121: MR. POTATO HEAD — the Toy, the Spud, the Victim

CAUTIONARY TALE

A future Mr. Potato Head sat in the produce bin. Any passer-by could grope or handle him. Easy pickings. (The produce bin is open source.) The shopper brought the potato home where he did creepy things with it, including manipulating repurposed body parts.

AN HISTORIC ASIDE

George Lerner originally came up with the concept of vegetables into which you could apply body parts. Break that down, if you will, and it seems pretty sick. It's a bit of a twisted amalgam of vegetarianism and abuse, so...take a moment...

Many years later Lerner's genius was appreciated when Hasbro went "all in" on the idea of selling plastic body parts for potatoes (POTATO NOT INCLUDED). Thus was birthed Mr. Potato Head.

They sold you the parts, you supplied the head.

On April 30, 1952, Mr. Potato Head made television history, the first commercial to target children, sidestepping their parents. Marketing to children, bypassing their guardians, was as innovative as it was bold. And creepy. As creepy as buying body parts for a vegetable.

And the rest is exploitation-of-children history.

Today, social media targets children, too, which is my segue: on March 25, 2024, Governor Ron DeSantis signed into Florida law a statute that banned minors from having any social media accounts.

GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE

If a demagogue decries many, many things, including books, vaccines, and hormones, he might just get it right--sometimes.

Consider the creepy goings-on in a minor's head, where those young frontal lobes haven't yet finished maturing: some of their so-called "executive" decisions might seem like a good idea at the time.

No adolescent good idea goes unfueled--with the excitement of notoriety, even perceived infamy--by letting AS (Artificial Stupidity) write scripts for those too young to have all their filters; prominently displayed for all of the other frontal lobes to see online.

Mr. Potato Head-thinking--spud-like cluelessness.

The couch potatoes of one generation have passed the body part to the next generation of spuds sitting as easy pickings in the social media produce bin.

CONCLUSION OF THIS (ALLEGED) STORY-OF-THE-DAY

The purchased vegetable became Mr. Potato Head, and the person with his hands in the bin did all kinds of things with body parts.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

For Tuesday, April 30, Day 121 of the Story-a-Day Challenge. Now well into triple digits!

Dedicated to all the couch potatoes out there.

366 WORDS (without A/N)

All pictures are AI-generated, but the produce department is not.

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