Friday, June 20, 2008

Wall-E takes over my Two-Year Old and what it can do for the environment


So, there's a new robot movie coming out...for kids...and humorous enough for adults...don't know if you've heard or not...it's called...Wall-E?? Looks like R.O.B from Nintendo and Number 5 from Short Circut? Cute? Inescapably addictive to young children? That's the one!

Disney-Pixar is the reason for my daughter's current infatuation with, a robot. She's not screaming for a Roomba, she's completely disinterested in the Scooba, I'm not I'd love to have both. For that matter, she could care less about our Robosapian, Roboreptile, mini-sapian thing, or the other -Sapian my son has lurking in his bedroom. All it took was clever marketing, snazzy graphics, and a cute voice/catchphrase, and done, you've got the youth market in a tizzy over robots again.

My daughter is just a hair shy of becoming three and can already do a dead ringer impression of Wall-E. If it was up to her, he'd move in with us tomorrow. We've already purchased the plate and couldn't make it through the store without constant cries of, "There's Wall-E!!", "There he is!!", "Can we get it?! MOM!!". She's two and a marketer's dream, and I know this. It's unavoidable somehow. All she's seen is the teasers like everyone's else with a TV. With the two robots, one say's "Wall-E" in it's cute robo-voice and there's some "At Last" and Wall-E in robo-love and a bra on his eyes. Somehow, that's all it took to make a two-year old fall in love with a robot. Doesn't matter if he's cold steel or if the movie's no good, which I doubt since it's Disney-Pixar, but that's the point I think. It doesn't matter, she's sold, hand's down and so is her brother who's nine.

There are a lot of big topics out there that we want to communicate to children about. Imagine if Disney-Pixar made Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth into a kids version...I'd be planting trees and walking everywhere. And buying a LOT of eco-friendly materials I would imagine. I can see the kids marketing now and product placement with Subway, because they serve healthier fast food that's moreso eco-friendly than the other fast foods. All it takes is clever marketing, snazzy graphics, and a cute voice/catchphrase, and done, you've got the youth market on track to save the environment with ferver.

It just makes me wonder, what else?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good post.

"I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it.'" -- Harry Nilsson