For seventy years, Mr. Potato Head has been whatever you wanted him to be, but that’s not going to work anymore. The #woke folk have convinced several ‘someones’ up or down the corporate food-chain that the brand needs a makeover. They are neutering the spud.
Related: Quaker Oats Should have Replaced Aunt Jemima with ‘Uncle’ George
Hasbro is converting him into a gender-neutral potato head.
“Culture has evolved,” Kimberly Boyd, Hasbro’s senior vice president of global brands, told Fast Company. “Kids want to be able to represent their own experiences. The way the brand currently exists — with the ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ — is limiting when it comes to both gender identity and family structure.”
So, Mystery Potato Head?
“While we’re renaming the MR. POTATO HEAD brand to POTATO HEAD to better reflect the full line, the iconic MR. and MRS. POTATO HEAD characters aren’t going anywhere and will remain MR. AND MRS. POTATO HEAD. The new product we announced today, CREATE YOUR POTATO HEAD FAMILY, is a kit that includes enough potatoes and accessories for kids to create all types of families,” Hasbro said in a statement.
The plastic potato in the box was always on the spectrum of imagination. Only recently have people begun to openly confuse themselves with the toy. Docs and governments got on board to embrace the chemical or surgical alteration kids the way kids could change up the plastic potato.
Thankfully, being a toy of color, we won’t have to worry about people insisting the thing is a systemic expression of white supremacy.
Cultural Appropriation could be a different story, but it has been on the shelves for 70 years and I have yet to hear of any #woke Irish complaining about famine-related PTSD because of the potato toy.
Maybe we need to give that a little more time.