Bad Toys

Optimus Prime is Gender Neutral, Arcee is Gender Neutral, Scarlet is Transgender and dating a gay man in a gimp suit (at least in my head canon) and cobra commander is... well he was... “Once a man”.

It seems to me that the right just need something to get angry about. Yeah I guess I'm slow to the party, I mean the right wing are always angry about something. I'd like to say that the latest non controversy was all there was to toys pissing off the goose-steppers, but no. Toys and their brands have always been a hallmark of Right wing outrage and you'll find that the history is a lot older than you think. Now in case you been living under a rock, or sleeping with the spuds in the dirt, Mr. Potato head is now being re branded as potato head. That's it, just the brand. Mr. Potato head is still alive and well, his pronouns are still intact and he is still Mr. Potato head. I mean seriously, we're talking about a plastic toy, based on an asexual, gender neutral vegetable who literally stuffs his face in his butt and the Right Wing are concerned with a never happened in the first place story about him, her... they... oh I dunno I never asked Mr. Potato head ask what their pronouns are. I mean literally both Mr. and Mrs. Potato head are the same shape. They're made out of the same mold people, and you were forking money out for two of the same toys because one had big red lips and the other a mustache... sometimes? Fact of the matter is, Mr. Potato head is still part of the potato head brand. And ITV are literally giving Piers Morgan airtime over this.

But like I said, toys have a long history of outrage and controversy, some real and some not so real., and in this episode of NJ4K we go back in time and follow the ancestors of Potato Head and take a look at some of the most controversial toy related events in recent history.

Computer Engineer Barbie

Well here's a name to get used to on this list. It seems everyone's favorite plastic blond can't get a break. Barbie, feminist icon throughout the ages has had her slip ups from time to time, but a book, published in her name may have forgotten what the girl with up until 2013 already held no less than 126 careers under her belt and what those achievements were supposed to represent. Girl power. I mean how many men do you know with such a resume under their belts? Well it seems the super qualified woman of the century is only good for one thing, "only creating the design ideas" leaving the real work and programming talent to the men. In fact the book presented her as such a ditz that all she contributed on the technical front was after inserting her heart shaped usb drive into the computer was infecting with a virus, which the men had to fix. Yeah it's not exactly a good representation of female strength and versatility for an icon that has represented woman for nearly 60 years, especially in 2013 when this book was published. Still thankfully the internet came to the rescue and re captioned the book making Barbie the actual hero with the hashtag #FemenistHackerBarbie.

Breaking Bad action figures

We all miss Toys R' Us. Even as adults many of us would still venture into the store to find something collectible, pretending buy something for our kids for Christmas when we were really looking for the latest siege of Cyberton Transformers toys. But imagine some parents shock when they found, in the store, The now long deceased Walter White, from the hit show, Breaking Bad, complete with toy crystal meth within their 8 year old's reach. Well so horrified by the toy were visiting parents, a petition went out to remove the toys from the shelf, which was successful, despite the fact that the company insisted they were designed for ages 15 and up. Which is all very well, but doesn't help very much when your commercials on TV are designed to tempt the kids to get their parents to take them there. It seems that the mass market corporation of Toys' R' Us simply had little understanding of the difference between mainstream and specialty when selling toys that had a better place in the local collectors comic store than within the reach of impressionable children. It's a good thing these toys weren't educational, I guess.

Share a smile Becky

Ahhh Mattel. Such an titan of inclusion to the point that if representation presents a problem for them personally, they erase the problem altogether. In 1997, decked in her tiny pink wheelchair and her pink backpack, Becky was introduced to the Barbie word with tremendous fanfare and popularity, selling 6000 toys in under two weeks alone, assuring that Becky would at least remain a mainstay in the Barbie world for at least 20 years. Was it a nice gesture or a selfish marketing ploy in an early example of virtue signaling. Who can say? What we can say is despite her inclusion into the Barbie world, she was very much left out of everything else, including the very epicenter of the Barbie world, the Barbie Dream house, being unable to fit through to doors. Mattel promised to fix the problem, and even though they it took them 20 years to do it, they finally fixed the issue by... canceling the Becky line. That's right folks. Instead of remolding the problem with the house, they literally fired one of their most popular toys in the franchise who just happened to be disabled. But not before considering making her wheelchair smaller to make her fit. That's right folks, according to Mattel if the disabled can't adapt to the world, they'll just cancel you. Smooth, Mattel, real smooth.

Forced Transgender Arcee

You know, it's ironic that the right wing took issue with the picture of Optimus Prime, a literal transforming robot, proudly waving the LGBTQ flag. I mean his motto is literally “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings”, not “Except those I don't happen to agree with on religious grounds”. But that being said, transformers is sadly not without it's controversy with attitudes towards gender. It was a battle alone with Hasbro to include Arcee in the Transformers movie as the company literally believed a female transformer would be pointless for a toyline targeted at boys. But she soon proved the argument wrong, becoming one of popular Transformers in the franchise despite never having got a toy release of her own for 25 years. Simon Furman's approach certainly didn't help in his second attempt to correct a mistake he made in Arcee being the equivalent of virtue signaling in his UK version of her origin. When IDW included Arcee in her own spotlight they literally presented us with an insane psychopath of an Autobot who was driven mad when her original protoform was forced into a gender change in a scientific attempt to include gender into the Transformers genepool. Of course this rendition of Arcee didn't come without it's own controversy, when the creator of the other titular female Transformer, Windblade, Mairghread Scott came out and criticized Furman's approach to the issues of gender. Saying

“In a vacuum, Furman's story is completely legitimate. The idea that someone is fundamentally changed against her will and struggles/rages against that is a really interesting idea… The issues I have with Furman's choice is that we don't exist in a vacuum and the suggestion that 1. women only exist in aberration 2. being a woman is inherently traumatic 3. being a woman has any correlation to mental illness are extremely upsetting. Do I think Furman was trying to make a statement about human women with Arcee's origins? No. In fact, the largest share of blame lies with the tokenization of women in the brand in general."

The actual problem I have with Spotlight Arcee is without mentioning the obvious and perhaps unintentional connotations of the story itself, is it's sad but often overused trope of using violation to make women stronger and more self reliant. The tragedy comes across almost as justified as look at what an effective warrior she's become now as a result of her trauma. It's quite sickening in a way and really something that needs to be addressed on a cultural level, especially if Arcee, a robot of all species, herself fell victim to one of the most abused tropes in fiction.

Virtue Signaling Arcee

Now I don't really think Simon Furman hates women, but I do think he has or had, some misunderstanding as to what women want. But Spotlight wasn't the first time Furman rocked the boat on gender issue with Arcee. But back in 1987 with Issue 234 of the transformers UK comic, Simon Furman wrote “Primes Rib” as yet another origin story explaining Arcee's perceived gender with Optimus Prime trying to appease a group of angry feminists who were quite literally upset that their was no female representation in a race of largely genderless Robots. Admittedly we can only assume that every Transformer sounded male, but that's a huge assumption on our part, if we put the animated series aside. No let's not do that as the animated series did introduce female transformers long before Arcee was even a thing, with Elita One and her band. They even hinted at some romance between Optimus and Elita at the time. So really, Primes Rib comes across as a pointless venture into the Transformers lore. But I digress. Optimus Prime's solution to the gender representation in his race was to literally create woman in the form of Arcee. And even though she manages to prove herself when a group of Decepticons crash the party, the fact that this story was written to appease militant feminism comes across as a poorly thought out joke. I'm sure Simon took the story seriously, but when you think about it none of the other transformers were given solid origin stories, save for a few of the major hitters. So giving Arcee one seemed more like a justification for Simon and male detractors than actual protests from women, who at the time, didn't really care about Transformers in the first place. And quite frankly, no one was laughing. This is why Windblade works so well with the audience, We don't have an actual origin to pinpoint, only they her function as a city speaker holds some unique mystery that is so much more compelling than understanding why she, as a female bot, exists in the first place. Now don't get me wrong, as a Transformer fan myself I have great respect for Furman's contribution to the lore that has made Transformers more than a simple toy line, but in Arcee's case, perhaps it would have been better to just accept, she's a Transformer that looks and sounds feminine, and really when you think about it, any justification for that seems to be superfluous.

If anything, Furman's missteps went someway to fixing the issues of a race of mechanical beings in which Gender was arbitrary rather than genetic or biological, allowing us to look at the relationships they developed in a different light. And whilst I take issue with the comic itself, I do feel it did lead the way to more beautiful approaches to the issue of non-binary-gender and relationships in the transformers universe with the Lost Light series. I mean Cyclonus and Tailgate, who'd not want that pairing. And I now picture Cyclonus with a female voice because, come on, she's a real femme at heart.

Poor Gwen Thompson

Now being Scottish I'm not all that familiar with the American Girl doll, but from what I gather they are a particularly expensive brand of doll selling for as much as 100 dollars a doll. The Brand has it's own store in New York that takes up an entire block and every doll has an intricate history behind it, from the Escaped Slave Doll to the Holocaust survivor doll and bringing awareness to these issues to children in my mind is no bad thing, despite the price tag. But the Doll too far came with Gwen Thompson, who's history sadly involved her father leaving them, her mother losing the house and ending up living in a car. Now the true tragedy with this girl is not only her sad story but sadly more two fold than that. One that adults okay with a line of dolls that tell stories branching from slavery to the holocaust thought that bringing homelessness to the children's eye was just going to far. In particular, rich parents who could afford these dolls for their kids. The second tragedy being that her 95 dollar price tag didn't come with any contribution to charitable organizations designed to combat homelessness and any television news piece I can find on Gwen don't even touch on this tragedy. Poor Gwen sadly not only came with a tragic backstory, but left behind her sad history a legacy of ignorance that really shows the true state of the privileged American and how they chose to ignore the plight of the homeless at the time. Sadly the very same people who if in power in city councils would put money into aggressive architecture designed to make it even more difficult for Gwen and her mother to lay down their head for a good nights sleep. This toy was not so much bad as it was a bad example of the money making adults who exploited her plight to begin with.