Potato Head, Ambiguous Holes, Poles, And The End Of All Things
The overreaction to an unremarkable branding decision
We play a weekly game where some company or institution makes some unremarkable decision and a reactionary corner of the internet turns it into some cataclysmic, western civilization ending event. Before I can even google to find the truth, a portion of the country already believes this is just one more step towards the end times. And so we had one entertaining week about Hasbro’s decision about Mr. Potato head and his gender. Full disclosure: I haven’t thought about Mr. Potato head’s genitals in years, but I always just assumed that his prominent nose served multiple functions.
The logic works something like this: The politically correct have run amok and demand we never differentiate between holes and poles and after that, we all get turned into some amorphous amoeba because we no longer have the language to tell the difference. All of this because Hasbro decided to market their toy as Potato Head instead of Mr. Potato Head. It’s a butterfly effect. Remove the gender identity of a toy, and halfway around the world a western civilization collapses. Life requires some perspective and if it drizzles in San Diego and a man decides to grow a beard and start building an ark in his front yard, we would rightfully say he’s lost the plot.
Not so long ago I came across a set of images where the lights and billboards in Times Square were removed. Times Square without the lights and billboards was a drab and sullen cityscape indistinguishable from any urban center in America. This image set was used as an example of status quo bias, and how we accept Times Square as it looks now and appreciate how it attracts people from all over the world to visit, but if those weren’t already there and it was proposed to add them, people would reject it. Status quo bias explains the Potato Head gender controversy. When the toy was first introduced in 1952, it was only Mr. Potato head. A year later, Mrs. Potato Head was added, followed by their two kids. Even though there were now four Potato Heads, two of which were not a Mr. Potato Head, the company continued to brand the entire collection as Mr. Potato Head.
Branding the toy as Mr. Potato Head was an inaccurate portrayal of the toy. Not to mention that by design, the Potato Head has no gender to begin with and is only determined by the accessories one adds. You can put any body part in any hole so let’s not act like anatomy or identity is of any real concern when you can create some chernobyl grown potato humanoid out of the various parts. Status quo and identity is another thing to consider entirely.
If the goal of Hasbro were to create a wide variety of Potato Heads to represent a wider variety of identity groups, why would that be bad? We tend to not think of the nuclear family as an identity that is catered to, but it has been at the center of American marketing for generations. This is another example of status quo bias and the reaction to that status quo changing. Not long ago, there were no gay characters on television and that wasn’t because gay people didn’t exist before 1990. Hasbro isn’t even doing any of this. All the male and female accessories are still being sold. The only thing that is changing is the brand name that accurately describes the toys as the “Potato Heads” instead of “Mr. Potato Head.”
Status quo is an ever evolving idea where people will rail against the billboards and bright lights for being put up, only to accept it as the norm a year later. You can continue to turn every light drizzle into a biblical flood, or accept it as the minor change in the status quo that it is. There is an entire doomsday brand that is forever looking for the canary in the coal mine of western civilization. They dig deep and misread almost every event as cataclysmic because they are zealots and grifters who either don’t understand or are too interested in lining their pockets. They keep going deeper and searching for that canary, telling everyone they don’t want us to suffocate. In that desperate search for more signs of imminent suffocation, they will asphyxiate themselves.