“It’s the coming of age of the Title IX mom, who grew up as an athlete in her own right,” he said, referring to the gender equity law. “And men, who have grown up in that environment, who have daughters, want their children, both boys and girls, to have equal opportunity to play.”
Previous efforts by toy makers to market traditional boys’ toys as new lines for girls proved successful in just a few categories, like construction and ride-on cars, said Jim Silver, the editor in chief of TimetoPlayMag.com, a website about toy trends.
Selling action figures to girls has been less successful, he said, pointing to Princess Tenko and the Guardians of Magic from Mattel and Kenner’s Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders, both of which bombed.
For many girls, things changed with the arrival of Katniss. Zing, whose sales doubled during the two weeks that it advertised on 3,600 movie screens playing “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” last fall, plans to advertise on twice as many screens for the first installment of the series’s two-part finale, “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay,” which is due in November.
Jill Calderon, an 11-year-old sixth grader in Atlanta, is so enamored of Katniss that she and her friends play “Hunger Games” at recess, authentically reconstructed with a make-believe cornucopia and a presiding “game maker.” Her grandparents were horrified by her interest in a story that revolves around children battling one another to death in a dystopian world, but her mother is fine with it. (video at the link)
NYT
