The Cool Factor : Forget the fancy talk. Kids can tell you in one word why they like a toy.

In the realm of really cool toydom--which is to say, in a zone far away from parental understanding--chances are that Austen Simonsen is a lot like many American youngsters.

The 7-year-old has a personal relationship with a turtle named Michelangelo. He hates a villain called Shredder and fantasizes about dressing up like a ninja and kicking his father in the kneecap.

He spends a lot of spare time with his Barnyard Commandos--machine gun-toting, pig-faced action figures.

He can save an electronic princess from most any predicament.

He wants, in the worst way, the Super Nintendo video game get-up that features bigger, brighter, better, more lifelike graphics.

He is a boy who knows exactly what toys he wants, researching them by watching television ads, cartoons and movies and by consulting other 7-year-olds.

Austen and youngsters like him are the consumers targeted by toy manufacturers in million-dollar marketing schemes. And they are the group that decides the fiscal fate of toy companies around the globe.

All of which raises the question: Why do Austen and his contemporaries latch onto certain complex video games, mutant hero action figures or specific glamour and baby dolls while ignoring other seemingly valid products?

“Because they’re cool,” he says.

Austen’s father, Allen Simonsen, 39, of Altadena, attempts a more detailed analysis: “He likes the challenge of the video games. And he likes the game to have a purpose--to save the princess or to get out of something. With the Ninja turtle stuff, that’s what the kids talk about. He’s seen the cartoons and the movies. That’s what got him interested in the first place. He feels like he knows the turtles. He knows their personalities. That’s why he likes playing with them so much. They are different, unusual, but he can relate to them.”

That’s largely what succeeding in the toy business has come to: Matching the personalities of mutant turtles, pigs, rats, Toxic Crusaders or Eco-Warriors with those of common, everyday boys. Just as difficult is coming up with a baby doll that does what girls of the ‘90s want: Wet a diaper, cry, grow hair, crawl, sing, tap dance, do the funky chicken.

Most important, industry experts say, toys must both capture and allow children to use their imagination.

Or, as the real experts--kids themselves--say, the coolest toys let them dream up all kinds of fantasies and, as one 7-year-old expert put it, “do whatever I want to do.”

Andrew Plumb, a first-grader who is a neighbor and friend of Austen, lists among his favorite toys a mixed bag of traditional and modern: Legos, Lincoln Logs, Go Fish and Nintendo.

“I like (the video game) Mario 3, because you have to beat the game,” Plumb says. “You have to jump over the bad guy, King Koopa, and you shoot fireballs at him.

“I (also) like building things and then playing with them, like dinosaurs. I like to pretend they’re real. That’s really fun.”

The concept of pretending that ferocious, or in her case beloved, inanimate objects are real has also captivated 6-year-old Sydney Gonzalez, whose family lives in Pasadena.

“I love my dolls,” she says. “I like to pretend they come alive at night.”

Julie Gonzalez says her daughter once read a book about toys coming alive: “In the story, the more the toys were loved, the better chance they had of coming alive. Ever since then, she’s played with her dolls a lot and hoped they’ll eventually come alive, even though deep down she knows. . . .”

Chimes in Sydney: “Well, maybe they will.”

Dreams and creativity aside, according to Ted Schoenhaus, kids today are sophisticated.

“They’re not going to want garbage,” says Schoenhaus, publisher of Toy & Hobby World, a New York-based trade magazine. “If a toy really has play value, it will take off.”

Other toy experts say it’s more complicated.

“For kids to latch on to a toy, it has to be a good product and it has to be fun,” says Jodi Levin, communications director at Toy Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group based in New York. “If parents think it’s a great toy but kids don’t like it, it’s not going anywhere. It has to be marketed properly; it needs advertising, some luck, and it has to have some magic.”

The magic comes, Levin says, when children begin passing information about a certain toy to their friends by word of mouth.

It happened in varying degrees with Cabbage Patch dolls, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, dinosaurs, video games and the Barbie doll.

“I have no idea what makes things go word of mouth,” Levin says. “Sometimes something special happens that you can’t put your finger on.

“Take the Cabbage Patch doll a few years ago. We don’t know why it was so popular. Was it the adoption component? The fact that each doll was unique, each had its own name, each looked a little different?

“They were the same price, same size as many other dolls. I don’t know what it was. The Cabbage Patch still brings in $100 million a year.”

Angela Bourdon, a spokesperson at Toys R Us corporate headquarters in New Jersey, says the phenomenal success of the Cabbage Patch doll taps into the mind of little girls who “love to imitate being a parent. Having a Cabbage Patch was like having a real baby.”

Having a Ninja Turtle, on the other hand, is like having your own hip-talking, semi-scurrilous mutant creature.

The turtles, which burst onto the scene about four years ago in cartoons, movies, collectibles and action figures, put on a full-court consciousness press that many kids embraced. Sales continue strong and, according to Schoenhaus, probably will stay so for at least another year.

“This is a case where the toy got so much attention from advertising and TV programs that the kids really talked about it,” says Dave Stewart, a consumer psychologist at USC. “Kids talked to kids, moms talked to moms and, suddenly, there was an explosion. They couldn’t keep the stuff in the stores.

“That’s how powerful the word-of-mouth effect can be.”

The turtle action figures’ appeal can indeed be traced to what Simonsen hypothesizes: Youngsters--particularly boys--are attracted to the peculiar, even the grotesque.

“Austen thinks the turtles are good guys, but he also likes the fact that they’re not lily-white,” Simonsen says.

“Gross always works with boys,” adds Donna Gibbs of Mattel, which has marketed such wonders as Slime, Monster Flesh and A Bad Case of Worms--a game that enabled kids to throw fake worms on a wall and watch them crawl down.

Or, take weird animals--like mutant turtles--give them sort of with-it, happenin’ personalities, and you’ve got something a boy can identify with.

“Boys like things with which they are familiar,” Stewart says. “They like to fit their toys into an existing story line. It stimulates their imagination. . . . If a strange turtle is suggested to be a hero, they can build around that.”

In other words, children get acquainted with the characters through advertisements, cartoons or movies, then embellish when playing with the action figures.

“With male action figures, a popular licensed character is less of a risk than making an entirely new figure,” Gibbs says. “Boys want a familiar character they already know, like Ninja Turtles, Robin Hood and the figures from ‘Hook,’ Steven Spielberg’s movie.”

Conversely, girls are more willing to engage in unstructured imaginative activity, Stewart says: “They simply make things up as they play.”

The biggest-selling doll of all time, Barbie, purposely has had no specific personality attributed to her by Mattel, Gibbs says, “because she’s whatever any little girl wants her to be. It’s completely up to the girl’s imagination. She’s beautiful, she represents a fantasy world children can escape to. Through the doll, they pretend to be that person. That helps their self-esteem.”

Many children and parents agree. Barbie brings in $800 million annually for Mattel.

Sydney Gonzalez typifies many young girls who spend hours playing with Barbie dolls and their accessories. All told, she has six Barbies and 30 separate packs of outfits, shoes, cars, beach items and houses.

According to Alan Fine, Mattel vice president of marketing services and entertainment, boys and girls generally want toys that allow for a measure of creativity: “They want something that ends with a different result each time they play with it.”

Like other large toy companies, Mattel has a laboratory--Fine calls it a fun center--where children are observed playing with various toys. Typically, he says, kids gravitate toward open-ended products, such as building blocks.

“They may be the same old blocks,” Fine says, “but each time they play with them, it’s different. They can be whatever the kids want them to be.”

Despite the research, Mattel and other manufacturers sometimes launch toys that flop.

For example, Mattel’s Captain Power, an interactive electronic video game, was largely ignored by kids who preferred Nintendo and other more familiar video game systems.

Two years ago, a number of U.S. toy companies expected a run on miniature battery-operated cars and trucks that had previously sold well in Japan.

“They went nowhere in this country,” says Diane Cardinale of the Toy Manufacturers of America. “The cars were fast but didn’t have enough pizazz, not enough of a hook. They went fast, so what?”

Bryan Sutton-Smith, a developmental psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Toys As Culture,” a book published in 1986, says certain toys are big hits with children because they have an unpronounceable allure: “Just like people are susceptible to being interested in people they see on TV, it’s the same with toys. They have charisma. Children go for that.”

Many electronic video games seem to have the right charisma. They have been and continue to be favorites for all the modern-day, high-tech reasons and a few old-fashioned ones as well.

Some children of the ‘90s were weaned on video terminals. Still, their popularity, especially among boys, in part stems from an urge to save the day, to be a hero, to beat the bad guys, to save the princess, Stewart says.

“The visual presentation on the new video games is remarkable,” he says. “It’s exciting stuff that will appeal to kids who are into action toys. But boys in our society are still brought up to be heroes; that’s the norm. If you can put yourself in the place of a hero, that really appeals to boys.”

Indeed, Andrew Plumb can tell you, there are few accomplishments in life that are as rewarding as nailing King Koopa with a few fireballs.

“When he falls into the lava,” he says, “it’s, it’s . . . great.”

Still, according to Stephanie Plumb, Andrew’s mother, even 7-year-old heroes who like grime and slime and wiping out bad guys take a little comfort hanging on to a protective stuffed animal at night. For Andrew, it’s a stuffed panda.

He’s pretty sure it won’t come alive and save him from a life-size King Koopa.

But he’ll keep the bear close, just in case.