1. Beverle Houston, "Viewing Television: The Metapsychology of Endless Consumption," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9, no. 3 (Summer 1984): 185.

2. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel" (1934-35), in The Dialogic Imagination , trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 281. See also Julia Kristeva, "Poésie et négativité," in Séméiotikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), 246-77.

3. Robert Stam, "Mikhail Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique," in Postmodernism and Its Discontents , ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: Verso, 1988), 138.

4. Jean Piaget, "Piaget's Theory," in The Process of Child Development , ed. Peter Neubauer (New York: Meridian, 1976), 165, 170, 182. Piaget defines accommodation as "any modification of an assimilatory scheme or structure by the elements it assimilates" and assimilation as "the integration of external elements into evolving or completed structures of an organism."

5. Elaine Dutka and Nina J. Easton, "Hollywood's Brave New World," Los Angeles Times , December 23, 1990, "Calendar" sec., 77.

6. Andrew Pollack, "New Interactive TV Threatens the Bliss of Couch Potatoes," New York Times , June 18, 1990, C7.

7. Arthur Applebee, The Child's Concept of Story: Ages Two to Seventeen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 16. Although Applebee's description of these modes as a "subjective" poetic discourse (that demands spectator response), on the one hand, and an "object- soft

tive" transactional discourse (requiring interactive participation), on the other, is somewhat problematic, the modes are useful for distinguishing between two complementary types of spectatorship that develop along with the child's cognitive abilities.

8. Ibid., 125.

9. Not only does Applebee observe that "many traditional theories of language development would certainly imply that . . . the earliest functions of language are interactive, even imitative, rather than detached and personal in the ways characteristic of the spectator role," but he also claims that during the preoperational stage (which lasts until about age six or seven) the child typically "relies on poetic techniques, reexperiencing the story in the process of retelling it" (i.e., on the spectator mode), whereas "with the advent of concrete operations," the older child (of seven or eight) has the "new ability to categorize," which "leads to the first relatively extended discussions of stories using transactional techniques" (i.e., the interactive participant mode) (ibid., 105). Moreover, these analytical techniques of "formal operational thought" are further expanded in two stages of adolescence: "During the earliest of these, probably corresponding to the twelve-to-fifteen-year-old age span during which Piaget asserts that these mechanisms are in the process of being acquired, response is formulated as analysis. . . . The second stage of formal operational thought represents the most mature mode of response. . . . Here, readers begin to generalize about the meaning of a work . . . and can analyze in support of their generalizations; they can categorize and summarize; and they can retell in whole or in part, depending on their purpose" (124-25).

10. Jean Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence (1947), trans. Malcolm Piercy and D. E. Berlyne (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1981), 123.

11. Piaget, "Piaget's Theory," 200-202.

12. Jean Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child , trans. Marjorie Warden (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1976), 171-72.

13. Jean Piaget, The Development of Thought: Equilibration of Cognitive Structures , trans. Arnold Rosin (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 3.

14. Susan Willis, "Gender as Commodity," South Atlantic Quarterly 86, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 404.

15. Lynne Joyrich, "Individual Response," Camera Obscura , nos. 20-21 (May-September 1989): 193 (special issue entitled "Spectatrix," edited by Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane).

16. See David Bordwell's Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), xiv. See also Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: Uni- soft

versity of Wisconsin Press, 1985); and Edward Branigan's Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classic Film (New York: Mouton, 1984).

17. Louis Althusser, "Freud and Lacan," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays , trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 207, 209, 211, 212, 215, 216.

18. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)," in Lenin and Philosophy , 174.

19. Christian Metz, "Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism," in Movies and Methods , ed. Bill Nichols, vol. 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 545.

20. Applebee, Child's Concept of Story , 138. The study that he cites is Evelyn Goodenough Pitcher and Ernst Prelinger, Children Tell Stories: An Analysis of Fantasy (New York: International University Press, 1963).

21. Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 157-58, 166. Papert also compares his computational "patchwork theory" of theory building with Claude Lévi-Strauss's notion of bricolage (defined in Totemism , trans. Rodney Neeham [Boston: Beacon Press, 1963] and Structural Anthropology [New York: Basic Books, 1976]). Papert writes: "Learning consists of building up a set of materials and tools that one can handle and manipulate. Perhaps most central of all, it is a process of working with what you've got. We're all familiar with this process on the conscious level, for example, when we attack a problem empirically, trying out all the things that we have ever known to have worked on similar problems before. But here I suggest that working with what you've got is a shorthand for deeper, even unconscious learning processes. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has spoken in similar terms of the kind of theory building that is characteristic of primitive science. This is a science of the concrete, where the relationships between natural objects in all their combinations and recombinations provide a conceptual vocabulary for building scientific theories. Here I am suggesting that in the most fundamental sense, we, as learners, are all bricoleurs " (173). Papert observes that, like so-called primitive bricoleurs , "computer scientists have devoted much of their talent and energy to developing powerful descriptive formalisms" (100)--which, one might add, sometimes equal, if not surpass, in formalist rigor and detail, the close textual analysis performed by critics of film and television like myself.

22. Mary Ann Spencer Pulaski, Understanding Piaget: An Introduction to Children's Cognitive Development (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 224. break

23. Papert, Mindstorms , 170.

24. Katherine Nelson, ed., Narratives from the Crib (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

25. Jerome Bruner and Joan Lucariello, "Monologue as Narrative Recreation of the World," in Nelson (ed.), Narratives from the Crib , 75.

26. John Dore, "Monologue as Reenvoicement of Dialogue," in Nelson (ed.), Narratives from the Crib , 231-60.

27. See B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1957); and Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

28. See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972).

29. Dore, "Monologue as Reenvoicement," 234, 232.

30. Ibid., 239, 237, 240.

31. L. F. Alwitt et al., "Preschool Children's Visual Attention to Attributes of Television," Human Communication Research 7 (1980): 52-67. Here is how the results of their experiment are summarized in Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties , the influential study by the National Institute of Mental Health (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982): "Children also are attracted to television by specific features of the programs, not by just what they see and hear in general. They more often look, and continue to look, at such features as women characters, activity or movement, and camera cuts, and not to look when there are extended zooms and pans, animals, and still pictures. Auditory cues turn out to be more important than expected; women's and children's voices, auditory changes, peculiar voices, sound effects, laughing, and applause all attract and hold attention, but male voices do not" (1:21).

32. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 100.

33. L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes , ed. Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 86.

34. Ibid., 99-100.

35. Roland Barthes, "Structural Analysis of Narrative," in Image--Music--Text , ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 124.

36. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 17. break

37. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 101.

38. Ibid., xi.

39. Ibid., 21, 216.

40. Dore, "Monologue as Reenvoicement," 239.

41. National Institute of Mental Health, Television and Behavior 1:69.

42. Jerome Bruner and Joan Lucariello, "Monologue as Narrative Recreation of the World," in Nelson (ed.), Narratives from the Crib , 96.

43. Earlier versions of this text include a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies, Washington, D.C., 1990, called "Animal Masquerade and Transmedia Intertextuality: or, Why I Love Being a Turtle"; and an essay, "Playing with Power on Saturday Morning Television and on Home Video Games," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13, nos. 3-4 (1991) (edited by Nick Browne).

44. Houston, "Viewing Television," 185.

45. Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (New York: Routledge, 1989), vii.

46. Willis, "Gender as Commodity," 405.

47. Sigmund Freud, "Little Hans," in The Pelican Freud Library , vol. 8: Case Histories I: "Dora" and "Little Hans" (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977).

48. Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Writing and Motherhood," in The (M)other Tongue , ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 355-56.

49. Ibid., 364.

50. Ruth Weir, Language in the Crib (The Hague: Mouton, 1962); Nelson (ed.), Narratives from the Crib .

51. Patricia Anne Robertson and Peggy Henning Berlin, The Premature Labor Handbook (New York: Doubleday, 1986), "Marsha's Story," 136-41.

52. This intertextual network can also be extended to include the TV series "Heart Beat" (which premiered on ABC in spring of 1988 and is now in syndication on HBO), a fictionalized melodrama based on the group of obstetricians (the Women's Medical Group in Santa Monica, California) who made it possible for Victor to be born.

53. In this book, I use the term paradigm in two ways. In the semiotic sense (as in this instance), it refers to a list or menu of a particular class or category of words, objects, images, or other signifiers, from which one can select an individual member and combine it (syntagmatically) with similarly selected members from other paradigms to continue

create some form of discourse--such as a sentence, a story, or a meal. In a more general sense, it also means a pattern or model, as in the phrase "the psychoanalytic paradigm."

54. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," in Ecrits: A Selection , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7.

55. Piaget, "Piaget's Theory," 166.

56. National Institute of Mental Health, Television and Behavior 1:6.

57. According to Television and Behavior , "When children are a year old, they watch about 12 percent of the time that the set is on. Between ages 2 and 3 comes a dramatic jump in viewing, from 25 to 45 percent of the time. . . . By age 4, children are watching about 55 percent of the time, often even in a playroom with toys, games, and other distractions" (ibid., 21).

58. Piaget, "Piaget's Theory," 166.

59. Applebee, Child's Concept of Story , 16.

60. Ibid., 123.

61. National Institute of Mental Health, Television and Behavior 1:22.

62. D.S. Hayes and D. W. Birnbaum, "Pre-Schoolers' Retention of Televised Events: Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words?" Developmental Psychology 16, no. 5 (September 1980): 410-16.

63. National Institute of Mental Health, Television and Behavior 1:88.

64. Roland Barthes, S/Z , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 19, 29.

65. Applebee, Child's Concept of Story , 51.

66. Nelson (ed.), Narratives from the Crib , 20.

67. Barthes, S/Z , 16.

68. Brooks, Reading for the Plot , 99-100.

69. Applebee, Child's Concept of Story , 52.

70. This distinction might help to explain the controversy over the recent comedy Problem Child (1990), which was attacked by outraged parents, animal rights groups, adoption agencies, and child abuse specialists for portraying in live action the kind of violence that is typically found in cartoons; and for the recent commercial success of Home Alone (1990), essentially a second-grader's version of Straw Dogs . Perhaps the latter was less controversial because the primary targets of the violence were adult burglars rather than kiddies or pets. The distinction might also help account for the creative tension in Who Framed Roger Rabbit , where two kinds of violence are played off against each continue

other--the exaggerated animated frenzy of the cartoon, and the pervasive evil of live action noir. I develop this argument at greater length in my essay "Back to the Future in the 80s with Fathers and Sons, Supermen and PeeWees, Gorillas and Toons," Film Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 2-11.

71. According to Piaget, "As imitation becomes differentiated and interiorized in images, it also becomes the source of symbols and the instrument of communicative exchange which makes possible the acquisition of language" ("Piaget's Theory," 188).

72. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971), 5-6.

73. Ibid., 41-47.

74. Patricia Marks Greenfield, Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 101-2.

75. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses."

76. See, for example, Ralph Cohen's essay "Do Postmodern Genres Exist?" in Post-modern Genres , ed. Marjorie Perloff (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 11-27.

77. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 148-52.

1. Beverle Houston, "Viewing Television: The Metapsychology of Endless Consumption," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9, no. 3 (Summer 1984): 183-95.

2. For an excellent analysis of the complex relations among television programs, commercials, and toys, see Howard Gardner with Leona Jaglom, "Cracking the Codes of Television: The Child as Anthropologist," in Transmission , ed. Peter D'Agostino (New York: Tanam Press, 1985), 92-102.

3. Observing that "television is watched by children about three hours each day on average," the Children's Television Act of 1990 concludes that "special safeguards are appropriate to protect children from overcommercialization on television." More specifically, it mandates that "each commercial television broadcast license shall limit the duration of advertising in children's television programming to not more than 10.5 minutes per hour on weekends and not more than 12 minutes per hour on weekdays." Also acknowledging that television "can be effective in teaching children," the act establishes a National continue

Endowment for Children's Educational Television, which will offer grants ($2 million in 1991, $4 million in 1992) to persons who propose to create educational television programming for children who are sixteen years of age or younger. For the full text of this act, see U.S. Code Congressional and Administrative News , no. 9 (December 1990): 104 Stats. 996-1000.

4. Mimi White has provided one of the best analyses of "intramedium referentiality" in her excellent and influential essay "Crossing Wavelengths: The Diegetic and Referential Imaginary of American Commercial Television," Cinema Journal 25, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 51-64. See also John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987). For the 1990 fall season there were more new series based on successful movies than ever before, including spinoffs from Harry and the Hendersons, Big, Parenthood, Canine, Look Who's Talking, Ferris Bueller's Day Off , and True Believer . Susan King reports that in the case of the season's new children's shows, "because of the competition from syndication, cable, home video and video games," the networks augmented their usual intertextuality with the use of celebrities, primarily as voices for animated characters--a technique that has proved successful in animated features. Examples include Roseanne Barr doing the voice of "Little Rosey" on ABC and, on the new Fox network, Howie Mandel doing the voice of Bobby on "Bobby's World" and Whoopi Goldberg doing Mother Earth on "Captain Planet." See Susan King, "Big Stars, Little Fans," Los Angeles Times TV Times , September 2-8, 1990, 1.

5. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 161-63.

6. Applebee, Child's Concept of Story , 3-4. In Perceptions and Representations: The Theoretical Bases of Brain Research and Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 138, Keith Oatley similarly argues that we should see human behavior "not simply as reacting to stimulus patterns from the outside world, but of using internal models of that outside world to interact purposefully, and appropriately with it." He claims that "the richness of the possible representations an animal or person might have . . . of our world (its layout in space, the potentialities of various objects in it, the plans we can make for some course of action) . . . comes close to what we mean by intelligence."

7. Applebee, Child's Concept of Story, 100-101, 105.

8. Dore, "Monologue as Reenvoicement," 249.

9. Ibid., 255.

10. Willis, "Gender as Commodity," 406, 411. break

11. Martin Rubin, "Intertextuality in Warner Bros. Cartoons, ca. 1940," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies, Washington, D.C., 1990.

12. Fiske, Television Culture , 108.

13. Ibid., 109.

14. For a lucid and influential description of "suturing" and "the structure of the gaze" in classical Hollywood cinema, see Daniel Dayan, "The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema," Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1974): 22-31.

15. Althusser, "Freud and Lacan," 205.

16. Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23, nos. 3-4 (September-October 1982): 87.

17. Willis, "Gender as Commodity," 409.

18. Lacan, Ecrits , 2, 3, 5.

19. Ibid., 289. This series of commercials also features pretty young girls, whose developing curves are intended to impress their older brother or some other older male object of desire. In another of these ads (which could be read as a gay parody of the straight version), a cute young redhead, a sort of contemporary Huck Finn, stands on a bare black-draped stage in t-shirt and jeans, holding a glass of milk and talking to the viewer in direct address about the virtues of this wholesome product. In a chain of images linked by dissolves we see his malleable body undergo a series of transformations that rupture his imaginary unity and deconstruct his masquerade as a growing boy. These comic images raise a double set of questions for two generations and for two groups with different sexual orientations: a brief glimpse of a skeleton (will milk make his bones grow? will he die of AIDS?), the comic inflating of bulging biceps (will milk give him muscles? will he become a body builder with homoerotic appeal?), and the inflation of his head until it pops off like a balloon (blowing his mind, or deflating his egotism and his fear of castration) and lifts him up out of the frame (carrying him away on an all-time high, as he sells both this desirable product and himself as a great "pick-me-up").

20. Houston, " King of Comedy : A Crisis of Substitution," Framework 24 (Spring 1984): 75-76.

21. Standard and Poor's Industry Surveys , March 15, 1990, sec. 3: Toys, 44.

22. Raul Ruiz, as quoted by David Ehrenstein in "Raul Ruiz at the Holiday Inn," Film Quarterly 40, no. 1 (Fall 1986): 7.

23. Fiske, Television Culture , 114.

24. Dore, "Monologue as Reenvoicement," 255. break

25. Fiske, Television Culture , 110.

26. Perry W. Thorndyke, "Cognitive Structures in Comprehension and Memory of Narrative Discourse," Cognitive Psychology 9 (1977): 77.

27. Ibid., 103.

28. Jean M. Mandler and Nancy S. Johnson, "Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall," Cognitive Psychology 9 (1977): 111, 141-42.

29. Patricia Marks Greenfield et al., "The 30-Minute Commercial: A Study of the Effects of Television/Toy Tie-Ins on Imaginative Play," Psychology and Marketing , December 1990, 16.

30. Ibid., 10, 32, 2.

31. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture , ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 114-15. For other influential discussions of the postmodern aesthetic, see also Jean Baudrillard, Simulations , trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983); and Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

32. Vygotsky, Mind in Society , 88.

33. Greenfield et al., "30-Minute Commercial," 31-32.

34. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 97-98.

35. Ibid.

36. See, for example, Kinder, "Back to the Future in the 80s"; Rob Winning, "PeeWee Herman Un-Mascs Our Cultural Myths About Masculinity," Journal of American Culture 2, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 57-63; and Constance Penley, "The Cabinet of Dr. Pee-Wee: Consumerism and Sexual Terror," Camera Obscura , no. 17 (May 1988): 133-55 (special issue entitled "Male Trouble"); Ian Balfour, "The Playhouse of the Signifier", ibid., 155-69; and Henry Jenkins III, "Going Bonkers!: Children, Play, and Pee-Wee," ibid., 169-93.

37. Winnicott, Playing and Reality , 11-12.

38. Ibid., 50.

39. Joyrich, "Individual Response," 193.

40. Doane, "Film and the Masquerade."

41. Hélène Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation," Signs 7, no. 11 (1981): 41-55.

42. One need only consider the success of an adult feature like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (which generated short cartoons that helped both Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Dick Tracy in their opening weekends at the continue

box office and whose own sequel is now in preproduction); the commercial triumph of children's films like An American Tale, The Land Before Time, Oliver and Company , and The Little Mermaid ; the surprising popularity of an animated TV series like "The Simpsons" in prime time; and the revival of the old Warner Brothers cartoons, which the AMC theater chain is now screening with its features in sixteen hundred theaters.

43. Fiske, Television Culture , 111.

44. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology , trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 86. This catalogue (or extension of a paradigm onto the syntagmatic plane) is precisely the kind of structure that controls the second episode of "Muppet Babies," broadcast on September 30, "Twinkle Toe Muppets." In order to mediate a quarrel between Piggy and Skeeter over whether dancing should be beautiful or fun, Nanny gives the muppets a videotape with a montage of dance sequences that vary not only in the mode of enunciation (color versus black-and-white, video versus film, animation versus live action), but also in gender, race, generation, culture, period, costume, music, dance style, number of dancers, and so on. As a form of narrative closure, the tape presents Fred Astaire as the ultimate mediator of beauty and fun; like the VCR itself, he also mediates between high art and pop culture.

45. Brooks, Reading for the Plot , 108.

46. Houston, "Viewing Television," 184.

47. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism , 93.

48. Althusser, "Freud and Lacan," 205, 208.

49. Nancy A. Boyd and George Mandler, "Children's Responses to Human and Animal Stories and Pictures," Journal of Consulting Psychology 19, no. 5 (1955): 367-71.

50. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 80 (1985): 68.

51. Brooks, Reading for the Plot , 100.

52. Houston, "Viewing Television," 189, 184. This state of anxiety is also central to the recent fad of attaching a stuffed Garfield doll to a car window, as if to express the raw terror that motorists feel but are forced to repress as they drive on perilous urban streets and freeways, particularly in Los Angeles with its freeway snipers and drive-by gang shootings. This toy became a populist means of expressing a topic that is omitted from the official industry and advertising discourses on the automobile--another consumerist medium (like television) that prom- soft

ises empowerment and freedom while in fact fostering greater dependency on complex multinational systems.

53. Winnicott, Playing and Reality , 50.

54. Houston, "Viewing Television," 188.

55. For an analysis of the struggle over gendering television, see my essay "Phallic Film and the Boob Tube: The Power of Gender Identification in Cinema, Television, and Music Video," Onetwothreefour , no. 5 (Spring 1987): 33-49 (special issue on music video).

56. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), in Film Theory and Criticism , 3d ed., ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 690.

57. Lynn Spigel, Installing the Television Set: Television and Family Ideals in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

58. Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," in Culture, Media, Language , ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128-39.

59. Martin M. Klein ("The Bite of Pac-Man," Journal of Psychohistory 2, no. 3 [Winter 1984]: 395-401) argues that the primitive oral and sadistic themes in video games center on the fear of engulfment and on an accompanying compensatory aggression, a combination particularly common in adolescence. The heavy emphasis on oral symbolism, he claims, helps to account for the popularity of Pac-Man, which provides a site of temporary displacement for the adolescent's struggle with the world. For the behaviorist argument, see Geoffrey R. Loftus and Elizabeth F. Loftus, Mind at Play: The Psychology of Video Games (New York: Basic Books, 1983), chap. 2.

60. Friedrich von Schiller, "13th and 15th Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man," in Critical Theory Since Plato , ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 421-22, 426.

1. See Robert McGough, "Passing Fancy? Video Games May Peak This Christmas, but Nintendo's Grip on Toys Remains Unshaken," Financial World , November 28, 1989, 39.

2. Craig Kubey, The Winners' Book of Video Games (New York: Warner Books, 1982), 80-83, 249-51.

3. Ibid., xiv.

4. Fumio Igarashi, "The Video Game with Media Potential," Japan Quarterly 33 (July-September 1986): 297-98. break

5. S. Rushbrook, "Messages of Video Games: Socialization Implications" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1986). This study showed that in 1985, 95 percent of all ten-year-old children in Orange County, a densely populated region of Southern California, had played video games.

6. On the proposed joint venture, see, for example, Matt Kramer, "The Next Nintendo 'Game' May Be Brainchild of AT&T," PC Week , July 24, 1989, 57; Jeff Shear, "AT&T Likely to Call Others as It Sets Up for a New Game," Insight , September 4, 1989, 41; Jason Rich, "Nintendo to Introduce Online Network: The Home Unit Will Become More Than a Toy," Link-Up , November-December 1989, 1; and Jason Rich, "The Nintendo Link: A New Way to Play the Market?" Barron's , December 4, 1989, 56.

7. Robert W. Casey, "Toy Companies' Tidings of Joy," New York Times , December 24, 1989; and "Nintendo Co.: Pretax Profit Climbed 23%, Sales Were Up 40% in Year," Wall Street Journal , October 17, 1989, A25.

8. "The Nintendo Kid," Newsweek , March 6, 1989, 67.

9. David Sheff, "Nintendo Isn't Playing Games," San Francisco Chronicle , December 2, 1990, "The World" sec., 8-9.

10. Kevin McKinney, "Captains of Video," Omni , October 1988, 46.

11. Martin Shao, Amy Dunkin, and Patrick Cole, "There's a Rumble in the Video Arcade," Business Week , February 20, 1989, 37.

12. For more information about these lawsuits, see Mark Starr, "A Game of Legal Punch-Out," Newsweek , January 2, 1989, 50; Ken Rankin, "Antitrust Subcommittee Targets Nintendo," Discount Store News , January 29, 1990, 36; Shao, Dunkin, and Cole, "There's a Rumble," 37.

13. Sheff, "Nintendo Isn't Playing Games," 9.

14. Mark Crispin Miller, "Hollywood: The Ad," Atlantic , April 1990, 41-68.

15. "The Wizard Behind the Scenes," Pocket Power , n.d., 4, 5. Published in New York by Nintendo of America, Inc., in association with EMCI, Ltd., this "pocket-size" journal is described as "a sample of Nintendo Power ," the 8 ¢ × 11 ¢ magazine that is "the real thing."

16. Game Player's Buyer's Guide to Nintendo Games 2, no. 5 (1989): 78, 126 (published in Greensboro, N.C., by Signal Research, Inc.).

17. At the 1990 Annual Meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies, Scott Bukatman gave an excellent paper, "There's Always Tomorrow-land: Disney's Phenomenology of Progress," in which he argued that continue

the entire theme park was structured as an interactive movie experience.

18. Mary Ann Galante, "Disney Proposes New $1 Billion Theme Park," Los Angeles Times , January 13, 1990, A1, 30.

19. Susan Scheibler, a film scholar who once worked at Disneyland, has elaborated on the theme park structure in a paper she read at the Ohio Film Conference, November 1989, called "Documentary Spectatorship in Consumer Society."

20. "Nintendo Kid," 65, 68.

21. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that games featuring violence are restricted to the U.S. market. For example, one study conducted in Mexico City showed that 44 percent of arcade games featured violent action. Surprisingly, in this study the oldest subjects were from the upper classes, whereas the youngest were from the lower classes and played more frequently than upper-class subjects. See Patricia Rodriguez, Rolando Medina, and Hector Perez-Rincon, "La conducta lúdica y los nuevos juegos electrónicos: Comunicación preliminar" (Game behavior and the new electronic games: Preliminary report), Salud mental 6, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 22-34.

22. See, for example, S. J. Kaplan, "The Image of Amusement Arcades and Differences in Male and Female Videogame Playing," Journal of Popular Culture 17, no. 1 (Summer 1983): 93-98; John W. Trinkaus, "Arcade Video Games: An Informal Look," Psychological Reports 52, no. 2 (April 1983): 586; Robert F. McClure and Gary F. Mears, "Video Game Players: Personality Characteristics and Demographic Variables," Psychological Reports 55, no. 1 (August 1984): 271-76; Henry Morlock, Todd Yando, and Karen Nigolean, "Motivation of Video Game Players," Psychological Reports 57, no. 1 (August 1985): 247-50; Claude M. Braun, Georgette Goupil, Josette Giroux, and Yves Chagnon, "Adolescents and Microcomputers: Sex Differences, Proxemics, Task and Stimulus Variables," Journal of Psychology 120, no. 6 (November 1986): 529-42; and Claude M. Braun and Josette Giroux, "Arcade Video Games: Proxemic, Cognitive, and Content Analyses," Journal of Leisure Research 21, no. 2 (1989): 92-105.

23. Gita Wilder, Diane Mackie, and Joel Cooper, "Gender and Computers: Two Surveys of Computer-related Attitudes," Sex Roles 13, nos. 3-4 (1985): 215-28. For my own conversations with children about video games, see appendixes 1 and 2.

24. Patricia Marks Greenfield, "Representational Competence in Shared Symbol Systems," in The Development and Meaning of Psycholog- soft

ical Distance , ed. R. R. Cocking and K. A. Renninger (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, forthcoming).

25. Greenfield, Mind and Media , 105-6.

26. Edna Mitchell, "The Dynamics of Family Interaction Around Home Video Games," Marriage and Family Review 8, nos. 1-2 (Spring 1985): 121 (special issue entitled "Personal Computers and the Family").

27. Sheff, "Nintendo Isn't Playing Games," 10.

28. "Nintendo Kid," 66.

29. Quoted in Shao, Dunkin, and Cole, "There's a Rumble," 37.

30. Quoted in Jason R. Rich, "Say Goodbye to WHAM! ZAP! POW! Video Games Are Getting Less Violent, More Brainy," TV Guide , March 2-8, 1991, 31.

31. Greenfield, "Representational Competence in Shared Symbol Systems."

32. Two studies had very interesting findings on this issue. Dianne Tice, Jane Buder, and Roy Baumeister ("Development of Self-Consciousness: At What Age Does Audience Pressure Disrupt Performance?" Adolescence 20, nos. 7-8 [Summer 1985]: 301) found that "children under 12 years generally improved under audience pressure; Ss age 14-19 years showed substantial drops in performance; and Ss aged 20 years or older showed moderate drops in performance." In a study that examined game behavior in subjects fourteen and older, McClure and Mears ("Video Game Players") found that the key issue was class rather than age; they observe: "Strangely enough, the higher the socio-economic status, the more anxiety about computers was shown," and conclude: "perhaps these people are more likely to have actually the opportunity to use them than people of lower status and to consider implications for their use" (271). For other studies considering the importance of the age variable, see Robert F. McClure, "Age and Video Game Playing," Perceptual and Motor Skills 61, no. 1 (August 1985): 285-86; and William Strein, "Effects of Age and Visual-motor Skills on Preschool Children's Computer-Game Performance," Journal of Research and Development in Education 20, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 70-72.

33. Greenfield, Mind and Media , 107-8.

34. According to linguist Jacquelyn Schachter, who specializes in second language acquisition: "Adults no longer have access to a parameterized Universal Grammar and . . . such knowledge of the constraints upon target language movement rules (i.e., subjacency) that they do have occurs only as instantiations of the constraint via their continue

native languages" ("Testing a Proposed Universal," in Adult Second Language Acquisition: A Linguistic Perspective , ed. S. Gass and J. Schachter [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 73).

35. Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child , 209.

36. Piaget, "Piaget's Theory," 177.

37. Piaget, Psychology of Intelligence , 123, 142.

38. Piaget, "Piaget's Theory," 190.

39. Applebee, Child's Concept of Story , 135.

40. Vygotsky, Mind in Society , 89, 102, 86-87.

41. See Greenfield, Mind and Media , 107, 115; and Greenfield, "Representational Competence in Shared Symbol Systems," 19, 25.

42. Papert, Mindstorms , 96.

43. Piaget, "Piaget's Theory," 192.

44. Greenfield et al., "30-Minute Commercial," 8.

45. Papert, Mindstorms , 176, 26, 37.

46. See Betsy Carpenter, "On the Trail of Nintendo's Magic," U.S. News and World Report , July 16, 1990, 56-57.

47. Greenfield, "Representational Competence in Shared Symbol Systems," 23.

48. Greenfield et al., "30-Minute Commercial," 33-34.

49. Standard and Poor's Industry Surveys , 18.

50. Willis, "Gender as Commodity," 47.

51. Quoted in Sheff, "Nintendo Isn't Playing Games," 11.

52. Greenfield, "Representational Competence in Shared Symbol Systems," 24.

53. For studies of the cognitive value of video games, see, for example, Jerry Griffith, Patricia Voloschin, Gerald Gibb, and James Bailey, "Differences in Eye-Hand Motor Coordination of Video-Game Users and Non-Users," Perceptual and Motor Skills 57, no. 1 (August 1983): 155-58; Marshall B. Jones, "Video Games as Psychological Tests," Simulation and Games 15, no. 2 (June 1984): 131-57; James W. Hull, "Videogames: Transitional Phenomena in Adolescence," Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 2, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 106-13; D. Gagnon, "Videogames and Spatial Skills: An Exploratory," Educational Communication and Technology 33, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 263-76; Steven B. Silvern, "Classroom Use of Video Games," Educational Research Quarterly 10, no. 1 (1985-86): 10-16; Michel Dorval and Michel Pepin, "Effect of Playing a Video Game on a Measure of Spatial Visualization," Perceptual and Motor Skills 62, no. 1 (February 1986): 159-62; Marshall Jones, William Dunlap, and Ina Bilodeau, "Comparison of Video Game and Conventional Test Performance," Simulation and continue

Games 17, no. 4 (December 1986): 435-46. For studies that dispute the harmful effects of video games, see T. Panelas, "Adolescents and Video Games Consumption of Leisure and the Social Construction of the Peer Group," Youth and Society 15, no. 1 (September 1983): 51-65; Eric Egli and Lawrence Meyers, "The Role of Video Game Playing in Adolescent Life: Is There Reason to Be Concerned?" Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 22, no. 4 (July 1984): 309-12; Daniel Graybill, Janis Kirsch, and Edward Esselman, "Effects of Playing Violent Versus Nonviolent Video Games on the Aggressive Ideation of Aggressive and Nonaggressive Children," Child Study Journal 15, no. 3 (1985): 199-205; Gary Creasey and Barbara Myers, "Video Games and Children: Effects on Leisure Activities, Schoolwork, and Peer Involvement," Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 32, no. 3 (July 1986): 251-61; Daniel Graybill, Maryellen Strawniak, Teri Hunter, and Margaret O'Leary, "Effects of Playing Versus Observing Violent Versus Nonviolent Video Games on Children's Aggression," Psychology 24, no. 3 (1987): 1-8. For more general studies about violence and media, see also Nancy Signorelli and George Gerbner, Violence and Terror in the Mass Media: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); Geoffrey Barlow and Alison Hill, eds., Video Violence and Children (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985); and Edward L. Palmer and Aimée Dorr, Children and the Faces of Television: Teaching, Violence, Selling (New York: Academic Press, 1980).

1. Stacy Botwinick, "Nintendo Edges Barbie in '89 Best Seller Survey," Playthings , December 1989, 29.

2. Not only does the rock group New Kids on the Block have its own Saturday morning animated TV series on ABC, but it is also being marketed in TV commercials as a fivesome that, in contrast to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, might appeal more to girls. As if trying to construct precocious groupies, these ads urge young female consumers to compete with each other to be "the best fan" by collecting the plastic figures for all five members of the group as well as all five sets of matching paraphernalia. Thus, in a sense, the group is being marketed as a cross between Barbie dolls and Ninja Turtles.

3. Willis, "Gender as Commodity," 404, 406.

4. See Kathleen Doheny, "Turtle Trouble," Los Angeles Times , August 27, 1990, E1-2. break

5. This relativity of age, size, and growth is also apparent in the reception of the various incarnations of the TMNT myth. For example, in TV Guide 's special "Parents' Guide to Children's Television" (March 2-8, 1991), the TMNT animated television series is judged the "worst" show in the age-two-to-five category ("a grotesque mix of marketing and manipulation," 7), whereas the videotape of the first TMNT live-action movie is the top choice for ages eight and up ("the reliance on the martial arts appeals to young boys more than any other toy or comic book," and "how can a parent ignore the popularity of these terrific terrapins?" 17). By some strange logic, it is as if once a child reaches the stage of operational thought, parents no longer have to be concerned with commercial manipulation.

6. Sheila Benson, "When Comics Click on Film," Los Angeles Times , June 15, 1990, F14-15.

7. Barthes, S/Z , 24.

8. Quoted in Will Murray, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Movie Stars," Comics Scene , ser. 23, 4, no. 12 (April 1990): 32.

9. Ibid., 10.

10. Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child , 177, 179.

11. Willis, "Gender as Commodity," 415-16.

12. In the sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze , Shredder is outraged when his infantile monsters mistake him for their mother, as if that is the ultimate insult. And April is stripped both of her love interest (who is replaced by an Asian American martial arts wizard) and her androgyny: she becomes merely the Turtles' prissy "straight man."

13. Papert, Mindstorms , 11.

14. Willis, "Gender as Commodity," 416.

15. Papert, Mindstorms , vii.

16. In the original comic book, which parodies other comic book superheroes, the violence is quite bloody and the Turtles much meaner. They explicitly tell their enemies, "Yes, we can bleed!"

17. Some of Tsuburaya's techniques from the Godzilla series are adapted in the TMNT movie: the transformation of the "monster" into comical yet superheroic good guys, the use of humans in super-realistic motorized animal masquerade, and the positioning of these superheroes in constant combat where they defeat bad monsters (like Shredder) and rescue or redeem lost boys and girls (like Danny).

18. Quoted by Nina J. Easton in "Behind the Scenes of the Big Deal," Los Angeles Times , December 31, 1989, "Calendar" sec., 6. break

1. Karl Schoenberger, "Ad Giant in Japan Sells Clout," Los Angeles Times , June 14, 1990, A20.

2. Teresa Watanabe, "Japan Sets Sights on Creativity," Los Angeles Times , June 10, 1990, A1.

3. See Leslie Helm, "Japan's Labs Open at Last," Los Angeles Times , November 11, 1990, D7.

4. Quoted in ibid.

3. See Leslie Helm, "Japan's Labs Open at Last," Los Angeles Times , November 11, 1990, D7.

4. Quoted in ibid.

5. Noë Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 5.

6. Charles Champlin, "The Oscars Go Global," Los Angeles Times , March 27, 1990, F2.

7. Karl Schoenberger, "Japanese Film: The Sinking Sun," Los Angeles Times , April 4, 1990, F7.

8. Kevin Thomas, "Last Picture Show in Little Tokyo," Los Angeles Times , October 31, 1990, F1.

9. Michael Cieply and Alan Citron, "The Poker Game to Win MCA," Los Angeles Times , November 30, 1990, A22.

10. Dutka and Easton, "Hollywood's Brave New World," 77, 84, 85.

11. Robert Epstein, "The Dream Factory May Never Be the Same," Los Angeles Times , November 10, 1990, F20.

12. A. G. Hawn, "HDTV--The 'Even Playing Field' Gets Muddy: An Inside Report on the Future of High Definition Television," Video Times , Winter 1990, 33.

13. Epstein, "Dream Factory," F20.

14. Dutka and Easton, "Hollywood's Brave New World," 84.

15. Hawn, "HDTV," 32-33, 38.

16. Quoted in Cieply and Citron, "Poker Game to Win MCA," A22.

17. Epstein, "Dream Factory," F20.

18. Quoted in Michael Cieply and Leslie Helm, "Matsushita to Buy MCA--$6.5 Billion, Los Angeles Times , November 27, 1990, A25.

19. Quoted in Alan Citron and Michael Cieply, "Pathe Closes Long-delayed MGM/UA Deal," Los Angeles Times , November 2, 1990, A1.

20. Michael Cieply and Alan Citron, "Parretti Makes Surprise Offer to Purchase MCA," Los Angeles Times , November 28, 1990, A19.

21. Jube Shiver, Jr., "The Bidding for MCA," Los Angeles Times , November 29, 1990, D13. break

22. John Rizzo and Jon Zilber, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Connectivity: Networking the '90s," MacUser , January 1991, 92-93.

23. Dutka and Easton, "Hollywood's Brave New World," 84.

24. Quoted in Jane Hall, "Network News: An Endangered Species?" Los Angeles Times , February 16, 1991, F1.

25. Houston, "Viewing Television," 185.

1. Willis, "Gender as Commodity," 404.

2. Ibid.

1. Willis, "Gender as Commodity," 405.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., 406.