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.