked to toys linked to websites linked to candy linked back to where you started--a pestilential Ponzi scheme (see foldout graphic). Smelling profits, America's conglomerates have pokeyed up to cash in. Hasbro paid $325 million to market the toys. The WB network (owned by Time Warner, the parent company of this...
Thus in the U.S., Nintendo had all the Pokemon pieces to play with--a fully extended product line of games, toys, comic books and cards to appeal to boys and girls from ages 4 to 15. Says Tilden: "We decided to make an all-out effort to repeat the phenomenon in the Western world." An additional part of the strategy, says Kubo, was to hide its "Japan-ness." Nintendo of America and its Japanese partners brought in Al Kahn, who developed the Cabbage Patch doll, to help with toy merchandising. "There's a little bit of magic in what Nintendo...
...dull treatment of a way-too-familiar scenario. As in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, an evil genius lords it over a mountainous island patrolled by a supermonster. The monster here is Mewtwo, a kitty clone or copycat of cuddly Mew. And as in Toy Story, the old-fashioned toys (like Mew) have to teach the mechanized ones (like Two) a bit about human values...
...follows a phone frenzy last week. The Warner Bros. switchboard took about 70,000 calls a minute after a televised offer for free tickets to the 'Pokemon' premiere last Saturday. The flurry crashed the studio's voice mail system...." "'Kids love the fact it's their own language,' a toy company rep said. 'They really enjoy becoming experts at something. It empowers them and builds their confidence....You become part of the fantasy as you try to become a Pokemon master...