All I Want for My Birthday is a Cadillac Escalade (and a Kaba Kick!)

Wow, a Cadillac Escalade for kids! This toddler-friendly SUV could be an award-winning toy this year. You see, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has opened the voting for its "Toys Oppressive And Destructive to Young Children Award."*

The TOADY will be given to the toy that best epitomizes... something awful. (So the Escalade Jr. gets points in its disfavor for ecological irresponsibility and mindless consumerism.) Although there are other contestants for the TOADY (link here), my money is on either the Fisher-Price SUV or Hasbro’s repellent Baby Alive (which I wrote about here).

Of course, none of these toys can hold a candle to the Kaba Kick, a plastic gun marketed in Japan a few years back. It was used as a kids' version of Russian-roulette. The barrel was held to a competitor's head and then the trigger was pushed. The gun would then randomly "kick" the unlucky user in the head at unpredictable moments.

* Do you also get annoyed by the selective use of capital letter to make a clever acronym? This should be the TOADTYCA.

“Sniff sniff. I made a stinky!”

Sorry for that blog heading, but that’s a direct quote from Baby Alive Learns to Potty (picture below). Although you’re probably familiar with dolls equipped with facsimiles of working digestive systems, this one’s a wee bit different.

Unlike the posterior posers of the past, Baby Alive is more… alive. First, you can feed her realistic bananas or green beans. Second, Baby Alive will often “hold it” until an unpredictable exit time. The little scamp might make a mess anywhere! Finally, after going, Baby Alive will proudly exclaim about her bathroom accomplishments… just like a real person.

Beavers have a pretty high-fiber diet, so after they eat their food (tree bark), the beaver digests it and then poops out what looks like a gelatin/oatmeal mix. What next? The beaver then eats its poop and digests it a second time. When it comes out this time, it looks like sawdust. Sawdust!

I mention this because the first Baby Alive-ish doll I saw was some decades ago. The problem wasn’t that you fed the baby and it pooped. The problem was that you then saved the doll’s poop, because that was going to be its next meal. While I doubt this process encouraged kids to engage in coprophagy (the eating of one’s own poop), it was an unfortunate process to observe. (A debate over whether dolls like this [whose contemporaries include Potty Patty, Potty Scotty, and the Mommy Real Loving Baby Gotta Go Doll] are in any way educational can be found here.)