Larry Kline first examined the impact of television in Out of the Garden: Toys and Children's Culture in the Age of TV Marketing. As a father and SFU Communications professor, he looks at what happens to the meanings of stories for children as marketers become the major storytellers in our culture and as 'character toys' such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles become major stimuli for the childish imagination. Almost twenty years later he published Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011) to assert the problem for children is not really what's on TV, but rather too much TV. He says people should just turn the TV off so kids will go outside to play, rather than obsessing over and trying to control what kind of advertising they are watching. -- Christine Hearn, AQ Magazine.

[BCBW 2012]