One thing I’ve always wanted to do with PGPoA is discuss not just the latest toys or the machinations of various toy companies, but also the nature of of our hobby and, in particular, the way the toys regularly intersect with media since the days of the “half-hour commercials” in the 1980s. And so it’s with great pleasure that I present this interview with Prof. Henry Jenkins. If you’ve never heard of Professor Jenkins, I think it’s your duty as a geek to become familiar with his work.

Real Name: Henry Jenkins
Specialty: Educator
Base of Operations: henryjenkins.org
History: Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending the past decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. He is currently co-authoring a book on “spreadable media” with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

1.) An easy one first: what were your own favorite toys as a kid? Did you have any action figures?

I think you could say that I was raised on the cusp of the era of action figures. Many of my favorite toys were extensions of media properties that mattered to me. For example, I love, to death, a rubber King Louie figure which was produced to coincide with the release of Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book. I had many stuffed figures who embodied cartoon characters or cereal box icons — some of which had pull cords which activated phonograph recordings hidden in their bellies. I had a series of small plastic figurines which embodied key characters from the Hanna-Barbara cartoons, and a company called Soakie distributed bubble bath in plastic cases designed to look like popular characters as well. We collected these and used them to block out little plays. (more…)