Kiddie P0rnogr@phy

You'll have to pardon the extraneous characters in the word above. They will appear throughout the post in an effort to ward off evil Google searches.

Sonshine has been utterly obsessed with this Hot Wheels movie we rented for him. He watches it all the time and flies into a rage if (God forbid) his sister might want to watch something else or Mom might want to turn it off. The movie contains no objectionable content, of course, but something about it was bothering me, so I thought about it for a while and it came to me. The movie is like p0rnogr@phy, but for kids-- the music is cheesy because nobody's really going to pay any attention to it anyway; and what little plot there is, is merely a flimsy excuse for yet another sequence full of action. And it is the action, really, that is the entire point of the film. It has to be-- there's precious little else in it.

I have a particular dislike for merchandising flicks like Yu-Gi-Oh, which exist solely as infomercials for their products. But this Hot Wheels one is different-- there's quite a bit of product promotion, of course, but what really chaps me is that the film uses a fantasy to create a constant need for action, a dependency on it, that will hopefully be channeled into the activities the film promotes. In that respect it's exactly like p0rn0gr@phy, even though it has no sexy images. Hot Wheels' creators hope that kids' interests will be channeled into buying more and more Hot Wheels products, while porn0gr@phy channels adults' interest into more and more extreme sex.

Maybe I am overreacting, but I sure don't like the change this film has wrought in Sonshine. Since the day he first watched it, he has been extra aggressive. Today he actually drew blood on one of Princess' friends. I don't know about anyone else, but I am creeped out by this Hot Wheels film. I don't want my son (or any kid) to think that he has a need for increasingly extreme action, or that buying products will satisfy his new need.