Michael, I beg to differ. I am talking about a junk culture glut several orders of magnitude more than what is there now for Tolkiana. Perhaps you are too involved in Tolkien fandom to appreciate what I mean. For me, I read LOTR several times in the period 1973 - 1979. I read Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales several times in the period 1977 - 1980. After that, I lost interest in fiction of any kind, and didn't think about Tolkien for almost twenty years. In that time, apart from noticing the HoME books once in a while in bookstores, I never saw a Tolkien toy, never met or heard of anyone named after a Tolkien character, never saw a Tolkien bumper sticker, never saw a Tolkien poster or tee-shirt, or a game, and never talked to anyone in twenty years where the subject of Tolkien ever came up!And I live in the Boston (USA) area, not some cultural backwater. So whatever Tolkien merchandising existed never created the slightest cultural wave in me or in any one I knew. It was and is so far below the cultural radar that it basically doesn't exist. Compare this to the attention and merchandising devoted to a million other things in those twenty years, including all those blockbuster movies, TV shows, rock stars, etc. , and you can see my point: We ain't seen nothing yet!
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