With Teen People and Cosmo Girl on the racks, cinemas full of American Pie-like romps and Britney Spears on seemingly every channel, it can feel like teenagers have taken over the world. But it was not always thus.

‘Teens as we know it are an invention of the 20th century. If you look around you today, we are inundated with teen culture: teen magazines, teen shows, movies aimed at teens. This hasn’t come out of a vacuum, it’s been built up,’ says Primitive Entertainment’s Tom Perlmutter of his Documart presentation Teen Invasion.

It is this build-up that Toronto-based Perlmutter is aiming to chronicle in his four-part series. The first episode will cover the ‘invention’ of teens and the first products created in recognition of their marketing power. Subsequent episodes will move through the decades from the explosion of teen power in the 1950s – and the division between the clean teen and the scarier juvenile delinquent – to the political power of teens in the ’60s and ’70s, and finally up to the end of the century.

Perlmutter plans for the four-part series to look at some personal stories from ‘both the people who create this culture and the people who lived through it.’

‘We want to do a history that takes us to the ’90s, that explains in an interesting way how we came to be so dominated by teen culture,’ he says.

And teens are still a powerful force, even more so since the definition of teen seems to have expanded to include younger brothers and sisters.

‘Now it’s shifted, it’s even younger,’ says Perlmutter. ‘We are looking at attempts to commercialize tweens [nine- to 12-year-olds], to create and see them as the market. I think it’s stronger now than in the past in terms of the kind of range of products out there and everything aimed at teens.

‘It’s so tied up with global consumer culture and how that’s spread around the world.’

And the teenager has always been an economic unit.

‘One of things interesting about all this is how quickly [teenagers] began to be seen as a market with great spending power,’ says Perlmutter. ‘One of the things that created the teen culture was quite a lucrative publishing industry of teen books – the Hardy Boys mysteries were created by one man using lots of different pseudonyms who had a publishing syndicate and created a whole teen culture single-handed.’ The same man was also behind Nancy Drew mysteries and other franchises such as the Bobsey Twins and the Rover Boys — characters in books that at 50 cents each were within the reach of most teens.

‘The question is, ‘Is it an authentic culture or one that’s been taken over by the marketing machine? And I don’t have an answer to that.’ *