Laying the Foundations, Pt. 3

Whether it's Nike's swoosh logo or McDonald's golden arches, Apple's iPhone or Heinz ketchup, corporate and product brands capture the attention of (and in/directly engage) nearly everyone on a daily basis. Modern branding was born in the mid- to late 19c, maturing in parallel with a middle class all too eager to spend its leisure time and money, but it's the nearly seventy years since 1945 that chart our current relationship with companies via brand recognition, brand identification, brand loyalty, etc. Indeed, the proliferation of technical terms for how we interact with brands is itself a sign of their intimate role in our contemporary lives.

As I noted in a recent post, TSR Hobbies, Inc., first began to exhibit its own brand self-awareness during the period from mid-1975 to mid-1977 -- moving to a slicker trade dress for its products, launching a hobby-wide magazine (The Dragon), adopting a pictocentric logo (the D&D lizard man). The culmination of that process, however, would be nearly a decade in coming, and perhaps inevitably, it was a process that would both reflect and reconfigure the company's identity and implied values as well as re/define its employees, customers, and critics. So many changes had occurred by the end of 1985, in fact, that TSR constituted an entirely different brand.

Because B/X D&D was on the market during the years just prior to those changes' culmination, it's worth keeping their trajectory in mind. Not every individual development did or could impact the Basic D&D line, but each and every one of them reflects the TSR brand's destination, one that was fast approaching even as the 1981 rules continued to sit on store shelves.

• Adventure modules went through two redesigns between 1978 and 1983, eventually settling on a more modern logo and cover presentation. The innards were likewise adapted to a more rigid "customer-friendly" template -- heavy reliance on boxed text (to be read aloud by the DM) is perhaps the most widely recognized of those interior changes.

• In mid-1983 BD&D underwent a mass-market retooling under the auspices of Frank Mentzer, accompanied by Larry Elmore artwork. BECMI became the "gold standard" for the non-Advanced D&D line, and while many of its rules were either identical to or only slightly modified from the 1981 edition, its sensibility is much more mainstream and consumer (i.e. pre-teen and teen) friendly.

• AD&D's hardcover rulebooks were likewise updated, beginning with 1983's Monster Manual II. All previous releases, with the exception of Fiend Folio, were reprinted to match. (Deities & Demigods was renamed Legends & Lore to forestall criticism from conservative critics, clergy, and parents.) The orange spines and sleeker artwork of Jeff Easley remain visual hallmarks of those versions, at least for my generation.

• TSR had always published games other than D&D, but a cadre of RPGs occupied the company's shelves by 1985. Gangbusters 1e (1982), Star Frontiers 1e (1982), and Gamma World 2e (1983) joined Top Secret 2e (1980), Boot Hill 2e (1979), AD&D, and BECMI. Not to mention the licensed properties that routinely made their way into TSR's catalog -- Marvel Comics' superheroes (1984), Conan (1984) and (later, in 1986) Red Sonja, Indiana Jones (1984), and Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar (1985) all put in appearances.

• The much-loved Dungeons & Dragons Saturday-morning cartoon ran for three seasons between 1983 and 1985, capitalizing on the game's growing popularity and vaulting it into the mainstream in a way no other RPG property has ever managed. And whether due to Gen-X nostalgia or their quality of production (or both), they remain highly popular, easily besting D&D's more recent adventures in live-action Hollywood.