Living: In All Seasons, Toys Are Us

A brother and sister leave home to wander through a place where exotic figures have the power to enchant and destroy. But the siblings are protected by an even greater force: goodness. At the end of a winding and hazardous journey, the wicked are vanquished and the children are redeemed.

This Christmas the pair may be called He-Man and She-Ra, and their blond manes and mesomorphic torsos beckon from shelves in nearly every toy store in the nation. In other times the wandering children have been differently named and more modestly dressed. Observes Roger Sale, a professor of English at the University of Washington: "A girl is in a wood. Give her a brother, and one has Hansel and Gretel . . . send the girl to dwarfs, and one has Snow White. Make the girl a boy, and one might have Jack, either the one who climbs beanstalks or the one who kills giants." Make the wood the reaches of space, and they are Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, GoBots or Masters of the Universe.

For the past eleven months, toy manufacturers have dangled fresh enticements - before small children, hoping for the greatest separation of them all: the parents from their wallets. More interested in the here-and-now bottom line than in fairy tales or the mythic wellsprings behind children's play, the marketers have long since phased out the elves in Santa's workshop (and kicked the old gentleman upstairs to his present role as the Colonel Sanders of the Yuletide franchise). Big business, after all, is not kid stuff; the other way round is more like it. In the U.S. last Christmas, according to the ledgers of the Wall Street Journal, "the average household bought 30 gifts and spent $315." In 1985 $12 billion worth of toys were sold at retail, 60% of them in the three months before Dec. 25. That was a sparkling $1 billion more than the previous year. This year it is expected to be 5% higher.

No child fights more single-mindedly for a toy than do some 800 manufacturers and distributors for a share of that market. At Mattel, the second largest toy company, with sales of just over $l billion, guards patrol the R&D building in Hawthorne, Calif., as if it were a Strategic Air Command base. Understandably. A successful new product can mean buckets of the stuff that grown-ups' dreams are made of. Coleco came charging out of the Cabbage Patch with its pathetic but lovable doll, and currently ranks third, with annual sales of more than $500 million. Hasbro, the leader, with $1.3 billion in sales projected for this year, is considered the industry hotshot. Every year some 4,000 new products soar and roar out of the factories in hopes of finding a place under the nation's Christmas trees.