The Left Is Cancelling Dr Seuss

[CJD]

(03-04-2021, 02:43 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: The cynic in me doubts the sincerity in pretty much every single move like this (when a company/organization acts on their own or first).

Take the Mr. Potato news a week or so ago.  For those that don't know, the parent company of Mr. Potato Head decided to change the name of the line to "Potato Head", which I still think consists of a Mr. and Mrs. (and some others???).  

I forget the stated reason for this by it was probably in the name of inclusion or something their marketing and PR department's came up with.  This got SO much traction in the news.

Did anyone call for this?  (I don't know and frankly, I don't care)  But I think we can assume their wasn't a mob of people outside of Hasboro's headquarters, or there weren''t more than a few hundred weirdos on Twitter leading the charge.

So why did they do it?  Why did they "cave".  Well the answer is, they didn't cave.  This was all a coordinated stunt.

On any given day, how many people are engaging in Mr. Potato Head talk?  How many are considering buying one?  (I don't know, maybe a few hundred????)

Well, guess what?  With Mr. Potato entering into identity politics in one single day the name "Mr. Potato Head" was uttered in millions of households.  A charater I honestly kinda forgot even existed was on numerous websites, and talked about on numerous shows.  Mr. Potato Head just got millions of dollars of free advertisement, and was the talk of the town (you can't buy this amount of attention)

Long story short, Mr. Potato Head changing to Potato Head was a smart business move, and it was most likely intentionally made with that in mind, not being more inclusive.

I kinda feel the same way here.  Dr. Seuss was on a bunch of best seller lists yesterday.  The timing of this, along with his birthday, seems like great marketing.   Is it cyncical of me to realize that more money is being made here, and that might drive these decision more than removing "problematic" material?

And Brad's point isn't entitely lost on me. Not at all.  Regardless of who actually did the cancelling, or what drove the decision, I don't think you can argue this all getting a little ridiculous.

From Mark Twain to Dr. Seuss, to the Sound of Music, to the Muppets (yes, the Muppets), this seems now seems neverending.  I even saw something the other day that some movie channel (TCM???) was going to run a marathon of movies that feature "problematic" material and they were going to have a segment before each one to discuss it.  

One of those movies was Psycho.  Why?  Because Norman Bates is dressed up as his mother later in the movie and this makes trans people seem unstable (I'm paraphrasing).  Forget the fact that Bates isn't trans at all it's mentioned he has borderline personality disorder.

Anways, I'll just wrap up here....  I don't think any of these companies do anything that doesn't result in their best interest.  And too many people get caught up in the sides of it, while they laugh all the way to the bank.

PS How in the hell has the Toxic Avenger not been cancelled?  It today's political climate, simply viewing should probably result in some calls for prison time.  You wanna talk about offensive (and hliarious)???  

Here's the thing about stunts like the potato head thing.

The right getting outraged over it is literally why companies do it.

IF the right just ignored that, as they should, companies would stop doing it.

Because outrage generates clicks. And the left, who would otherwise probably not care at all about a corporate marketing stunt, now have to say calling a toy potato "potato head" rather than "Mr. Potato Head" is not something worth getting outraged over.

Then the right gets outrages that they're "Being silenced" and the cycle repeats.

And these potato toys, something I haven't even given a single thought to outside of the Toy Story Series in nearly 20 years, are now suddenly getting weeks worth of attention.

In short: Outrage culture is invented by the right because they have no actual policies to talk about (their entire CPAC was just meaningless virtue signaling towards "cancel culture," whatever the hell that is), and companies are steering into it HARD because they know they'll get signal boosted for weeks just by doing a simple, meaningless gesture of "hey guys, I'm not racist."

If the right just didn't fall for it every single time, the corporations who stand to profit from free marketing would stop doing it.