Everybody did; that was the point of the toy, or so we thought. I don’t get the modern toy at all: you stick a few bits in predetermined spots on a plastic blob…and then what?
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well, if it were up to me and my brother, when we were bored kids growing up in rural central texas, Ol’ Spudhead met the BB gun firing squad or got a Black Cat suppository and BOOM.
we liked to blow shit up. prob’ly why we couldn’t have nice things.
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Or worse, the “Mom cooked my friend and served it to me for dinner” problem.
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That photo. Potato Head looks surprised.
Potatoes reproduce both through seeds produced by self-pollinating flowers and via clone cuttings. So they are simultaneously asexual and hermaphroditic?
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Luxury. We had to supply our own potato and make features out of anything we found lying around the yard. Then that was our dinner.
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You got to play with the potato?
Luxury!
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They’re not limiting the potential market, they’re doubling the number of potential markets. By marketing a gender binary of potatoes at kids, parents feel obliged to buy one for each gender of their kids. When the toy first came out, parents were fine buying one per household and having their kids share.
God knows what horrors would be unleashed on the world should a boy have fun dressing up a lady spud.
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Not Spuds For Work
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The toy market is largely driven by getting folks to buy the exact same toy more than once by releasing it with different sets of accessories (see: Malibu Stacy’s new hat). In many cases that appears to be the only reason toys are gendered; why go to the trouble of making a nerf gun or a frisbee in gendered colorways, unless it pays for itself by making parents buy one of each?
It’s especially obnoxious in the case of Mr Potato Head because the whole point of that toy is to play with outward expression. I can’t imagine there’s any kid, regardless of gender, who wouldn’t prefer to have all the variously gendered features in the same box.
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Now I want to see a Silent Hill and Potato Head crossover. Thanks, Rob.
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What exacty are the wingnuts raving about? Do they want anatomically-correct potato toys for their children to play with? You don’t suppose they’re trying to draw attention away from the whole attacked-the-Capitol and Jewish-space-lasers insanity, do you?
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For languages that assign a gender to nouns (e.g., die/das for German) what gender do they assign potatoes?
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Die Kartoffel.
La Pomme De Terre
Mr. Potato Head is a trans man, and Hasbro has been secretly advocating a transgender agenda for 70 years.
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There’s still a set called Mr and a set called Mrs. It’s just that the overall brand is being renamed, so that Mrs isn’t sold under a Mr brand.
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The real three genders:
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