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    Lifelong ‘Star Trek’ Fan Leaves Behind a Massive Trove of Memorabilia

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    Troy Nelson and his younger brother Andrew were almost inseparable.The two youngest of six, they were born two years apart. They lived together in their childhood home in Bremerton, Wash., for more than half a century. Near their home, there is a park bench on which they carved their initials as young boys.The Nelson brothers never married or had children. They worked together at the same senior home. They even once, as teenagers, dated the same girl at the same time while working different shifts at the same pizza shop. This lasted a week until they realized it.“Two parts of one body,” Evan Browne, their older sister, said of their relationship in an interview.On Feb. 28, Andrew Nelson, who had been treated for cancer for years, went to feed the chickens and ducks that were gifts from Ms. Browne to her brothers. He had a heart attack and died. He was 55. Just hours later, Troy Nelson, who was stricken with grief, took his own life. He was 57.“He had talked about it before,” Browne, 66, said, tearfully. “He said, ‘Hey, if Andrew goes, I’m out of here. I’m checking out.’ Andrew would say the same thing, and then it really happened.”The collection of “Star Trek” memorabilia left by Mr. Nelson is among the largest known, according to the president of a nonprofit that focuses on the franchise.Connie Aramaki for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      These Keyboard Musicians Are Thinking Beyond the Piano

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      Phyllis Chen began studying the piano at age 5, learning from a strict, traditional teacher who taught her the standard repertoire. She was a passionate musician, but sometimes wondered how much of her playing was artistic, rather than purely athletic.“I never found it to be entirely fulfilling,” Chen said in a video interview. “I always thought there was something missing.”Chen, 45, was pursuing graduate studies at Indiana University when she first encountered the toy piano, an instrument with a brittle, xylophone-like sound usually around 20 inches long, with a range of three octaves. Her teacher, the virtuoso pianist André Watts, was a Liszt specialist but encouraged her to pursue her own interests.Once, Watts tried Chen’s toy piano; the keys were so small and his hands so big that he struggled to play a single note at a time. But for her, playing the unusual instrument was liberating. “I was very excited to be able to explore without all of the traditional boundaries being tied to it,” she said. “No one was going to tell me: ‘This is the canon of works. This is how it needs to be played.’”She is among the growing number of keyboardists expanding their practice beyond the modern piano — that instrument so central to classical music, with its large and historically important repertoire, orchestral heft and essential role in teaching. But for these pianists, learning to play other keyboards has been invigorating. On these less prominent instruments, they have explored unfamiliar timbral terrain, re-examined their approaches to canonical works and created new repertoire. They return to the modern piano with greater aural and tactile sensitivity, feeling a renewed sense of freedom and purpose at the instrument.Chen was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001. A few years later, she was extremely busy, traveling between New York and Chicago to perform and attending university in Bloomington, Ind., when she got tendinitis in both arms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stevie Nicks Unveils a Her Own Barbie at MSG

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      The performer worked with Mattel to create a doll in her likeness, wearing an outfit inspired by the one she wore on the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours.” She showed it off onstage at Madison Square Garden.Midway through Stevie Nicks’s concert at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, the musician told the audience that she had a “surprise,” prompting speculation among audience members about a potential unexpected guest: Could it be Lindsey Buckingham?It turned out that the special guest was a Barbie made to look like Nicks, and its musical abilities were limited to a tiny ribboned tambourine.Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie, officially unveiled the Stevie Nicks doll at midnight on Sunday, the latest addition to the world of Barbie tributes to musicians, including Tina Turner, David Bowie and Celia Cruz.(You may be thinking, that’s a lot of Barbie this year, and you are right. The audience at Madison Square Garden didn’t seem to mind.)Bradley Justice, a doll historian and proprietor of the Swell Doll Shop, which specializes in antique and vintage dolls, said that Mattel has been making celebrity dolls since the 1960s.“I see it as sort of a crossover branding, where you attract someone who previously may have not had an interest at all in the doll or the brand,” he said, “but suddenly is very excited to see their favorite singer or movie star or whatever immortalized in 11 and a half inches.”The Nicks doll’s outfit, as well as a pair of Pasquale Di Fabrizio black platform boots, was inspired by her look on the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album “Rumours.”At the concert, Nicks explained that she sent the album cover outfit, which she still had decades later, to Mattel to capture that time in her life. To roaring cheers, Nicks began to speak in a high-pitched Barbie voice, explaining how much the doll meant to her.Nicks wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that when she looked at the doll, she saw herself at 27.“All the memories of walking out on a big stage in that black outfit and those gorgeous boots come rushing back,” Nicks said, “and then I see myself now in her face.”At the concert, Nicks also chose a fan in the front rows to take one doll home and promptly began to serenade the woman, named Sara, with the track bearing her name from the album “Tusk.”The doll went on sale hours later for $55, and preorders sold out almost immediately.Mr. Justice said that it was normal for the celebrity Barbie dolls to sell out quickly. “When you hear it’s coming, you need to just go ahead and start limbering up your fingers for your keyboard to type in your credit card number,” he said.The design team behind the Tina Turner doll studied Turner’s hair “at all angles.”The rush on the Nicks doll comes after decades of Mattel’s creation of Barbie dolls that honor influential musicians, athletes and pioneers.Mr. Justice said that one of the first celebrity Barbie dolls, released in 1969, depicted Diahann Carroll as the star of “Julia,” the first American television series to chronicle the life of a Black professional woman.More recently, Mattel released a doll of Celia Cruz, the Cuban American singer who was known as the Queen of Salsa. The Cruz doll, dressed in a red lace mermaid dress, was unveiled in 2021 but only went on sale this year.Carlyle Nuera, who designed that doll, said on Instagram that the design team had gone back and forth “with the fabric vendor to get the right scale of the lace design and to maximize the gold metallic threads woven throughout.”A Tina Turner doll that was released in October 2022 has sold out in stores, but it is available on eBay for hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars.That doll depicts Turner in the outfit she wore in the music video for “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”Turner, who died in May, was very involved with her doll’s design process, Bill Greening, a Mattel designer, said in a news release. Mr. Greening explained that the design team studied Turner’s hair “at all angles” to capture her look. “Lots of teasing and hair spray was involved!” he said.David Bowie has been honored with two Barbie dolls dressed in two of his classic outfits.Left, Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Chris Pizzello/Associated PressDavid Bowie has been commemorated with two Barbie dolls dressed in tribute to two of his famous looks.Linda Kyaw-Merschon, who led the design of the second doll, which was released last year, said that it was meant to be a Barbie as Bowie, “not Bowie exactly as himself.”The doll was dressed in a replica of the powder blue suit Bowie wore in the “Life on Mars?” music video.The earlier Bowie doll, released in 2019, dressed as Bowie’s alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, wore a metallic red and blue striped get-up with siren-red platform boots and a gold circle on her forehead.The Stevie Nicks doll was released after a big year for Barbie. The Barbie movie released in July made more than $1 billion in ticket sales at the global box office in a few weeks, according to Warner Bros., and has created a windfall for Mattel.Nicks told USA Today that she loved the movie and said “I had to come home and tell my Stevie doll all about it.”Melina Delkic More

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      in Movies

      Mattel’s Windfall From ‘Barbie’

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      The company’s approach has paid off to a degree that even the C.E.O. could hardly have believed possible.When Ynon Kreiz arrived at Mattel in April 2018, the newly installed chief executive had one mantra when it came to a feature film starring Barbie, a project he really wanted to get off the ground: He didn’t care if the movie sold a single additional doll.But “Barbie” the film had to be good and a cultural event. It had to be different. It had to break molds.And if that meant turning the chief executive of Mattel — i.e., himself — into the object of comic ridicule in the portrayal of the chief executive character in the film (“vain and foolish to the nth degree,” as The Guardian put it), then so be it.That approach has paid off to a degree that even Mr. Kreiz could hardly have believed possible. “Barbie” is close to grossing $1.4 billion and passed one of the “Harry Potter” movies as the top-grossing Warner Bros. film of all time. It could end up near the $2 billion mark. (The record-holder is 2009’s “Avatar,” at $2.9 billion.)How Mattel pulled off a feat that had eluded the company for years was the subject of recent interviews with Mr. Kreiz; Robbie Brenner, Mattel’s executive producer of films; spokespeople for Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig, the film’s star and its writer-director; and others familiar with the doll’s sometimes tortuous path to the big screen.Mattel and Warner have jealously guarded their financial arrangements. But people with knowledge of their agreement said Mattel earned 5 percent of the box office revenue, as well as a percentage of eventual profits as a producer of the movie and additional payments as owner of the Barbie intellectual property rights. At $2 billion in box office revenue, that amounts to $100 million. In addition, there are sales of merchandise connected to the movie as well as an expected boost in sales of dolls.Representatives for Mattel and Warner declined to comment on the financial arrangements, though the company’s chief financial officer said at a conference on Thursday that the company would make about $125 million in total billings from the film.Even though Barbie results weren’t reflected in Mattel’s latest earnings, released July 26, all anyone wanted to talk about at the earnings call was “Barbie.” Mr. Kreiz hailed the film as a “milestone moment” in the company’s strategy to “capture the value of its I.P.” and demonstrate its ability to attract and team up with top creative talent — a cornerstone of its ambitious slate of more toy-themed movies.After the first “Barbie” trailer — showing a hyper-blond, Day-Glo-clad Ms. Robbie and Ryan Gosling skating along Venice Beach — went viral in December, anticipation started building. Mattel stock has been on a tear. It has gained 33 percent, from $16.24 on Dec. 19 to this week’s $21.55. The S&P 500 rose 16 percent over the same period.Wall Street has been reluctant to give much credit to one hit, on the theory that such success is hard to replicate. (“Barbie” has had no discernible impact on Warner Bros. Discovery’s stock price.)But for Mattel, the positive impact of “Barbie” goes far beyond just one film. The company’s yearslong strategy to become a major film producer, using its vast storehouse of toys as intellectual property, had been met in Hollywood with skepticism, if not outright mockery. A-list talent wasn’t lining up to direct a plush purple dinosaur like Barney. But now the perception that Mattel’s leadership is willing to trust and support an unorthodox creative team that delivered both a box office bonanza and a possible awards contender has radically altered that.And Mattel’s surprising willingness to make fun of itself was one of the elements that mostly delighted critics and added to the buzz that roped in many more moviegoers than the “Barbie” fan base.That Mr. Kreiz was willing to laugh at his own caricature came as something as a surprise to some acquaintances and former colleagues. An Israeli military veteran with dual Israeli and British citizenship, a former professional wind surfer, an avid kite surfer and a fitness buff, with more than a passing resemblance to a younger Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 58-year-old Mr. Kreiz comes across as more of a square-jawed G.I. Joe action hero than a Barbie fan with a sense of humor.Mr. Kreiz’s entire career was in media and entertainment, not retail. His longtime mentor, the Power Rangers entrepreneur and billionaire Haim Saban, hired him fresh out of the University of California, Los Angeles, to launch Fox Kids Europe, a joint venture with Fox. He later ran Maker Studios, a YouTube aggregator, which Disney acquired in 2014. Mr. Kreiz left in 2016, and Maker was folded into the Disney Digital Network in 2017.That “Barbie” even got made was no small feat. It had languished at Sony for years, with Mattel routinely renewing the option, as various writers struggled to adapt the doll for the big screen. Although one of the most popular toys ever, Barbie was the subject of intense controversy, seen both as a symbol of female empowerment and as an impossible standard of beauty and femininity. The only feasible approach seemed a parody. The comedian Amy Schumer was once slated for the part. But scripts came and went.Ynon Kreiz, the chief executive of Mattel, and Robbie Brenner, a producer of “Barbie.”Rozette Halvorson for The New York TimesWeeks after becoming chief executive in 2018, Mr. Kreiz refused to renew the Sony option, according to multiple people interviewed for this article. He called Ms. Robbie’s agent and asked for a meeting. Ms. Robbie was among the most sought-after young actresses in Hollywood, fresh from acclaimed performances in diverse roles — as the ill-fated ice skater Tonya Harding in “I, Tonya”; in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”; and as a fixture in Warner’s DC Comics universe as Harley Quinn, the Joker’s former girlfriend. And while no human could replicate Barbie’s exaggerated dimensions, Ms. Robbie came reasonably close, while also radiating wholesome beauty.Ms. Robbie was simultaneously reaching out to Mattel and Mr. Kreiz after learning that the “Barbie” option hadn’t been renewed. She was looking for a potential franchise to take to Warner, where her production company, LuckyChap, had a first-look deal. But she wasn’t looking to star in the film herself.Over breakfast at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the plush entertainment and celebrity hangout not far from Mattel’s less glamorous El Segundo headquarters, Mr. Kreiz shared his vision: He didn’t want to make movies in order just to sell toys. He wanted something fresh, unconventional, bold.“Our vision for Barbie was someone with a strong voice, a clear message, with cultural resonance that would make a societal impact,” he said, recalling his message.Mr. Kreiz’s obvious enthusiasm and determination, and his pitch for creative integrity make him hard to resist, as Ms. Brenner, a producer, discovered when he recruited her to run the newly created Mattel film division during another meal at the Polo Lounge. Ms. Brenner, a respected producer and an Academy Award nominee for “Dallas Buyers Club,” was attracted to his idea for the movie. In Mr. Kreiz’s vision, Mattel would be as much a movie company as a toy company. The two bonded after he asked her who should play Barbie, and she, too, volunteered Ms. Robbie.At their first meeting, Ms. Robbie suggested Ms. Gerwig for the director. The two were friends and had talked about working together. Mr. Kreiz loved the idea in part because it was so unexpected — Ms. Gerwig had directed and written acclaimed but offbeat independent films like “Frances Ha,” “Lady Bird” and a new take on the classic “Little Women,” but no big-budget fare.“Lady Bird” was one of Ms. Brenner’s favorite movies. But would Ms. Gerwig consider such a mass-market, commercial proposal?Ms. Gerwig, it turned out, had played with Barbie dolls and loved them. She even had old photos of herself playing with Barbie. Ms. Brenner met with Ms. Gerwig and her partner, Noah Baumbach, also an acclaimed screenwriter and director, at an editing facility in New York. They kicked around a few ideas, but nothing concrete emerged. Anything seemed possible.A deal was struck, and Warner signed on as co-producer. Once Ms. Gerwig was on board, Ms. Robbie agreed to star.At which point Ms. Gerwig and Mr. Baumbach retreated. “I know it’s not conventional and not what you’re used to, but we have to go into a room for a few months. That’s how we work and want to do it,” as Ms. Gerwig put it, Mr. Kreiz recalled.The script for “Barbie” — starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and directed by Greta Gerwig — “was like going on this crazy ride,” Ms. Brenner said.Warner Bros.When the script did land in Ms. Brenner’s email, it was 147 pages — the length of a Quentin Tarantino film, epic by Hollywood standards. She closed her office door and started reading. “It was like going on this crazy ride,” she recalled. It broke rules, including the so-called fourth wall, addressing the audience directly. It poked fun at Mattel.New to the company, Ms. Brenner didn’t know if this would prove too much for Mattel executives. But she believed it was a great script.Ms. Brenner’s first call was to Mr. Kreiz. “I’ve read a lot of scripts, and this is so different,” she told him. “It’s special. You don’t get this feeling many times in an entire career.”Mr. Kreiz read the script twice, back to back. “It was deep, provoking, unconventional and imaginative,” he said. “It was everything I was hoping it would be.”Ms. Brenner was pleasantly surprised. “Ynon is a very confident person,” she said. “He can laugh at himself.”At one point Mr. Kreiz flew to London, where “Barbie” sets were being built at Warner’s studio outside the city. He and Ms. Gerwig spent a half-hour discussing the perfect shade of pink.Mr. Kreiz and Ms. Brenner knew they had a potential hit. “It was our secret that we couldn’t talk about,” Ms. Brenner recalled.The original budget target of $80 million jumped above $120 million once Ms. Gerwig was signed. But even that wouldn’t realize the director’s full vision for the film. For Warner executives it was a struggle to find what are known as “comps,” similar films that had grossed enough to justify such an outlay.Would “Barbie” be another “Charlie’s Angels” from 2019 — which was budgeted at $55 million but grossed only $73 million and, after marketing costs, lost money? Or another “Wonder Woman” from 2017, budgeted at over $100 million, with a worldwide gross of $822 million?Eventually the budget hit $141 million and, with some reshoots, ultimately topped $150 million.On opening night, July 21, Mr. Kreiz took his 19-year-old daughter to the Regal cinema complex at Union Square in Manhattan. As they neared the theater, droves of moviegoers — and not just young girls — were heading to it in pink outfits. Five screenings were in progress. All were sold out.Mr. Kreiz and his daughter dropped in and out to gauge audience reactions. People laughed, applauded and in a few cases shed tears.Of course the success of “Barbie” has drastically raised the bar — and expectations — for Mattel’s movies in development, starting with “Masters of the Universe,” written and directed by the brothers Adam and Aaron Nee. Twelve more films are in various stages of development, including a “Hot Wheels” produced by J.J. Abrams, also at Warner. Some of these may need to be rethought.And there will no doubt be “Barbie” sequels, perhaps even a James Bond-like franchise, which would be Mr. Kreiz’s ultimate fantasy (although he said it was too soon to discuss any such plans).Mr. Kreiz acknowledged that in a notoriously fickle and unpredictable business, future success is hardly assured. But “Barbie” has given Mattel momentum — the beginning of what he calls “a multiyear franchise management strategy.” More

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      in Movies

      How ‘Barbie’ Set Designers Brought Those Dreamhouses to Life

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      To make their Barbieland sets a reality, the movie’s production team embraced the surreal, going big on bright pinks and shrunken proportions.While working on films like “Atonement,” “Anna Karenina” and “Darkest Hour,” the production designer Sarah Greenwood and the set decorator Katie Spencer, both Oscar nominees many times over, had to turn soundstages into period-accurate sets, using their extraordinary attention to detail to embroider these spaces with texture and soul.And while those jobs were demanding — if even one thing looked wrong, it could dispel the film’s period illusion — they proved to be no match for the bright-pink studio comedy that is Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.”“It was one of the most difficult philosophical, intellectual, cerebral pieces of work we’ve ever done,” Greenwood told me last week during a video call with Spencer. “How can that be? It’s ‘Barbie.’ But it really was.”Then again, since the film works on several levels, many things about “Barbie” are headier than you might expect: Though it’s a big-budget film based on a Mattel toy, Gerwig and her co-writer, Noah Baumbach, pose plenty of significant questions about life and womanhood throughout. And in the visually dazzling Barbie Dreamhouses that Greenwood and Spencer designed — where Margot Robbie, as Barbie, and Ryan Gosling, as Ken, performed — even the smallest details in the background required many months of existential pondering.“Everything is considered,” Spencer said. “Absolutely everything.”Though Gerwig came on board the project as a bona fide Barbie aficionado, Greenwood and Spencer had no personal history with the doll. “Neither of us had Barbie growing up,” Spencer said. “I suppose we were like a lot of the population, quite judgmental about Barbie in a way.”The film’s primary color was a vivid fuchsia. The production cleaned its paint supplier out of every pail they had.Warner Bros.Still, captivated by Gerwig’s enthusiasm, the two women threw themselves into intense research. Their directive was to preserve a sense of play, which is why Barbie’s home has no stairs: Why would a doll deign to descend a flight of steps when she could take a circular pink slide or, even better, float gracefully down from the roof as if guided by the invisible hand of a child?“We all had to believe in it as much as if it was a space movie or period movie,” Spencer said. “We had to research it as though it was set in 1780.”First, the designers studied a vintage Barbie Dreamhouse, finding it to be much more cramped than they anticipated: A classically proportioned Barbie could graze the ceiling of each room with a simple upward swivel of her arm.To simulate that feel, “the Dreamhouses in the film are 23 percent smaller than they would be, as are the cars and roads,” Greenwood said. “When you scale the house down, you make the actors like Margot and Ryan seem bigger, which makes the whole thing seem ‘toy.’”Instead of adapting the Dreamhouses to feel more real, Greenwood and Spencer played up their surreality. When Barbie opens her refrigerator, most of the foods are simply flat cartoon decals. Her oversize cup contains no liquid — why should it, when Barbies don’t drink? — and the size of her toothbrush is even more exaggerated, since it’s the kind of prop a child might find included in a dollhouse.“Once you’ve done that once or twice, those moments of dollness, it makes the whole thing believable,” Spencer said.With few walls to speak of, Barbie Dreamhouses are the definition of “open plan,” which presented its own logistical problems. “You’re designing something that isn’t there, in effect,” said Greenwood, who drew inspiration from museum dioramas to conjure layers of background that would help fill each shot. Since our main Barbies live in a cul-de-sac — in fact, it’s the dot of the “i” in the cursive roads that spell “Barbieland” — each Dreamhouse looks out into several other Dreamhouses, while the blue sky and mauve mountains that surround them were hand-painted onto an 800-foot-long backdrop meant to recall old-fashioned soundstage musicals.If it feels artificial, that’s the point: Why preserve the fourth wall for homes that barely have any walls to begin with? “It’s fake-fake, which is perfect,” Greenwood said. “It was almost Brechtian, the way Greta approached it.”Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie. Her home stands in contrast to the style of the film’s Barbie Dreamhouses.Warner Bros.There is no actual fire in Barbie’s fireplace, nor water in her pool, since Barbieland is devoid of all elements and is as hermetically sealed as a toy box. There aren’t even whites, blacks or browns: Anything in a Dreamhouse that would typically be those colors is just a different shade of pink, with a primary fuchsia so vivid that the production cleaned its paint supplier out of every pail they had.“All the other colors, like the blues, had to up the ante,” Greenwood said, referring to their intensity.The cul-de-sac Dreamhouses were designed in a midcentury-modern style that evokes the time period when Barbie was invented. “We kept coming back to the aesthetic of Palm Springs,” Spencer said. In contrast to those homes, distinguished by clean and simple lines, was the postmodern house on a hill owned by Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) — a riot of weird angles and clashing colors, as if Pee-wee’s Playhouse emerged in the middle of a carefully constructed pop-up book.“It was once a Dreamhouse, and it all went a little bit cockeyed, like her,” Greenwood said. “Nothing there was straight, in any sense of the word.”Like its owner, whose face is covered in scribble marks, the walls of Weird Barbie’s house are adorned in doodle patterns and swirls, and there are plenty of other colors on display besides pink. (The primary color on one wall is even, gasp, green.) The other Barbies treat her domicile as if it were a witch’s house, but you can’t deny that Weird Barbie has an eye. Greenwood and Spencer singled out her irregular rainbow rug as a favorite that everyone hoped to take home.“We all wanted her rug, but it’s gone into the Warner Bros. vault of goods,” Spencer said. “But I love the fact that in this vault where you have to go through so much security, you have the Batmobile and then you have Barbie’s car.”Weird Barbie’s house isn’t the movie’s only deviation: Later in the story, after a trip to the real world tips off Ken to the power of the patriarchy, he returns home and exhorts the other Kens to turn the pink and girlie Barbieland into their own personal “Ken-dom.” Soon enough, they’ve staged a hostile takeover of the Dreamhouses — rechristened the “Mojo Dojo Casa Houses” — and given those buildings a man-cave makeover replete with La-Z-Boys, mini fridges and appalling equestrian lampshades.From left, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ryan Gosling and Ncuti Gatwa, three of the film’s Kens.Warner Bros. “We had to keep going back to Greta and saying, really? Really ugly?” Greenwood said. “But there’s a purity to the ugliness as well, because it’s a limited palate.”That’s because these himbos aren’t sure where all of their purloined swag ought to go, or even what most of it does. Barbecues have been placed haphazardly onto ovens, the juicers are filled with Doritos, and flat-screen TVs in every Mojo Dojo Casa House are tuned to the same hypnotically banal clip of a horse in eternal gallop.”He’s no interior designer, Ken,” Spencer said, chuckling. “But can I just say, a lot of the crew wanted to buy things from the Ken-dom. I’m not saying who, but a lot of them did.”The film was shot last year at Warner Bros.’s Leavesden Studios, about 20 miles northwest of London, and as word of the colorful sets spread, the production quickly attracted its fair share of visitors. “We were filming in an English winter, gray and black with snow,” Greenwood said. “So everybody would just come in there for an injection of light and summer.”Added Spencer: “It made people happy. You couldn’t help but smile.”And what of its makers? Did all that time spent on these “Barbie” sets affect their personal palette? Yes, confessed Greenwood.“I’ve painted my bedroom pink, literally,” she said. “I’d never painted anything pink before. I love pink now!” More

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      in Television

      The Boy King of YouTube

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      Over the protests of my fellow concerned parents, I want to admit something: I don’t care all that much about screen time, the great child-rearing panic of the 21st century. So many of us have come to believe that if our children spend more than a certain amount of time staring at a screen, whether television, phone or iPad, they will succumb to some capitalist plot to turn them all into little consumption monsters with insatiable appetites for toys, sugar, more screen time. This seems absurd to me, but as the father of a 4-year-old, I have not been immune to screen-time shaming — it upsets me to see my child watching a vapid show like “Paw Patrol” on our iPad. These moments of protest usually come, it should be noted, when I’m sitting beside her, staring at my own phone, scrolling through Twitter.“This show is dumb,” I’ll sometimes say. She almost always ignores me. Her stony silence then prompts me to try to think of a show that’s not dumb, which is an impossible task — because what kids’ programming isn’t dumb?For the last two years, her favorite show has been “Octonauts,” about a diverse band of animals who explore the oceans and swamplands in vessels called GUPs. They help whales and eels and flamingos in need. What’s left unsaid, but certainly seems clear enough to me, is that the Octonauts have colonized the Vegimals, a species of squeaking underwater creatures who all resemble one sort of vegetable or another. The Vegimals’ oppression does not register with my daughter, who has watched every “Octonauts” episode multiple times, owns a small fortune in toy GUPs and goes to her preschool dressed in a sweater with Kwaazi, an incorrigible pirate cat, knit across the front. I have not yet talked to her about how the Vegimals are portrayed as infantile, loyal beings who love to bake kelp cakes all day, but I plan on doing so soon.What effect do all these television shows have on the developing brain of a 4-year-old? I don’t honestly know, but I try not to worry too much about it. Life is long and full of different stimuli. I spent most of my preteen years reading horny fantasy books by Piers Anthony and the science fiction of L. Ron Hubbard. The “good” books I read mostly involved warrior mice who were probably also colonialists. I’m fine now. A wary ambivalence seems like the most healthful way to go.There is one type of video I refuse to let my daughter watch: toy videos. Parents with kids of a certain age will certainly know what I’m talking about here, but for the rest, a toy video is an internet genre, usually found on YouTube, that features someone playing with another plastic monstrosity, often one with tie-ins to “Paw Patrol.” The genre has spawned many toy-video variants: Some feature adults; others, kids. Some have even been deliberately packaged to hide their true content from concerned, but perhaps less than vigilant, parents.On occasion, especially on long drives, I’ll hand my daughter the iPad. She watches “Peppa Pig,” which I, of course, hate — those British pigs with their phallic noses prattling on about nothing. Invariably, after about 20 minutes or so, I’ll look back and see her, still strapped into her car seat, brow furrowed, jabbing at the screen with her finger. Then I’ll hear the same high-pitched nonsense, but in a much worse British accent, and know she has switched from Peppa proper to a video of some adult with Peppa toys who, for God knows what reason, is re-enacting a scene in which Peppa and her brother, George, go jump in muddy puddles or whatever.“No!” I yell.My daughter then looks up, annoyed.There’s no real logic to this, of course. What’s the difference between watching the Anglophone silliness of Peppa, a show that exists only to sell toys, and a video of someone playing with the toys themselves?Until recently, my daughter and I were somehow able to avoid the king of toy videos: Ryan Kaji. There’s no one way to describe what Kaji, who is now 10 years old, has done across his multiple YouTube channels, cable television shows and live appearances: In one video, he is giving you a tour of the Legoland Hotel; in another, he splashes around in his pool to introduce a science video about tsunamis. But for years, what he has mostly done is play with toys: Thomas the Tank Engine, “Paw Patrol” figures, McDonald’s play kitchens. A new toy and a new video for almost every day of the week, adding up to an avalanche of content that can overwhelm your child’s brain, click after click.Kaji has been playing with toys on camera since Barack Obama was in the White House. Here are a few of the companies that are now paying him handsomely for his services: Amazon, Walmart, Nickelodeon, Skechers. Ryan also has 10 separate YouTube channels, which together make up “Ryan’s World,” a content behemoth whose branded merchandise took in more than $250 million last year. Even conservative estimates suggest that the Kaji family take exceeds $25 million annually. But we’re a full decade into being stunned by YouTuber incomes, and I’m not sure these numbers should be alarming, or even surprising.Ryan Kaji and his parents, Loann and Shion, on the set of Nickelodeon’s “Ryan’s Mystery Playdate” last summer.Ilona Szwarc for The New York TimesRyan’s parents, Shion and Loann Kaji, met while they were undergraduates at Texas Tech University. Shion, the son of a microchip executive, moved to the United States from Japan when he was in high school and still speaks with a slight accent. Loann’s family escaped Vietnam on a boat and shuttled through refugee camps in Malaysia and Singapore before they made it to the United States; she grew up in Houston wanting to be a teacher. After college, Shion left to get his master’s in engineering at Cornell, but he returned to Texas within a year, after Ryan was born. (He would complete his master’s degree online.) They moved in together and began the uncertain and difficult work of trying to piece a family together.Which is all to say, these aren’t your stereotypical parents of a child star, who, frustrated with their own crashed Hollywood dreams, put their kid through singing and dancing lessons in the living room of a bungalow in Van Nuys. But neither are they just an adorable couple who stumbled into fame and fortune. They’re much cannier than that.In his first-ever video, Ryan Kaji, then just 3, squats on the floor of the toy aisle at Target. He looks very cute, doe-eyed with a Beatles mop cut. He’s being filmed by Loann. “Hi, Ryan,” she says brightly.“Hi, Mommy,” Ryan says.“What you want today?” Loann asks. “What is your pick of the week?”Ryan stands up and picks out a “Lego choo-choo train.” He does seem precocious, but not obnoxious — he doesn’t rattle off factorials or sing “Over the Rainbow” or “Tangled Up in Blue” or anything like that. Just a 3-year-old who seems a little advanced for his age, especially when it comes to expressing himself. There’s little that distinguishes this video from the millions of other family videos on YouTube, and Loann herself says she didn’t really expect anything to come from it other than something to share with her son’s grandparents. If you’re being uncharitable, you might note how “pick of the week” seems to suggest a plan for unending content.Shion saw no issue with it — why would he? — but he worried about the cost of buying toys nonstop for Ryan to play with on YouTube. And so the young couple agreed to allocate $20 a week in production costs, toys included. Loann would film everything on her phone and edit the videos on her laptop.For years, Kaji has made a new video almost every day of the week, adding up to an avalanche of content..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}At the time, Ryan was watching a lot of YouTube shows. His favorites were “EvanTubeHD” and “Hulyan and Maya,” each of which served as inspiration. Children’s content on YouTube tends to be derivative in this way. Once a specific toy or activity becomes popular, copycats emerge, knowing that algorithms will pick up and spread their version of “Slime Time” or what have you. A result is a self-referential world where thousands of children do the exact same thing on thousands of separate channels.When Ryan was getting started, one of the most popular and copied trends involved a giant papier-mâché egg filled with toys. Loann says Ryan wanted to do a giant-egg video, but this would have broken the weekly budget. Loann improvised. She had a lot of old toys based on the movie “Cars” lying around, which she stuffed into the requisite papier-mâché egg. In the video, Loann wakes Ryan up from a pretend nap. He seems genuinely surprised and begins smacking away at the egg with an inflatable toy. Then he begins pulling some clearly used toys out of the egg and feigning great surprise. The video currently has over a billion views.The giant egg was Ryan’s breakthrough. His channel’s audience began growing at an explosive rate, which then placed pressure on Loann to keep feeding her son’s new fans. “I was worried,” Shion says. “Every time I looked at other YouTubers, I didn’t see the huge growth that we were seeing over a short period of time.” That growth wasn’t just limited to the United States; Ryan was becoming popular in Asia, as well. “I was concerned about how much we could keep doing this without putting too much pressure on Ryan.”Virality is mostly luck: A teenager does a dance on TikTok, and suddenly every middle- and high-school kid has seen it, and before you know it, the dancer has 100 million followers and 15 separate sponsorship deals. Some critics will divine great importance from the tiniest of details and build a theory about what the kids really want, but there’s usually nothing outside the brutal logic of algorithms and the insatiable appetites of children.When Ryan’s egg video went viral, Loann saw an opportunity to make some extra income, though she didn’t know all that much about monetizing videos. Their first paycheck from YouTube was for about $150. At the time, Shion was still working as a structural engineer, and while he wanted to help Loann, who had a job as a teacher, someone needed to earn a steady salary.But after about a year of continued growth and bigger paychecks from YouTube, Shion and Loann both realized that they needed to commit fully to influencer life or risk squandering Ryan’s rare gift. They wanted the core of their channel, at the time called Ryan’s Toys Review, to remain the same — Ryan playing with the toys he liked, from “Cars” and “Thomas & Friends” — but they needed help. So they hired a couple of editors and started a production company, Sunlight Entertainment. Loann, who was pregnant at the time with twin girls — Emma and Katie, who are now 5 years old and appear frequently in Ryan’s videos — finally quit teaching to become a full-time YouTube mom.Shion held out a little longer, but he, too, eventually left his job to manage his son’s business. “I started to feel like I was the dead weight in the family,” Shion told me. Ryan needed full support from both parents. “So that’s when I realized, OK, we need to kind of step back, and we have to see how we can support Ryan in his branding.”Shion and Loann noticed that a lot of kid YouTube channels were focused more on the brand of the toy than on the brand of the talent. They were, in plainer terms, just adding “Thomas the Train” to their titles and hoping that other kids who wanted to consume every single video about Thomas the Tank Engine would stumble upon their content. Shion thought this was backward. Ryan, not the toys, should be the brand. Shion was proposing an interesting evolution: Given Ryan’s popularity, why couldn’t he create his own brands, his own characters, his own toys? Why help Thomas when you can create your own universe of characters, diversify your content streams, ramp up merchandising and license your content to some of the biggest platforms in the world? “People are watching Ryan, not the toy he’s showing,” Shion says. “So, oftentimes, we create a new original, animated character that’s inspired by Ryan.”Today, Ryan’s World includes the separate channels “Combo Panda,” “Ryan’s World Español” and “Gus the Gummy Gator.” Ryan doesn’t put in extensive appearances in all these videos; sometimes he just gives a short introduction. In one recent video, the action starts with Ryan in his backyard holding a rubber ball. He tosses it halfheartedly in the air, watches it bounce and then says that Peck and Combo — two of the cartoon characters in Ryan’s World — are going to teach viewers about gravity. He’s on camera for all of 35 seconds.Loann and Shion say that cameos like this are their way of limiting the amount of time Ryan needs to be on camera, which is their main concern these days. Still, there’s little doubt that he has spent most of his childhood being captured on video. Many of these appearances are banal; some are of dubious taste, like “Ryan’s First Business-Class Airplane Ride to Japan.” Others are just more videos of a cute kid playing with toys. Right now, as I am typing this, the latest entry in the Ryan’s World feed is an hourlong video in which Ryan is present for a vast majority of the screen time. He gives a few scientific facts about the strength of spiders, plays with some toys and is his usual, charming self, all while wearing a Ryan’s World T-shirt.In 2017, the Kajis established a partnership with Pocket.watch, a licensing company headed by a former executive from the Walt Disney Company. Pocket.watch handles the Ryan’s World franchise, including the deals with Walmart, Amazon and Skechers. But even as the family enterprise was expanding, Shion says, most viewers at that time still wanted to see Ryan play with familiar toys. So, Ryan continued to do — and generate a great deal of revenue from — what he had always done: picking up a popular toy and playing with it on camera. In 2019, Truth in Advertising, a consumer watchdog group, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, accusing the Kajis of “deceiving millions of young children” by not adequately disclosing their advertisers. (A spokeswoman for the family said that they “strictly follow all platforms’ terms of service and all existing laws and regulations, including advertising-disclosure requirements.”) The brand, which has continued to profit from sponsored content on its YouTube channels, also makes money from its line of Ryan’s World toys, multiple deals with streaming networks and licensing deals.Today, Sunshine Entertainment, the production company Shion and Loann created, has 30 employees. And the Kajis have traded Houston for Hawaii. When I asked Loann why they moved, she said, “Well, I always wanted to live in Hawaii, and now that we can afford it, we thought, Why don’t we just do it?”Last summer, I traveled with my daughter to Simi Valley, Calif., for a taping of the Nickelodeon show “Ryan’s Mystery Playdate,” a half-hour-long, professionally produced recapitulation of many of the motifs from Ryan’s YouTube videos. The night before the shoot, I asked my daughter to watch an old episode of the show on our iPad. She didn’t seem particularly interested at first, but when I moved to turn it off, she slapped my hand away and said she liked Ryan. Which didn’t surprise me — why wouldn’t she like him? But I admit I did feel slightly disappointed. Over the next few days, I had her sample a bit more from the Ryan Kaji media empire: A science lesson in which Ryan and his little twin sisters mix baking soda and vinegar; a game of tag played between Loann and Ryan; and the giant-egg video that started it all. She, of course, liked the egg the best.The Nickelodeon shoot was at a remote studio lot that had been made up to resemble a boulevard, with long stretches of building facades that somehow evoked historic Boston and the Wild West at the same time. Crew members in masks and plastic face shields were standing around the set, waiting for the talent to arrive. The Kajis’ tight schedule and their desire to spend as much time as possible in Hawaii means that Ryan flies to Los Angeles, films a season’s worth of shows, then heads right back home.Kaji and crew members on set of “Ryan’s Mystery Playdate.”Ilona Szwarc for The New York TimesThe conceit of “Ryan’s Mystery Playdate” is relatively simple. Ryan, Shion and Loann play a game. Ryan generally wins. Shion usually loses. Loann wins some and loses some, but she mostly hovers as a positive, encouraging presence. At some point, the mystery play date arrives. Today’s two guests were the Pie Ninja, who throws pies, and Major Mess, a burly military man who loves to make messes.A blast of cheery music sounded, then a round of recorded applause. Ryan emerged from a door wearing a pair of polarized sunglasses. Next came Loann and Shion, dressed in brightly colored jumpsuits, followed by a couple of production assistants who carried water and clipboards. The first contest was a simple memory-based matching game. Whoever missed got a pie in the face from the Pie Ninja. Before shooting started, however, Shion and the director on the set had to negotiate whether Shion would be hit with one or two pies. Shion said he didn’t really have any problem with two pies, which pleased the director.When the filming started, Ryan kept the scene together as Loann and Shion repeatedly forgot their lines. This, Loann would tell me later, is how nearly all these shoots go. Ryan rarely makes mistakes, nor does his positive attitude waver much. He spends a majority of “Mystery Playdate” with an amazed, gape-mouthed look on his face.Watching the Kajis coming together as a family to play these games reminded me of a moment from high school, when I was driving around town with a couple of classmates I didn’t know particularly well. One of them, an exemplary student who did things like run for student council, divulged that she and her parents played board games together once a week. This seemed absolutely insane to me, but I didn’t say anything about it, because you never know if your family’s dysfunction is atypical or if everyone else is just lying about their happy lives. I pictured this classmate seated on the floor of a living room, one much bigger than mine, playing Parcheesi with her bookish parents. This image persisted, and for the next year, I felt a great deal of hostility toward her. Today I play games with my daughter almost every night, but I suppose there’s still part of me that thinks about that happy family and still cannot fathom how such things could ever be possible.Why do children want to watch happy children playing with toys they can’t have? Are they responding to the toys or to the images of a happy family? Are they envisioning a life they already feel may be out of reach? And at what age does aspiration turn into resentment? I imagine my daughter will grow tired of these toy videos when she learns to feel real jealousy, which I suppose is a good reason to hope she just keeps watching them.And yet there’s something a bit unsatisfying about this explanation. Because if it were true that children just want to watch other children doing the things they most want to do, the most popular videos would show kids watching “Paw Patrol” on an iPad. The Kaji empire and its thousands of imitators, oddly enough, have created perhaps the only world in which children do not stare at screens. It’s a nice dream, I admit, but not to the extent of persuading me to allow my daughter to keep watching videos. The limits we set as parents may be arbitrary, but they are all we’ve got.Ryan’s life, despite its fictional presentation as a parade of remarkable discoveries that he shares with his enthusiastic parents, may not be all that different from my daughter’s. During the shoot in Simi Valley, after a long stretch of filming in the intense sun, I overheard a crew member say to him, “If you finish this scene, you can play Minecraft.”Jay Caspian Kang is a staff writer for the magazine and the opinion pages. He is the author of the novel “The Dead Do Not Improve,” and his latest book, “The Loneliest Americans,” was published by Crown in October. More

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      Brian Goldner, Hasbro Executive With Hollywood Vision, Dies at 58

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      He turned a traditional maker of toys and games into an entertainment company with its own TV and movie studio.Brian Goldner, who transformed Hasbro, a traditional maker of toys and games, by rethinking its many brands as properties that could become films, television series and online games, died on Monday at his home in Barrington, R.I. He was 58.Hasbro announced the death but did not give a cause. Mr. Goldner received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2014 and took a leave of absence from the company the day before he died.Mr. Goldner, who was named Hasbro’s president in 2008, oversaw a company whose brands include My Little Pony, Monopoly, Dungeons & Dragons, Power Rangers and Nerf.One of his most notable successes was persuading Hollywood executives that Hasbro toys and action figures like Transformers and G.I. Joe were as film-worthy as Batman or Spider-Man.“We had relegated these brands to an experience that was limited to the playroom floor or the kitchen table,” Mr. Goldner told The New York Times in 2009. What he envisioned for the company was something more expansive.The Transformers — toy robots that can turn into vehicles or beasts, which Hasbro introduced in 1984 — were adapted into six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide since the release of “Transformers” in 2007. Mr. Goldner was an executive producer on all those films and a producer on two G.I. Joe movies.Since 2007, Optimus Prime and the other Transformers, which began life as Hasbro action figures, have starred in six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide.HasbroTo coincide with the opening of “Transformers: Age of Extinction” (2014), the fourth film in the franchise, he challenged his design team to recapture the toys’ original magic by making them less complex so that they could transform with the push of a button rather than in a dozen steps.“We’ve made incredibly sophisticated robots, but it can be like a 1,000-piece puzzle,” he told The Times in 2014.For much of his time at the company, which is based in Pawtucket, R.I., Mr. Goldner espoused a brand blueprint that reimagined Hasbro as a play and entertainment company.“He came into a traditional toy company that was making stuff, and he believed we weren’t in the business of making things but in the business of storytelling,” Rich Stoddart, the interim chief executive of Hasbro, said in a phone interview.But, he added, Mr. Goldner encountered some skepticism with his plans.“Some people said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it sounds nice,’” Mr. Stoddart said, but Mr. Goldner had to keep pushing to bring his vision to reality. “He didn’t waver, because he believed to his toes that it was the right strategy.”Mr. Goldner’s effort to tell stories using Hasbro brands went even further in 2019 with the $3.8 billion acquisition of Entertainment One, a Canadian production studio that is also known by the shorthand name eOne. At the time, it was producing the popular children’s series “Peppa Pig” and “PJ Masks.”The purchase of eOne gave Hasbro the ability to produce its own programming, rather than make it only in partnership with Hollywood studios, which it had done with its Transformers and G.I. Joe movies as well as with its movie “Battleship” (2012). The film was part of an ultimately failed deal with Universal Pictures that was to have included movies based on the games Monopoly and Candy Land.“What we’ve found is that as all of the big studios have streaming services, they are increasingly holding on to their own I.P.,” Mr. Goldner told CNBC this year, referring to intellectual property. “Therefore, it gives us the opportunity as an independent to go out and present world-class, powerful brand I.P. to these streaming services like Netflix, Apple, Amazon and several others who used to have access to other people’s content and are now looking for great brands.”Mr. Goldner, left, and Adam Goldman, the president of Paramount Pictures, at the premiere of the movie “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” in Los Angeles in 2013.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBetween 2022 and 2023, he added, eOne would produce two to three movies and three or four streamed programs every year.Among the projects in development are Power Rangers and Dungeons & Dragons films and TV series based on Transformers and the board games Risk and Clue. The animated film “My Little Pony: A New Generation,” based on that Hasbro line of toys, had its premiere on Netflix last month.Eric Handler, an analyst at the equity trading firm MKM Partners, said by phone that Mr. Goldner had taken “the Disney approach to creating a virtuous circle and monetizing brands beyond the toy aisle.”He added: “Toys are still the core of Hasbro’s business, at least for now. But Brian recognized that you can do so much more with its brands and build them across franchises that cut across toys, consumer product licensing, movies, TV shows and theme park attractions.”Under Mr. Goldner, Hasbro also became a toy and game licensee for the Walt Disney Company’s Marvel universe of characters, including Iron Man and Spider-Man, and continued its licensing of “Star Wars” characters, which began in the 1970s.Brian David Goldner was born on April 21, 1963, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. His mother, Marjorie (Meyer) Goldner, was an investment adviser. His father, Norman, worked at Eaton, a power management company.After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in government, Mr. Goldner was hired as a marketing assistant at a health care company. He then worked at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he rose to director in charge of entertainment before leaving to become an executive vice president of Bandai America, a subsidiary of a Japanese toy company.He became chief operating office of Bandai but left in 2000 to join Hasbro as executive vice president and chief operating officer of its Tiger Electronics subsidiary, which makes the Furby robotic toy and many other products. He climbed quickly, becoming Hasbro’s chief operating officer in 2006. The success of the first “Transformers” movie helped lead to Mr. Goldner’s appointment in 2008 as president and chief executive. He was named chairman in 2015.He is survived by his wife, Barbara (Genick) Goldner; their daughter, Brooke Goldner; his mother; and a brother, Bradford. A son, Brandon, died of a heroin overdose in 2015.In 2018, Hasbro acquired the Power Rangers television and toy brand (originally the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) from the billionaire Haim Saban for $522 million. For Mr. Goldner, it was a reunion: He had worked with Mr. Saban when Bandai had been the Power Rangers’ global master toy licensee.“From time to time,” Mr. Saban said when the acquisition was announced, “Brian would say to me, ‘So when are you coming to Hasbro?’”It took a while, but Mr. Goldner finally added the Power Rangers to Hasbro’s ever-widening constellation of merchandising, television and movies. More

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      It’s Hollywood Barbie’s Moment (and She’s Bringing Her Friends)

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      For 62 years, Barbie has been the hardest-working woman in the toy aisle, using a dizzying array of outfits and accessories — and, lately, changing body shapes and skin tones — while gliding from one career to the next. Astrophysicist Barbie. Ballerina Barbie. Chicken Farmer Barbie. Firefighter Barbie.But she has never pulled off the ultimate transformation: Barbie, live-action movie star.Time and again, her corporate overlords at Mattel have teamed with Hollywood studios to make a big-budget film in hopes of forging a new revenue stream while giving Barbie new relevance. Time and again, nothing has emerged, in part because Mattel has tried to micromanage the creative process, alienating filmmakers. (You want Barbie to do what?) Financial turbulence and executive turnover at Mattel haven’t helped.A similar situation has played out with other Mattel brands, including Hot Wheels, American Girl and Masters of the Universe — a humiliation given the success that other toy companies have had in Hollywood, which loves nothing more than a movie concept with a built-in fan base.The inventive “Lego Movie” took in nearly $500 million at the global box office in 2014 for Warner Bros. and the Lego Group, resulting in a sequel and two spinoffs. Paramount Pictures and Hasbro have turned the Transformers action-figure line into a $5 billion big-screen franchise over the last 14 years; a seventh installment is on the way and will undoubtedly deliver the same halo for Hasbro as the previous films, driving up the company’s stock price and turbocharging demand for Transformers toys.With money like that on the line, Mattel has clung to its Hollywood dream. “There is ‘Fast and Furious 9’ and Hot Wheels zero,” said Ynon Kreiz, Mattel’s newish chief executive, referring to Universal’s hot-rod film franchise, which has taken in $6.3 billion worldwide since 2001. “That is going to change.”There are signals — 13 of them — that Mattel is not playing around this time.Margot Robbie will star in “Barbie,” a live-action movie directed by Greta Gerwig.Pool photo by Chris PizzelloUnder Mr. Kreiz, who has overseen a stunning financial turnaround at the company since becoming its fourth chief executive in four years in 2018, Mattel has moved to turn its toys into full-fledged entertainment brands. It now has 13 films in the works with various studio partners, including “Barbie,” a live-action adventure starring Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”) and directed by the Oscar-nominated Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”). Ms. Robbie, who is also one of the producers, described the big-budget film in an email as being “for both the fans and the skeptics,” a theatrical endeavor that will be “really entertaining but also completely surprising.”The script, by Ms. Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story”), even pokes fun at Barbie and Ken, her plastic paramour.As in, what happened to their genitals?“I’m excited about this movie because it’s emotional and touches your heart and honors the legacy while reflecting our current society and culture — and doesn’t feel designed to sell toys,” said Toby Emmerich, chairman of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group, where “Barbie” is pointed toward a 2023 theatrical release.The dozen other films in Mattel’s pipeline include a live-action Hot Wheels spectacle; a horror film based on the fortunetelling Magic 8 Ball; a wide-audience Thomas the Tank Engine movie that combines animation and live action; and, in partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment, a big-screen Masters of the Universe adventure about the cosmos that includes He-Man and his superheroic sister, She-Ra.Mattel also has 17 television series in production, including “Masters of the Universe: Revelation,” which arrives on Netflix on July 23.NetflixMattel, Universal and Vin Diesel are collaborating on a live-action movie based on Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, a tabletop game introduced in 1966. Lena Dunham (HBO’s “Girls”) is directing and writing a live-action family comedy based on Mattel’s Polly Pocket line of micro-dolls. Lily Collins (“Emily in Paris”) will play the title role and produce; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the distribution and financing partner.“Young women need smart, playful films that speak to them without condescension,” Ms. Dunham said.Mattel has also announced movies based on View-Master, American Girl and Uno, the ubiquitous card game. (If you think an Uno movie sounds like a satirical headline from The Onion, consider this: There are non-Mattel movies in development in Hollywood that are based on Play-Doh and Peeps, the Easter candy.)All or some or none of Mattel’s movie projects could connect with audiences — if they come to fruition at all. That is the nature of the Hollywood casino.“Familiarity with a toy or character is a start, but no movie makes it without clever character and story development,” said David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a movie consultancy.Toys have a surprisingly strong track record as film fodder. Other hits include the 2016 animated musical “Trolls,” based on the wild-haired dolls, and “Ouija,” which cost $5 million to make in 2014 and collected $104 million worldwide. (Pixar did not base “Toy Story” on a toy, but it has populated the franchise with classics, including Barbie.) But the genre has also had wipeouts, notably “Battleship,” which Universal and Hasbro based on the board game and cost more than $300 million to make and market. It arrived to $25 million in North American ticket sales in 2012.The head of Mattel Films, Robbie Brenner, right, with Mr. Kreiz and Richard Dickson, Mattel’s president and chief operating officer.Rozette Rago for The New York Times“UglyDolls,” adapted from a line of plush toys, was a smaller-scale box office disaster for STX Films in 2019. Mattel itself got bruised in 2016 when “Max Steel,” a modestly budgeted film based on an action figure, arrived to near-empty theaters. It received a zero percent positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation site.“Unless you can make something that feels really sticky and really interesting and really authentic, there’s no point in doing it,” said Robbie Brenner, who heads Mattel Films, which was created in 2018. (Mattel’s previous movie division, Playground Productions, was started in 2013 and folded in 2016.)Ms. Brenner said she had approached all of Mattel’s properties with the same question: “How do we flip it on its side a little bit while still respecting the integrity of the brand?”Mr. Kreiz said he was not interested in making thinly disguised toy commercials. In a shift from the Mattel of the past, “we want to give our filmmaking partners creative freedom and enable them to do things that are unconventional and exciting,” he said. “Focus on making great content and the rest will follow.”He added, however, that Mattel did not “sign a deal and disappear.”The message appears to be resonating in Hollywood, allowing Mattel to attract A-plus talent. The “Barbie” team is one example. Tom Hanks has agreed to star in and produce an adaptation of Major Matt Mason, an astronaut action figure introduced by Mattel in 1966; Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning writer of “A Beautiful Mind,” is working on the screenplay. Marc Forster (“World War Z”) is directing and producing that “Thomas & Friends” movie. And Daniel Kaluuya, who won an Oscar in April for his role in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” is involved with a Mattel film project based on Barney, the interminably perky purple dinosaur.Even Ms. Brenner has a sophisticated film pedigree. She produced the AIDS-medication drama “Dallas Buyers Club,” which received six Oscar nominations in 2014, including one for best picture. (It won three: actor, supporting actor, and makeup and hairstyling.) Before that, she was a senior executive at 20th Century Fox and Miramax.“Barbie DreamHouse Adventures” is already steaming on Netflix.MattelMattel’s momentum in Hollywood has resulted, in part, from a turnaround at the company as a whole. Mattel has fixed many of its core problems, making it less risk averse, according to Richard Dickson, Mattel’s president and chief operating officer.“Five years ago, the foundations that our brands were sitting on were not strong enough,” Mr. Dickson said.When Mr. Kreiz arrived in April 2018, the toymaker was reeling from gut punches, some self-inflicted. It had lost Disney’s lucrative princesses toy license to Hasbro. A crucial retail partner, Toys “R” Us, had evaporated in a cloud of bankruptcy. Millennial parents had turned on Barbie, dismissing her as vapid and noninclusive. And some of Mattel’s other stars — American Girl, the glam Monster High crew — were adrift, unsure of how to compete for the attention of a generation of iPad-wielding children.Total revenue plunged to $4.5 billion in 2018, from $6.5 billion in 2013, and a profit of more than $900 million in 2013 became a loss of $533 million.Mr. Kreiz stabilized Mattel by restructuring its supply chain and reducing costs by $1 billion over three years, in part by closing factories and laying off more than 2,000 nonmanufacturing employees. At the same time, a long-gestating modernization plan for Barbie began to pay off in a major way. She now comes with roughly 150 different body shapes, skin tones and hairstyles; Wheelchair Barbie was such a runaway success last year that Wheelchair Ken recently arrived.In 2020, with parents looking for ways to entertain children at home during the pandemic, Mattel sold more than 100 Barbie dolls a minute, Mr. Dickson said. (Juli Lennett, toy industry adviser for NPD Group, backed him up.)Revenue totaled $4.6 billion last year, and Mattel posted a profit of $127 million. In the first quarter of 2021, sales increased 47 percent from a year earlier, the company’s highest growth rate in at least 25 years. Mattel’s stock price has climbed 52 percent since Mr. Kreiz took over.Mattel, based in El Segundo, Calif., is now turning to the next phase of Mr. Kreiz’s growth plan. With a vast catalog of intellectual property, Mattel wants to become more like Marvel, which started as a comics company and transformed into a Hollywood superpower.“In the mid- to long term, we must become a player in film, television, digital gaming, live events, consumer products, music and digital media,” Mr. Kreiz said.And by player he means player. Mattel has a long history in direct-to-DVD animated movies, for instance, but its television division, run by Fred Soulie, is working to capitalize on the streaming boom. The company has a long-term deal to make one or two Barbie cartoons for Netflix annually. “Masters of the Universe: Revelation,” an animated series from the filmmaker Kevin Smith (“Clerks”), arrives on Netflix on July 23.In total, Mr. Soulie has 18 shows in production, including a revamped “Thomas & Friends” and a new incarnation of “Monster High.” An additional 24 are in development.“We’ve been planting a lot of seeds,” Mr. Soulie said, “and we’re about to see the results.” More