GoldieBlox – Come on Bring the Toys For centuries toys and imaginative play have been the training ground for children. Boys and girls everywhere yearn for their own miniature version of tools their parents use daily. It is no different today. By examining a commercial first aired on national television during the NFL Super Bowl XLVIII, the toy company GoldieBlox shows how they view the choice of toys available for girls and their solution to them. The ad opens with a young girl peering through the window of her doll house while upbeat music plays, giving the impression she is happily playing. This is the first use of pathos. Our hearts are warmed with the sweet memories and innocence of childhood. The camera pans to reveal the girl picking up the house and running out of the room, leaving the viewer to wonder what the girl is doing. At this point the lyrics to the music begin, a spoof of a 1980’s heavy metal song “Come on Feel the Noise” made popular by Quiet Riot and are sung by a chorus of sweet, young, female voices. The next scene opens with a close up of a purple, pink and red pulley made from reassembled bicycle parts. Again, the camera pans out to reveal a strong, confidant girl on a balcony, lowering a pink and lavender rocking horse down to a group of waiting girls. This could be a subtle attempt at logos by introducing the idea of thought and ingenuity shown by the preteen girls’ ability to engineer a pulley system using recycled materials. Yet in another scene, a stream of younger girls burst through a fenced gate carrying various gender specific pink and purple toys such as play kitchens, ironing boards and dolls toward a central goal. As the friends reach the street, the small stream of girls quickly grows to become a river of rushing feminism parading through the town. Meanwhile the lyrics to the song become part of the narrative with phrases such as “Come on get your toys, girls make some noise. More than pink, pink, pink: we want to think, think, think.” We hear “going’ to build, going’ to grow our minds... Right now’s our time…” The lyrics clue the audience into the product and purpose of the commercial as well as begin an appeal to logos. Who doesn’t want to build girls minds? Through the crowd of parading girls, we see, for the first time, boys, working on a bicycle with a look of surprise and confusion as they watch the girls rush past them.
Could this be a foreshadowing of the future? Is it possible that one day girls will outnumber the boys? The girls pass a town park where a beauty pageant is taking place. We see a further archetype of female youth in a girl participating on stage. She rips off her tiara and throws her arms up in triumph and joins the throng of rushing girls as her traditional mother looks on in shock. The mothers’ alarm is reinforced by the look of a boy buying a snack from a street vendor while the girls rush past him. This show of emotional surprise helps the viewer to identify and question their own initial startled reaction. “What’s going on? Where are these girls going? And why are they gathering their girly toys? Am I taken aback with what the girls are doing?” Finally, the camera breaks from the street march to a field where the girls are streaming in to gather. Several girls on ladders are building a rocket out of the toy tributes each girl has brought. Again the music narrative tells us, “come on bring the toys, girls build like all the boys” at which point we see three girls operating the rocket command center; one on a yellow telephone receiving the go-ahead verification, one with yellow binoculars viewing the progress of the building of the rocket, and the third girl at the yellow launch controls. The use of neutral yellow is in obvious contrast to the pinks, purples and aqua shown thus far. As the chorus of girls sing the lyrics “time to fly, fly, fly” the rocket made of pink, girly toys is launched successfully, followed by cheers and
