This past weekend, Chicago police arrested a man who had basically set up a recording facility inside a theater in order to make a bootleg copy of The Hannah Montana Movie. You can understand how it might have seemed worth the effort in these tough economic times: Hannah brought in $34 million in its opening weekend. Whatever degree of agita this might inspire in parents who can look forward to memorizing the dialogue in their sleep when the movie is (legally) released on DVD, it's also frustrating for those who work in the entertainment industry and are trying to catch a piece of what should be a potentially rich demographic: little boys. These rascals, it turns out, are much trickier and more elusive than little girls, who are shelling out for Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and High School Musical. (Yet, "boys 6 to 14 account for $50 billion in spending worldwide, according to market researchers.") As Kelly Peña, a Disney researcher who some refer to as "the kid whisperer," confided to Brooks Barnes, "Boys are complicated." Peña, who works with a team of anthropologists and psychologists, is paid to interview often uncommunicative boys in order to get at the ideas and aspirations most dear to them and how they translate into cultural signifiers. “Wearing it," says a boy about the well-traveled Black Sabbath T-shirt flaking off his torso, "makes me feel like I’m going to an R-rated movie.”
Ms. Peña herself has no kids; her background is in market research for the casino industry. ("Children seemed to open up to me,” she says.) Right now, she and her team are coming off an eighteen-month study geared to shaping the content of Disney XD, a new cable channel and Web site partly designed to help Disney reconnect with young consumers packing the Y chromosome. One authentic insight the researchers came up with: “Winning isn’t nearly as important to boys as Hollywood thinks.” If true, it's good to know that boys are, as a group, more psychologically and emotionally mature than Sylvester Stallone. Such research has been plowed into the series Aaron Stone: "Actors have been instructed to tote their skateboards around with the bottoms facing outward. (Boys in real life carry them that way to display the personalization, Ms. Peña found.) The games portion of the Disney XD Web site now features prominent trophy cases. (It’s less about the level reached in the game and more about sharing small achievements, research showed.)" Other companies who have stolen Disney's thunder since the days of coonskin caps sneer at their rivals' attempts to get on the bus. “'We wrote the book on all of this,' said Colleen Fahey Rush, executive vice president for research of MTV Networks, which includes Nickelodeon." Yeah, yeah. Get back to me when you've given the green light to a Rocko's Modern Life movie.
