I liked The Mandalorian, the Star Wars series that Disney used to push their Disney+ streaming service. But I don’t like the monster it created.
That monster is the baby-fication of pop culture. The big-eyed, adorable children of popular characters. It was first, with the creature known as “The Child” in the show’s lore and “Baby Yoda” to everyone else. It was genuinely cute, and immediately sympathetic creature with its great big eyes and tiny stature. It ate frogs and played with toys. The world was in love.
The rest of the world went “we need more babies.”
Of course, with the time needed to design these babies, we probably haven’t reached the apex. The Baby Sonic, part of the upcoming movie based on Sonic the Hedgehog, was probably in the works long before Yoda, given that movie’s troubled production history. But babies are coming, and they won’t be stopping.
The trend has already reached its nadir, thanks to the “Baby Nut,” the attempt to revive Planters’ Mr. Peanut brand through the most ill conceived ad campaign I’ve seen in a long time.
We will never see the full campaign that Planters’ ad agency cooked up, largely because the real world intruded into their plans to make people mourn the death of a fictional character. We know how the entire thing started, with the death of Mr. Peanut, their long-standing mascot. He died by falling to his death and then exploding, which was a bit hard to play for laughs given that Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash soon after.
The ending of this very stupid campaign came with the Super Bowl, the biggest event in advertising. Planters showed Mr. Peanut’s funeral, where the tears of the Kool-Aid Man caused a tree to sprout and a baby version of Mr. Peanut to be born, and make dolphin noises for reasons that are unclear.
He follows the Baby Yoda template with a tiny body and giant eyes. This template has been known for decades, confirmed by scientific experiments to appeal to all of our instincts to protect children. It’s hard to deny that this baby is cute.
But it’s also terrible. Not just because they called it “Baby Nut,” which is very close to being an extremely rude turn of phrase. But, instead, because it’s pretty clearly hopping on a trend. Someone saw Baby Yoda, and saw recent Avengers movies where popular characters died, and they had a brainwave. Maybe this is a way for people to care about our character? A one-two punch of death and babies, harnessing pop culture trends in a very cynical way.
Hopefully Planters’ gambit fails – I know I’m not buying any peanuts today – but the real lesson here is that we have to prepare ourselves. Babies are coming, and they’re going to be everywhere. By the end of this all, we’re going to be so sick of babies that the birth rate will decline dramatically. That’s a wild prediction, but I’m also not looking forward to seeing what other babies are getting cooked up as we speak.
