All There In The Manual / Toys

• Toylines in general are like this. At best, packaging has a blurb about the story and a quick bio giving the rundown on the character. At worst, there's nothing in or on the box explaining the world the characters live in. Some may have a TV or movie tie-in (if they're not based on one in the first place), but other than that when they say it's All There In The Manual, they mean it's All There In The Manual.
  • Exaggerated with American Girls Collection where each Historical/BeForever or Girl of the Year doll comes with a book depicting the characters' backstories, with an entire series sold separately plus spinoff books (originally equal amounts for everyone, but in the past two decades, the more popular characters have gotten more). After all, it's what series creator Pleasant Rowland intended anyway as she marketed them with an educational aspect compared to its contemporaries back in the Eighties.
• For BIONICLE - besides the fact that the toys are some of those have no story material included at all - the main story has to focus on current toy sets, so information on other characters and general world-building can be the domain of supplemental guidebooks and web-published side stories (and occasionally Word of God).
• Thanks to Mixels having its toyline and shorts appearing concurrent with each other, and because the shorts are heavily situation-based, rather than character-based, the product description bios help shine more light on the personalities of the characters, including elements that are hardly, or even never, shown in the show, such as Krader's short fuse or Shuff's clumsiness.

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