When television sets first landed in American living rooms, regulators took steps to limit how much marketing was aimed at children. As a society, we understood television to be a powerful tool for driving human behavior. It was deemed too dangerous for developing brains.

Enter the de-regulation era of the 1980s. An onslaught of marketing was aimed at children, resulting in an incredible boom in the toy and cartoon industries. What are we finding as the generation who grew up on He-Man, Transformers, and GI Joe matures into adulthood? Pop-culture guru Brian Box Brown takes a deep dive into culture, commerce, and the generational effects of media saturation.