It’s not enough these days to simply have Harry Potter books, movies and merchandise. They have to be cross-bred with Lego so there’s Harry Potter Lego and then they get in bed with Nintendo so there can be a Harry Potter Lego Wii game. It’s like one big cross-promotional orgy.
And then there are the “brand extensions” where marketing people push brands in new (and often unexpected) directions.
Just the other day, when we were stuck in a Canberra motel with nothing but the Disney Channel for the kids to watch, we saw an ad for My Little Pony Mermaids. Yes, My Little Pony Mermaids. Apparently (according to the ad) whenever the My Little Ponies visit the sea, they magically turn into beautiful mermaids – or rather, pony mermaids. I mean, I was still getting over the Barbie film The Pixie made me watch, where the Barbie character found out she was half-human half-mermaid. What that actually meant in reproductive terms was disturbing enough, but a stallion getting it on with a trout’? That’s more ‘sick-as-fuck’ than “magical”, people.
“Who comes up with this sh…” I started to say, but then I saw the look of wonder on my daughter’s face. It was like that commercial had spoken directly to her soul.
“…imply fantashtic shtuff!” I concluded, brightly.
“Oh, I want a My Little Pony Mermaid Castle for my birthday, Mama,” The Pixie said. “Oh, please can I have one. Please??”
So I did what any parent would do. And no, I didn’t refuse to buy it. That’s what an ‘ethical’ or perhaps even ‘sane’ parent would do. Instead, I delegated the purchase of said My Little Pony Mermaid Castle to my father.
A few days later, my dad rang me from Target. He sounded in shock. A seasoned-father of three daughters, there was nothing in his nearly 40 years of parenting that had prepared him for the My Little Pony Mermaid range.
“There’s a My Little Mermaid Pony dolphin carriage here,” he said. “But no castle…”
Of course, there is a My Little Pony Dolphin Carriage, I thought to myself. Because if a mermaid pony wanted to get around under the sea, they’d totally make the dolphins their bitches rather than do any actual swimming themselves. You know it makes sense.
I considered for a moment letting him off the hook and telling him to get her the dolphin carriage but I knew, in my heart of hearts, that it was the My Little Pony Mermaid Castle she wanted.
Sure enough, a few days later, my decision to bully my father into searching until he’d found the castle was vindicated. After her party, I asked The Pixie if she’d liked the presents she’d received.
“They’re great!” she said, and then her bottom lip started to tremble. “But I’m a little sad because… because… I didn’t get the present of my dreams!”
And she burst into tears.
“Nobody gave me the My Little Mermaid Pony Castle!” she wailed. “And… and… nobody gave me the Dora Mermaid that [Baby C] got for Christmas!”
Dora the Mermaid Explorer? Oh. My. Sweet. Fuck. Is there no end to this madness?
Apparently not.
Just waiting for Lego to come to the party...
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Darling Pixie: Happy 6th Birthday for yesterday. Remember, your mummy loves you so much that she bought you a Dora The Mermaid Explorer (after she worked out that it wasn’t a talking or singing toy, that is. Small mercies, people. SMALL MERCIES.)
Not Drowning, Mothering. 
So scarily true.
And at the risk of sounding like a miserable old grumpy old woman, what the fuck happened to being happy with a bucket of Playdough or a new packet of textas? (In my day all I got was a cotton reel with 4 nails hammered in the top…….not really, but you get my drift.)
I am at the mercy of the Leapster SpongeBob Diego casette gaming thingo. Fuck, I am lost in a world of 5 year old tat.
I know, I know! I had a lump of coal and an empty beer bottle… The hours of fun I had putting that bit of coal in the beer bottle and then emptying it out again…
Oh my lord! How horrifying! – If it weren’t 7.25 am I would pour myself a stiff drink! Save me from mermaid madness!
However, a very Happy birthday to your little mermaid! Congratulations to all!
Alcohol certainly helps ease the pain of a Dora The Mermaid Explorer Nintendo DS game. But only for so long, my dear Diva. Only for so long…
i am lucky that at this stage he just wants Iggle Piggle, and even luckier that as he doens’t talk using words yet, i can pretend i have no idea what it is he wants – surely he was asking for the ethically produced wooden puzzle when he was pointing at the In The Night Garden range….
One small word changes all that, my friend. And that word is “NO” – repeated again and again (and again). That usually gets their message across…
Can you check whether I can use the saying ‘I didn’t get the present of my dreams” to Mr Woog at Christmas time?
Well, I’m certainly planning to use that phrase on my own 40th birthday – once I’ve worked out what the “present of my dreams” actually is.
So, did The Pixie get the My Little Pony Mermaid Castle??? I need closure!
Yes, yes, she did. It makes noises. Loud noises. There is no volume control. And one of the Pony Mermaids, disturbingly, has wings. I mean, what good are wings under water???
We need photos – I wanna see the orgy; mermaids, dolphins, super mario, trout, my little ponies, luke skywalker, iggle piggle, bananas in pyjamas …. I wanna see em all
But especially those mermaid my little ponies
Oh, you. You need to see it all.
Here is a sneak preview of the My Little Pony Mermaid Castle:
http://www.hasbro.com/play/details.cfm?guid=ED78B480-19B9-F369-10D2-2F8920666654&src=endeca
Dear Pixie,
Very happy birthday from one (50something) mermaid girl to another. Yes NDM, did your dad who is capable of so much, find that castle? That image made me smile.
He did find it. And he spent a small fortune posting it to us. He’s a good, good man. He may never be the same again, though…
Happy Birthday Pixie!
I refuse to allow Dora stuff inside my house – Amy gets to watch it at her grandmother’s house, because that’s what grandparents are for.
However, with Xmas coming up, I’m wondering if I can get away with giving the kids string and glitter, because sheesh, they’ve got enough toys!
Wow. With string and glitter, you could make “glittery string”. Fantastic. Wait until Hasbro gets hold of that little nugget and next we’ll have “My Little Knit-Your-Own Glittery String Ponies”.
I’d like to see star wars my little ponies. You could have a darth vader little pony (complete with wrinkled pale pony underface when the helmet comes off). And a Princess Leia little pony (with an added stash of coke). And just imagine a chewbacca little pony….it would make the strangest, deepest neighing sounds. Instead of lightsabres they could have green and red coloured horns – making them star wars-unicorn-my-little ponies and then if you really wanted to cross-over they could be transformer-star-wars-my-little-ponies where there hooves turn into gunships and their little legs into jet fighter wings. Okay, I’ll stop now. Got a bit carried away.
You have now unleashed the idea into the universe and when I see the mutant Star Wars Transformer My Little Pony range on the shelves just before Christmas, I will think of you.
They will probably be on the shelf next to the mutant Justin Bieber Barbie, which is almost as traumatic a concept as working out how those My Little Ponies became mermaids in the first place.
I wanted to click ‘like’ on Susan@reading upside-down’s comment but then I remembered this isn’t Facebook. There’s so much mutating and transforming going on these days that a Justin Beiber My Little Pony now seems entirely *conceivable*.
Somebody’s already several steps ahead of you all.
And now Lady Gaga seems to positioning herself as a kind of Hire-A-Wookie.
It’s the fever talking…
All I can say is thank God we have moved on from Dora’s “Hola *gurgle gurgle*” madness in the Waffler house. But I’ll hide this post from Petal. Just. Incase.
Smart move, Waffler. Smart move, indeed.
When I first saw your tweet stating that your post was about “half-horse, half-fish things”, I thought of the Newcastle University crest, which features (and I quote) ‘a mythical seahorse’ which is indeed half-horse and half-fish.
(http://www.newcastle.edu.au/mpr/branding/the-universitys-crest-and-emblem.html)
Obviously My Little Pony has just tapped into some preschool version of the mythical seahorse. I imagine it progresses through a vampire tween/teen version before finally settling into the form used for the university logo.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure that it’s all that reassuring for a university to be using a mythical creature in their crest. What does that say about their ability to think rationally and foster true scientific thought? Hmmm. From now on, I shall use this as my excuse for never having finished my degree at Newcastle Uni. 🙂
I always thought there was something fishy about Newcastle University – and not just because the only time I ever heard my father swear was when he was playing tennis on the university tennis courts.
Now I know there was only something half-fishy about it.
Oh, Dora the Mermaid! Such happy memories. My kids’ cousins had a DtM that was one of their bath toys, among all the little boats and cups. When we went to stay while the cousins were out of town, my girls adored it. Well, of course the baby chose to do an explosive poo in the bath. Now all your classic buckets and other little floaty hollow plastic things are pretty easy to clean, but try giving Dora the Mermaid a full shampoo and set to get all the slimy baby sh*t out of her hair. Yes – I am scarred.
Tasty!
I think if I had to share a bath with DtM, I’d be tempted to do the same…
If you come across a Zhu-Zhu mermaid or a Bakugan mermaid, we’ll know the world is truly at an end. I’ve got pirates sailing the high seas in my washing basket over here. Any Pony-Mermaid abominations would be immediately put to the sword. I’m okay with that.
Not sure what attraction pony mermaids would have for sailor folk, any way. I mean, they don’t even have big breasts to recommend them.
I totally know what you mean.
I seriously feel a bit gang raped by the Hasbro (My Little Pony makers) and Nickelodeon.
Hasbro? Grrrr….. Hasbro is also responsible for Transformer toys (which have also been trans-mutated with Star Wars). Sometimes those robots are so much in disguise that even a person with a higher degree in Transformer Transformation can’t restore them to their full Robot Glory.
Since our boys don’t watch TV, they don’t ask for this garbage all the time. But since all their little mates seem to spend every waking non-kindy hour glued to the box, I’m wondering what abominations they _will_ start asking for, based on the secondhand knowledge they pick up around the crayon box.
The older one already thinks he’s Spiderman – without really knowing what Spiderman is (apart from, alramingly, someone who kills baddies by punching random people in the face). He’s seen friends wearing spiderman constumes, so he knows he’s blue and red, and he knows he shoots webs from his wrists, but as far as physiognomy goes I suspect he’s had to draw on his own research in our garden – which makes me shudder when I think of some of the specimens I’ve seen hanging from the foliage.
All of this leads me to fear that when one day he does finally get a lifelike all-action Spiderman figure he’s going to be terribly disappointed that he doesn’t have eight legs, twelve bulging eyes, and slavering Mandibles of Death (with realistic slaver).
Part of me wants to know what’s inside that head. Another part of me really, really, REALLY doesn’t.
NDM, the line about mermaid ponies “making dolphins their bitches” literally made me LOL. Well, more of an unladylike snort, really, but you get the gist.
I have 9yo twin sons who ask for all the latest Wii-Star Wars-Lego-Harry Potter-Bakugan-Pokemon-pirate combinations, but who – thankfully – are also appreciative of items for creative play. When they were about 3, we gave them a box full of envelopes that we’d saved from the mail, because they loved playing with envelopes. They would put them on their head as hats, folded them into paper planes (well, asked me to fold them into paper planes), drew on them, peeked through the windows, etc. They were stoked to get a whole box of them! Another year we went and got a heap of empty flat pack boxes from the local furniture store, and they loved that, too. 🙂
But the Wii Harry Potter Lego game is still top of the Christmas wish list this year…. *sigh* I wonder if they’d settle for a box with all the leftover craft odds and ends that I don’t want any more, instead?
This was freaking hilarious…but intensely disturbing at the same time! My kids are still young enough not to know about all this stuff…yet. I’ve seen all the branded Lego etc though and sometimes for life of me can’t actually locate the NORMAL plain Lego. Scary, scary stuff.
Shimply fantashtic! You had me in stitches there 🙂
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Yeah, a bakugan (spelling?) mated with a My Little Pony mermaid would go down well here. No Dora though. We are too old for Doras, even Doras with wings. We would also like a Pokemon Pony … could someone please come up with something that has across board appeal, while still being impossible to find, and fiendishly expensive, as we are used to?