I wasn't aware anti-capitalists were deeply invested in Mr. Potato Head. (And I love that I have to have a political conversation about Mr. Potato Head. Please kill me.)
Other than me breaching the subject, the only people I've seen talking about it are right-wing folks on Facebook.
srsly. They're all flipping out on my feed, which is just as bad as anyone who made it an issue of rebranding to start with.
It boils down to the fact that potatoes have no gender anyway, so it was always a marketing fabrication to start with, 70 years ago.
Technically, this would allow them to simply produce one kind of box and it would include a bunch of pieces to reflect a diversity of characters rather than being locked into having to brand each product separately -- Mister, Mrs, whatever. You'd still have all the parts and you can call them whatever you want. Barbie expanded her line to include a more diverse mix than just white blonde leggy chicks, after all. Making it political is just stupid.
And really, if you're viewing the "Potato Family" changes as something useful, wouldn't it be better just to have more equal rights? While maybe in some situations it helps to change the view of a situation (for example, retelling stories with heroes that minority kids can identify with), it sounds to me like this potato head thing was more about simplifying the manufacturing / packaging process and politicizing it is serving no one, really.
What a lot of the backlash comes down to is, "You are taking away something I remember from my nostalgic childhood. It's yet another sign the world is changing in ways where I recognize it less than before. I hate this feeling. Stop it." But it's a plastic potato.
