Girlhood, Sold Separately
Nostalgia often rolls in as the fall season does. When leaves begin crunching underfoot, I reach for comforting media while curling up, sipping apple cider, and insulating myself from the cold weather. My go-to is the Disney-cancelled Tinker Bell movie series. As a young girl, the fairies flitting from flower to flower encouraged my imagination while I played with my friends on the playground. More than that, though, the series portrays a group of girls encountering issues and solving them with creative solutions and teamwork. My jaw dropped when I saw news of a potential new addition to my comfort media repertoire: Tinker Bell & The Glitter City. My hopes were quickly dashed when I realized Disney would never let the Fairies movie series into production after DVD sales died and they assumed no market existed for animation anymore. The fairies remain firmly in the mouse’s grasp. It represents a bigger problem in modern media: large corporations rarely support strong, female-led stories.
Demand for nostalgia-based content is strong. With the resurgence of Monster High as go-to Halloween costumes and the My Little Pony series continuing to surge in adult viewership from 70 to 86%, according to Edwards, an entertainment psychologist. Additionally, bidding wars on Etsy for vintage Ever After High dolls make it evident that there’s a market for movies with strong female-led groups. However, corporations don’t heed this. Venturing down memory lane again, I recall the excitement I felt watching Monster High for the first time. A film about a group of teenage girls, dressed to the nines and navigating social situations, resonated with me in ways other media failed to. Ever After High falls into the same category as Barbie and My Little Pony: a strong female-led group drives the plot. Despite the cries for nostalgia and a market desiring female-led entertainment, big corporations don’t spend as much time today creating or promoting the type of content they did in the 2000s and 2010s.
With the creation of large franchises like Monster High, Ever After High, Barbie, and Tinker Bell, came the rise of Mattel’s dolls. The shows in question promoted and encouraged the production of each franchise’s accompanying dolls. That way, children could purchase their favorite character and be able to engage with the franchise in a more physical manner. In the 2020s, the merchandising quality has significantly gone down.
This drop-off in merchandising quality is perhaps most prominently shown in the Disney animated show, Amphibia. Amphibia features a strong female lead in a magical world she must navigate as she journeys home. The show was a rousing success, pushed further by Disney’s marketing efforts during the first season, which soon dropped off despite the show’s popularity. Then, in the final season of Amphibia, Disney stopped promoting the show. This lack of marketing stands in contrast to Tinker Bell and her Fairy Friends, where Disney closely integrated the fairy movies into the greater Disney company, interlinking them with other movies and TV shows that were being marketed at the time.
In the case of Amphibia versus Tinker Bell, Disney shows a severe lack of integration into Disney Channel and instead pushes social media and short-form clips rather than full-length ads. The move to social media instead of physical merchandising and television ads was a decisive move that failed to push Amphibia to the national stage as much as Tinker Bell did during the DVD age. The Fairies franchise only grew once Disney expanded to pumping out merchandise. Dolls, books, backpacks, and clothing floated around everywhere, particularly in the Disney parks themselves.
Amphibia, on the other hand, only had one officially licensed piece of merchandise: one of the characters’ diaries. For Tinker Bell and Friends, Disney produced dolls, books, backpacks, clothing, and other types of merchandise for the franchise. Despite this, Amphibia relied heavily on word-of-mouth marketing on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, outside of Disney’s short-form content. Fans pushed the show through the final season. Further, the lack of official merchandise represents the lack of effort that Disney, a giant corporation with reigning influence over children’s media, gives to female-led stories. The motivation has shifted to making a quick buck rather than pushing genuine learning experiences or emotional growth on young generations.
Younger me wouldn’t have thrived the way she did if it weren’t for the friendships depicted on those different shows. It gave me a leaping point to jump off of and ask people around me what their favorite character from that franchise was. In refusing to promote or pick up major children’s entertainment around female-led stories, I fear younger generations of girls may never understand that they can both feel emotion and be strong. Big corporations failing to pick up shows with such demand behind them reveals they never had children’s interests in mind. While companies like Disney and Mattel focus on sales, they shun woman-led stories. Young girls deserve better. Let the next generations be guided by media that empowers them instead of beating them down to turn a profit.
Zya Chow is a freshman in the SFS. She has a mild grudge against the National Zoo because she still hasn’t spotted its red panda.
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