Johnny Seven Oma Toy Gun Essay

Advertisements are everywhere in this day and age. Television commercials are ultimately more popular forms of advertisements because the advertisers are better able to get their message across in a commercial rather than in a paper ad. Television commercials started in the 1940s and the techniques the advertisers use today are similar to the ones they have been using since the 1940s. They typically all have a target audience who they have specifically designed the commercial for. Commercial advertisements are often used to sell a product using a range of techniques, and although they are relatively short in length, they have a variety of hidden agendas that greatly influence their target audience.
In the 1964 Johnny seven OMA toy gun commercial, …show more content…
The commercial conveys this message by the way it starts out with a group of children having fun playing with toy guns, and then it cuts to a lone child playing with the advertised gun labeled as a ‘one man army’. The child is playing by himself with the one OMA gun and ‘defeats’ the enemy by himself. This could imply that the advertisers are trying to transfer the message to children who don’t have any siblings to play with, that they can have fun alone with this toy. Consequently, parents can view this as a toy that doesn’t require multiple players so their children wouldn’t be begging them to let their friends come …show more content…
The use of the way the boys are involved playing with the gun, in a real life scenario where they are fighting in a battle, implies that boys are supposed to grow up and get jobs where they will be using weapons and fighting such as joining the army or going into a law enforcement career. Since the commercial was made in 1964, a time during the Vietnam war, advertising weapons to young boys could be seen as a way the media is trying to influence children to grow up and live their life in a certain way, in this case boys growing up and fighting in the Vietnam