SpongeBob- Now With Extra Vitamin C!
Awww, just look at the expression on SpongeBob’s body face whatever that is! Those big blue puppy eyes, how they look up imploringly from the box, begging your child to eat something nutritious! Pretty please with a prize on top?
SpongeBob not only appears on nectarine boxes, but also on boxes of apples, pears, and cherries.
“My goal is to have every fruit a kid would want to eat with a Nickelodeon character,” says Sherice Torres, licensing vice president at Nickelodeon. Well Sherice, we all have to have goals in life, now don’t we? Except I’m not sure that the motives of Nickelodeon are simply to ensure that kids eat healthy foods.
Unless that means they might live longer, and thus would be around longer to buy even more stuff! Now it all makes sense.
And by the time the generation this product is marketed to reaches a certain age, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see SpongeBob Depends.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Eww. There’s something about seeing the words “sponge” and “Depends” in the same sentence…*shudder*. Haha.
I’m going to go on the record and say that although this kind of stuff usually drives me crazy, I think I’m OK with it. Why, you may ask? Because when Maya was of the age to care about this stuff, only CRAP came with characters on it. So while she was perfectly happy to eat plain cheerios for breakfast, she still BEGGED for cereal with her favorite character on the front. She didn’t even know or care what that cereal might taste like, just wanted the character. Wanted to go to McDonalds for Happy Meals, because she loved the toys. Don’t scold me, I didn’t give in, and she got over it. But gosh, it might have been nice to have some compromise in order…”No, we’re not going to buy the Spongebob cereal, because it has so much sugar in it that your head will turn into a propeller and spin right off of your body if you eat it…but, I’ll tell you what, I’ll buy some Spongebob nectarines instead, OK? We can slice them up and put them into your Cheerios.”
I don’t think that’s all bad.
What? Like there’s something wrong with Frankenberry or sumpin! Jeez!
I just wish there were less packaging. Maybe they could put a sign on that row of the school vending machine with Spongebob’s smiling visage, telling you to eat more fruit or something. But no, you just somehow know they’re charging the Pomelo Marketing Board a buck fifty per dozen to use his face on their boxes, each of which is thrown away immediately afterwards.
Liz- But they go together so perfectly!
J- I hear what you are saying, but I still don’t like all the advertising that is shoved in our faces everywhere we turn around. It’s like visual pollution.
Rain- It does seem that somehow the cost would get passed on to the consumer.