Last week, the Hasbro toy company announced some, well, let’s just call it ‘interesting’ news surrounding one of its most well-known figures for close to 70 years.
It seems as if Mr. Potato Head has gone ‘gender neutral’, at least in name.
The company reported on February 25 that it was dropping the ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ prefixes from the brand in an effort to make sure that “all feel welcome in the Potato Head world.” Yes, that last part is an actual statement that was put out in the world. Later that day, Hasbro clarified that while the husband-and-wife spuds will still exist, the branding on the boxes will simply say, “Potato Head”.
The change was part of a launch that included a new "Create Your Potato Head Family" kit with two potato parents and a potato baby. The video announcing the kit said it was for "modern families" and featured a variety of family makeups, including with same-sex potato parents.
Hasbro says this apparent update to the Potato Head family is all about promoting gender equality and inclusion, per a statement on their website.
I’ve honestly been trying to wrap my head around this in the last few days.
I’m all for equality and inclusion because my parents raised me right and taught me respect and acceptance of my fellow human beings, but a plastic potato? Really? And you’ll have to correct me if I’m wrong here because Jack and Lynda didn’t buy my brothers and I anyone from the Potato Head family (we played with real potatoes before we ate them), but isn’t the whole selling point of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head the fact that you can already change their appearance and features in the first place? You can take off the guy’s mustache and hat, switch them out with the girl’s accessories and BOOM, he’s either a teenage boy or a girl, right? And vice versa with the lovely Mrs. PH? Take an easy-erase marker and add your own flair to either tater? So, in that regard, didn’t Hasbro kind of have it right all along with this toy line?
We’re in the middle of a viral pandemic that has gripped the globe, gripped North America, gripped our country, gripped our province, and gripped our very community and neighborhoods. It’s killed hundreds of thousands of people and will continue to do so in the months ahead, but not before it’ll have crippled more families and friendships with its divisive elements, and it’s changed the very way we’ll probably always look at the world.
It’s cool, though – we’ve fixed the Potato Head family.
We’re dealing with fractured times from a political perspective as many people on both the Canadian and American sides of the fence don’t feel represented from those who hold top office. Lost jobs, lost wages, and a lack of support for initiatives that might correct those things are at the forefront of many peoples’ minds who call both countries home. All of this on top of that viral pandemic I just mentioned.
It’s cool, though – we’ve fixed the Potato Head family.
People living on First Nations reserves in this country don’t have access to clean drinking water, essentially a basic human right.
It’s cool, though – we’ve fixed the Potato Head family.
Public shootings and all manner of racism-fueled hate crimes continue to permeate our society with no end in sight.
It’s cool, though – we’ve fixed the Potato Head family.
The truth that Hasbro’s public relations team seems to deflect from is the fact that Mr. or Mrs. Potato Head could always be whatever you wanted them to be; man, woman, boy, girl, or whatever you desired. But apparently, it’s those pesky prefixes of Mr. and Mrs. that needed correcting in this day and age we live in, where we apparently have so much time on our hands that we need to retro-actively “fix” things to suit the up-and-coming generations of human beings.
It’s not just toys, either. Our lovely “millennial media” types on social media (a crime to call them actual journalists, in my view) have so much free time that they will actually do deep scans of old TV sitcoms to point out jokes that apparently would scorch the planet if they were uttered in today’s “Careful or We’ll Cancel You” climate. Phew, I don’t know about you, friends, but I’m sure glad I’m safe from old one-liners from ‘Friends’ and ‘Frasier’, both shows having gone off the air back in 2004 when I was still in high school.
I’m not coming at this from some harsh right-wing angle and crying, “GIVE ME NORMAL POTATO TOYS OR GIVE ME DEATH!!!”. Hasbro has every right to do whatever they want with their product line. I just have to question this bizarre priority we seem to have where every teeny tiny thing needs to be sanitized, remodeled and bubble-wrapped in order to be accepted. I get what Hasbro is doing, but it also hurts the back of my head from my eyeballs rolling back so hard.
But it’s okay, because now we all feel welcome in the Potato Head world.
Oh, and in the interest of all this blank-slate neutrality that the world wants to promote in the interest of inclusion and diversity, I should point out one more thing that hasn’t been mentioned at all:
Potatoes, be they plastic or real, have never had genitals.
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
