He also worked on play sets and vehicles for the Star Wars toys, getting to preview concept art and story outlines ahead of the actual film. According to Burnett, George Lucas had rigid expectations for the toys and remained very hands-on in his oversight (“Lucas was super picky”). There was also a back-and-forth, in which the Kenner designers made suggestions to the filmmakers about what kind of movie content would sell more toys.

“We were looking for ways to have more characters, to add more playsets and troop carriers,” Burnett says. “Our idea was the more you needed characters to fill up a set, the more characters you would buy. At some point we even started suggesting vehicles for Lucas to put into the movie, because it would sell more toys.”

A Care B…er, I mean, an Ewok. (Photo courtesy of 12back.com)

Before long, this shift towards an inverted process between the toy companies and the filmmakers became a slope that grew slippery very fast in the face of just how lucrative the Star Wars toy phenomenon had become.

“The best example of this was Care Bears,” Burnett explains candidly, “which was a movie [in 1985] and then Kenner made all of the stuffed animals. But we had invented that whole thing. We wrote the script, and then we had it animated by the cheapest animation shop in Korea. It was all just a giant commercial to sell teddy bears.”

The Care Bears strategy was so successful that they soon moved on to Strawberry Shortcake. Unsurprisingly, other toy companies emulated the approach. In fact, a critical survey of the iconic toys and their corresponding TV shows from the 1980's—Transformers, G.I. Joe, Masters of the Universe—suggests that this kind of strategy had become status quo within the industry, quite a long way from Play-Doh and the Spirograph.

None of this was lost on Burnett, who had a front row seat to watch it happen: “At that point, I thought, ‘Now wait a minute, we’re just manipulating kids here.’ It’s one thing if it’s a real story and then you make the characters, but if we’re making the movies just to sell the characters to the kids, that’s kinda…kinda evil.”

Overall, Burnett’s time at Kenner was short. After a few years, he returned to Stanford for graduate school and settled down in California for the long run.

The final film of the original Star Wars trilogy—Return of the Jedi—produced record breaking sales for Kenner, and featured the very Care Bear-like Ewoks for major portions of the movie.