rdfs:comment
| - The Power Trio's answer to the Five-Token Band. As with most of Tokenkind, group members typically exhibit absolutely no personality--at least, when they're in a commercial. Which they usually are. If you want to sell a product like, say, Lucky Captain Rabbit King Nuggets to kids, you put kids in the commercials. That's basic demographic appeal. But you can't cast just any kids-- you want three, all implied to be friends, and for a mix of reasons-- political correctness, as well as representing the largest target demographics in the Western world with a minimum of actual effort --you choose:
|
abstract
| - The Power Trio's answer to the Five-Token Band. As with most of Tokenkind, group members typically exhibit absolutely no personality--at least, when they're in a commercial. Which they usually are. If you want to sell a product like, say, Lucky Captain Rabbit King Nuggets to kids, you put kids in the commercials. That's basic demographic appeal. But you can't cast just any kids-- you want three, all implied to be friends, and for a mix of reasons-- political correctness, as well as representing the largest target demographics in the Western world with a minimum of actual effort --you choose:
* a white male
* a black male, or other visible minority
* a white female (increasingly often a female of yet another minority as to go two for two) The end result manages to combine Token Minority and The Smurfette Principle: the Token Trio. Implicit in all cases is that the white male is the de facto head of the Three Amigos--at the least, he'll play a more prominent visual or verbal role in the commercial. Only on rare occasion will the girl be recognizably a third race, such as Asian. And the black one naturally will be not very black. Even outside of advertising, this is an incredibly frequent attribute of the Three Amigos, where the white guy's status as The Hero is essentially guaranteed. Larger variety is Five-Token Band. The Scott Westerfeld novel So Yesterday termed this phenomenon the 'Missing Black Woman Formation,' or MBWF. Examples of Token Trio include:
|