Meet Your New Best Friend...Chuck!

http://www.hasbro.com/play/details.cfm?guid=036480FB-19B9-F369-D920-6B97E9A2C665&src=endeca

The above link is for a new commercial for a Tonka truck made by Hasbro—more specifically, Chuck the Talking Truck. Chuck is a friendly-looking motor vehicle—all red and yellow, with big eyes, a toothy grin, and a dump truck bin adorning his top. What’s the best part about Chuck? He talks and responds when called. In the commercial, Chuck zooms throughout a little boy’s not-so-subtly blue room seemingly helping the boy clean up his mess, yet knocking blocks over and making more of one. He follows the boy, responding to the boy’s elated shouts of “Chuck!” A voiceover in the commercial also claims that Chuck will be “your boy’s hard-working, new best friend”. A parent does not appear in this ad at all, except for one shot where she places a juice box into Chuck’s bin (but all that is really seen is a close-up of her hand), after which the camera focuses back in on Chuck racing over to the boy who retrieves his juice box from Chuck and drinks with a smile.

There is a focus now on interactive toys like Chuck because of the fact that the world has become a more complicated place with greater time-pressure demands. This is certainly understandable, and there is nothing wrong with a parent using interactive toys to help multitask and ease the pressures of everyday life, but in the “Chuck” ad, the mother does not even have a real presence—it is as if she is extraneous, that Chuck can apparently provide sustenance, fun, and cleaning services, so why does the boy need a parent? The ad says that “for any job, Chuck’s the one to get it done” and the ad emphasizes that by deemphasizing the role of the parent and basically replacing her with a talking toy.

In chapter 3, Sturken and Cartwright stress that “the idea that consumer products will offer self-fulfillment is crucial to marketing and consumption” (269). For this reason, Chuck is not advertised to the children who will be playing with him, but to the parents who will be exercising their purchasing power and can decide whether or not to buy a Chuck. And Chuck, more than about the self-fulfillment of the child, is about the self-fulfillment of the parents and the fulfillment and benefits they will think Chuck will bring to their children. The boy gets to have a great time playing with a plastic talking truck who makes cleaning fun, and mom and dad get to check their emails and do their work, confident that their child is having good, safe fun. So both parties are happy and fulfilled, especially the parents because they feel like they have covered all of their bases.

This ad also meshes with Roland Barthes discussion of toys. The commercial makes it very clear that Chuck is for “your boy”. This ties in to Barthes when he says that the lifelike, urinating dolls are “meant to prepare the little girl for the casualty of house-keeping, to ‘condition’ her to her future role as mother” (53). In that same sense, the Chuck ad is all about developing masculinity and falling perfectly in line with traditional gender roles. The boy is playing with a truck, cleaning up his blocks, and using the blocks to then build a tower-like structure. These represent traditional roles of boys who are expected to grow into men of brawn and dexterity. I can almost see the boy in this ad fifteen years in the future, operating a crane in a muscle shirt. Would it be such an issue if a boy had no desire to play with a talking truck, or if a girl wanted her very own Chuck? Why must toy truck equal boy?

Barthes also says that French toys are objects that “now act by themselves” and “they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators” (54). And Chuck follows this pattern exactly. He is a toy already made, ready for use. The boy might be simultaneously playing with Chuck and blocks in the commercial, but most kids would be amused just calling Chuck’s name and watching him speed over and speak to them. There is none of the imagination or creativity that Barthes alludes to in his writing because Chuck already is what the think tanks at Hasbro and the advertisers have decided he should be. He is a talking truck who responds to your voice—and he brings you juice.