>>7957771I feel like I’m more bothered that these exist than I should be.
Not because they’re toys about poop marketed towards kids—that’s been a recent revitalized trend, and gross-out toys like garbage pail kids and wacky packages existed for years before we got the likes of the poop emoji, and poopeez, and those potty training unicorns, and the whole unicorns pooping rainbows thing on “geek culture” merchandise.
What bothers me is how little it seems like the company making them had their shit together (sorry, bad pun)—here we have pop culture figurines, all made from identical molds, all based on existing characters but exempt from copyright licenses...which poop slime, which is sold in mock packaging that ALSO avoids copyright and directly mimics collectable gross-out stickers; and all of the individual characters and foods have feces-based puns, but the product LINE is called “Hangrees”...because someone thought that “hangry” was a hip new phrase which means you have to poop, I guess? And the only commercial I’ve seen for them doesn’t even touch on any of that, it’s just some generic Ninja Turtle figurine wiggling around in half-assed stop motion and picking up one of the food packages—it doesn’t eat or poop the slime, and doesn’t have any indicator that it’s “hangry” either.
It’s like the people who came up with the concept lost control of the project within seconds of pitching it, and both the executives who greenlit it and the marketing team advertising it were all on completely different pages, yet they were cocky enough to roll something out with minimal research or effort, just knowing that they can ride a wave of freshly printed money based on stolen ideas from more popular and better-executed lines, because consumers have shown that they can and will buy things like this, either just because it’s there or because customers start advertising for them by meming it into a product that sells ironically.
