A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

I couldn’t help but be thrilled by the recent story of the woman who tried to sue Cap’n Crunch because after 4 years of eating Crunchberries she realized they weren’t real fruit. A judge was forced to write a non-condescending opinion in dismissing the case that sounds like something from The Onion. My favorite line, from the Consumerist write up: “This Court is not aware of, nor has Plaintiff alleged the existence of, any actual fruit referred to as a ‘crunchberry.’”
Simply classic. But what could the mentality of the person who brought the lawsuit be? And how could any being who’s supposedly smart enough to pass a bar exam represent them? There’s apparently a legal precedent from another nutball who tried to sue Toucan Sam because Froot Loops don’t contain any real fruit. You’d think “Froot” would’ve nipped complaints like that in the bud, but you can’t be sure anymore. In a world where most people can’t spell “fruit” they must’ve seen it coming eventually. I knew a guy who didn’t learn how it was spelled until sometime in his forties, and went around pronouncing in “froo-itt” like everybody else in the world was an idiot.
It’s a personal favorite, the naive moron tale. The best may be the story of the numerous people who complained about one of those animatronic dinosaur exhibits at a zoo because the dinosaurs weren’t real. I’m pretty sure that was in Tennessee, but still. And Texas was beset by reports of giant flying pteradactyls after a famous find of a pteradon fossil in the 1970s. Bible belt anti-evolutionists thought they were under siege and mistook every small aircraft they saw for a monster chasing their car.
Anyway, the good Cap’n survived another hit. They took away his Jay Ward commercials, cool little plastic toys in the box, and made him look bad by making every other cereal on the planet “healthier.” They’re even adding fiber to Apple Jacks, the quintessential sugary emptiness for Saturday mornings. But Cap’n Crunch hasn’t given in, and the legal system and America’s morons won’t be the ones to take him down.

One of the great injustices of being born in the mid 1960s, in my mind, is missing out on the whole McDonald’s playland experience. I didn’t even get to go inside a McDonald’s until I was in my teens; we’d have to sit in the car with full ashtrays where you’d have cupholders these days while my mom went in for the food we’d eat in the parking lot. I have no idea why, except that they might have thought of it as a drive in from an even earlier age. But we still had drive-ins around and went to them occasionally so who knows.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m grateful for my vague memories of the original six-limbed Grimace and the talking hamburger-headed public servants that have been replaced for today’s youth with a gay clown that eats raw apple slices. They fried apples into pies in my day. DEEP fried them. Probably in lard.

But when those brightly colored habitrails appeared in every high-traffic McDonald’s and I was far too old for them, I was more than a little ticked. A youth spent on ice-cold metal monkey bars and molten-hot metal slides seemed dismal compared to what was virtually a pre-pubescent wet dream of molded plastic tube-crawling joy. I couldn’t have imagined such a thing outside of a space station, and then, surely, no sooner then the impossibly far-off year 2000. And indoors, out of the elements! With deep-fried pies within sniffing distance!

As it turns out, the only thing that seemed farther off to young me than space stations was having a daughter, but unlike flying cars and cheap sub-orbital travel some things actually come to pass. And just like Walt Disney’s bourbon-fueled Epcot visions of the future taught us, you never really know what tomorrow will bring.

It brought me to a McDonald’s near the park we like to visit with a sunstroke-reducing awning over their equally mind-numbing play fortress with rubber coated parts and a recycled tire rubbery surface beneath it. If nothing else, McDonald’s is usually your bathroom away from home, just because they always keep the place clean and have all the amenities. You learn to appreciate this kind of thing even more with a baby, because a clean place to change a diaper is like striking gold.

I should say they usually keep the place in order, because this particular McDonald’s, even in a nice area with gated communities, a thriving shopping center, and the nicest park in town across the street, was pretty screwed up. The bathroom was disorderly, and worse didn’t have a changing table on the wall. So I headed back out with the wet squirrelly two-year-old, and noticed that there’s a “family” bathroom inside the biodome that encloses one of the biggest playlands I’ve ever seen (the supposed largest anywhere is in the touristy section of Orlando). So we trekked back in and around, but this one has a padlock on the door for some reason, so back out again.

By this point the 2-year-old has taken extreme interest in the giant series of tubes (not the Internet) and there’s no going to the park until she gets a shot at them. So after a blazing hot diaper change in the car, the nice air-conditioned McDonald’s sounded like a nice place to spend her exercise time and get something to eat.

The clues should have been adding up by now that this wasn’t the choicest franchise going. I noticed that one guy who’d been waiting for his food during our first quest for a bathroom was still waiting, along with a small throng at the lunchtime rush. There was no real line, but it took nearly 20 minutes to get our order with a near-frantic two-year-old urging me over to the playland area.

But finally it came, so we headed to a table in the playland. Another bad sign going in was the door propped open with a chair, which didn’t make sense, until I realized that the giant biodome was actually a greenhouse with 2000 square feet of southern-facing glass and no air conditioning. The open door was slight relief so we sat next to it. Or, rather, I sat, because the little one had no interest in food and beelined straight into the tubes and disappeared.

My kid is pretty fearless and will climb anything. She might ask for help getting down, but doesn’t flip out or cry and scream. And of course, a few minutes into the habitrail she started calling for help. A few other older kids were going in and out of the tubes, so I thought she’d follow one of them out, but no luck, so I had to go poke my head in. She was at the top of the first tube, a slight ramp with little rubber grips for steps, that seemed pretty tame, but she wouldn’t come down. I thought she might be claustrophobic or something, so with no real options I headed up the ramp to get her.

Of course I barely fit, and it’s about 120 degrees and smells like melted polyurethane inside these things. None of this would have bothered me when I was five, but now it’s pretty uncomfortable and hard on the knees. A little coaxing got the kid out, though, and I brought her back to the table to her fruit salad. She’s cured of all tube aspirations, for now, if not forever, I figured. But of course not; she bolted up the ramp again like it was the greatest thing ever. Well, she sees how to get down now, I thought, so resigned myself to eating my hamburger and waiting her out.

The next thing I heard was “Help, Daddy,” from above me, and I looked up to see her peering down from a plastic bubble 20 feet in the air. Oh, great. There’s no way I’m climbing all the way up there, so she’s going to have to figure it out. She disappeared from the bubble but the “help” cries moved all over the top level, not panicky or scared, just like “hey come and get me.”

The older kids went in and out some more, duly reporting to me which section of the tubing she was in and repeatedly letting me know she was stuck. Their parents or grandparents were wise to the fact that this side room was a sauna and ate in the actual restaurant, so I was the only adult in there. One grandmother did come in to get her grandson and noted that “she doesn’t seem very scared, at least.” Thanks grandma. None of the kids were willing to give her a hand getting down, so as soon as the room cleared out and I finished my food I realized that I had to climb up there.

I went past the little sign that said “Ages 3 and up” and “No shoes—socks only” (the 2-year-old was in sandals) so I figured we’d already broken a couple of rules and the lackadaisical management wouldn’t bother me even if they noticed. I was soaking from sweat a few feet into the middle level, and still had to twist around a few turns to get to the last bubble I saw her in. Thankfully, she came back to the top of the ladder on the second level so my trip wasn’t as long as it could’ve been. She just didn’t like coming down the ramps alone, so a little coaxing and a cramped u-turn and we were on our way out.

No shift manager was waiting outside the last tube for us so I packed up our stuff and held on to the kid as tightly as I could because she was gung ho to climb back up the thing again. A quick sneak out the side door and by the time I had her strapped in the car seat she’d forgotten about it, and was back on some crazy demand for Dora the Explorer fruit snacks that she rejected as soon as we got out of the grocery store.

Ah, fatherhood.

The good Cap’n looks delighted to harpoon a jolly, effeminate white whale, who in turn looks delighted to send the crew of the SS Guppy to their watery graves.

While pretty bizarre, at least Captain Crunch used to have a cast of characters and go out on wacky adventures, looking for Crunch Berries or fending off his own megomaniacal nemesis Jean LaFoote. These days he rescues snotty boys and girls from overly-strict authority figures and takes them off on a hyperactive sugar-orgy abaord his ship, which conveniently, kids, is as eerily empty as the Mary Celeste and probably on a windward course for international waters.

To further confuse kids, here’s the corporate website, playing on mom’s fears of poor nutrition for her children. The crazed Cap’n gets a token nod, but otherwise they ignore the fact that they’re pitching their fortified sugar-concoction to kids as a fortified sugar-concoction and pretend it’s health food.

Then there’s the “part of a good breakfast” pitch which has gone on since the dawn of sugar cereals. Basically it comes down to the fact that you need everything else they show on that bountiful spread on the side of the box– the toast, orange juice, milk in the bowl and on the side, and sometimes even bacon, eggs, or grapefruit– to get any actual nutrition in your breakfast.

When I was a kid, cereal for breakfast was IT in the morning. And that’s what the milk was for, cereal, and you couldn’t drink it any other time. My brother, always more willing to test the folks more than I, actually tried laying out the whole breakfast shebang like they suggested one time, and the @#$% never hit the fan any harder than that. “Milk to drink!” my mother mocked when she came across the abomination on the kitchen table. “There’s milk in the goddamm cereal!” She was apoplectic over the extra milk part, mainly, but there was also the ever-puzzling “Whadda think I buy juice for, for it to get drank?” routine thrown in for good measure. And it meant extra dishes, that was probably a sore point too.

I always wanted to live on that boat with Cap’n Crunch.

The cereal image via The Southern Florida Sun Sentinel, via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, via Neatorama.

The 2-year-old is at that magic window where she’s old enough to recognize and idolize characters from TV, but young enough to believe they’re real. And that’s even if we run into a 6-foot tall felt costumed version who can’t talk to her at a theme park or store opening.
We spent a week at a Sesame Street themed resort earlier this year, where her sense of awe and wonder at Elmo and Cookie Monster looked like it might send her into a state of shock. Dora and Boots here are her current favorites so the reaction was even loopier, ellicting a heart-felt “I love you” to each character as we left and leaving a sweaty minimum-wage employee to wonder how we were raising our kid.
Notice the sign behind Dora, proclaiming K-mart your hurricane safety headquarters and urging shoppers to stock up on supplies. You’d think they could distance the kids from that by a few feet. But only in Florida is the usual seasonal aisle in every store dedicated to hurricane supplies instead of, what, July 4th/picnic stuff we’d see up north right now. The entire state is filled with fireworks and pool toys year round anyway so they had to come up with some scare-mongering to drum up business come summer…

Link: http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/06/astro-boy-made-from-recycled-train-tickets/

It’s Astro Boy made from used train tickets in somewhere in Japan. Link
I should make something like this from the 2-year-old’s discarded string-cheese wrappers or something…