Illustration: Leo Espinosa
It’s hard to imagine what child-rearing would be like without product tie-ins. Consider this now-familiar scene: During an outing to the aquarium, an overworked dad, desperate to connect with his thumb-sucking toddler, says, “Honey, say hi to Nemo!” even though all the kid is actually doing is looking at a fish. But anyone with children can relate. In childhoods of recent memory, our cartoon-based toys got tucked into Happy Meals or the bottoms of cereal boxes. Now, though, we live in a world of total character immersion.
Cartoon characters permeate every aspect of our children’s existences. We serve them TransformersLunchables and have them brush with SpongeBob-branded toothpaste. We tuck them in on branded sheets, fix their owies with branded bandages, and change their branded diapers because we know, or at least we think, that the characters will make them happy. Whether our kids are sleeping, bleeding, or pooping, Spider-Man is there. Even if you operate one of those rarefied TV-free households, the brands will penetrate, assuming your children go to preschool, have friends, or eat food. Those alluring, googly eyes are everywhere.
But no product-spawning property is more seductive for kids than the Cars franchise. The original 2006 animated feature was the seventh Pixar film and the first release after the Disney-Pixar merger that same year. Set in a world wholly populated by anthropomorphized vehicles, Cars follows the adventures of the toy-conversion-ready Lightning McQueen, a hotshot shiny-red sports car who gets waylaid in the run-down desert town of Radiator Springs, where he learns timeless if predictable lessons about the importance of family, friendship, and love from his fellow cars turned future children’s toys.
Though it made a respectable $462 million in worldwide box office (we’re talking Pixar numbers here—Toy Story 3 made more than $1 billion globally), Cars, which is essentially an animated automotive Doc Hollywood, doesn’t quite hold up against Pixar’s Oscar-winning blockbusters like Up and Wall-E, or even the Toy Story series. Yet Cars is the largest merchandising franchise at Pixar and the fourth largest at Disney: It’s had an estimated $8 billion in ancillary sales since its 2006 release and continues to haul in around $2 billion a year. Surprising, until you look at the competition: There’s only so much pent-up demand for passive-aggressive talking cowboy puppets, and no kid is going to want a Wall-E play set when the two major locales are an apocalyptic junkyard and a spaceship full of morbidly obese people.Cars, on the other hand, lasers in on its key demographic, boys ages 2 to 8. The main competitors for this crowd are Thomas & Friends and Bob the Builder, characters so square that they make Mister Rogers look like Hunter S. Thompson. It’s the only thing little boys see that offers more than do-gooder platitudes. So it makes sense to keep the promotional engine running and churn out the clothing and trundle beds.
The sequel, Cars 2, is coming out on June 24. This time, McQueen takes on an international spy ring and will unleash a product avalanche unlike anything ever seen, the seductive equivalent of three belly dancers and a bottle of absinthe. It will be bigger than Star Wars. A three-ride Cars mini theme park at Disney’s California Adventure (reported cost: $300 million) is slated to open in 2012, and there are plans to open a Cars-themed hotel wing in Florida. If you have kids, and even if you don’t, no corner of your life will go untouched by Cars. So when Cars 2 comes out this summer, to be followed by Cars 3, Cars 4,and Cars vs. Predator, you might as well strap yourself in and submit to its siren call, because there’s no turning back. Kachow? Ka-ching!
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