aw naw blippy.
according to legend, recently my mother Thorax was shopping with my slightly-less-recently-turned-six-years-old niece Violin and pointed out this display, then Violin said something like “i don’t like Blippi anymore.” Thorax responded “well maybe it is something for littler kids” and then Violin said “NO, it’s for ALL kids.” However neither turns out to be true, for the boxes here all say
“Not for children under 3 years.” You are either meant to blatantly ignore the safety guidelines associated with this screeching preaching hyperactew or encourage children old enough to know better to partake of his offerings.
I first became aware of blipson 1-3 years ago at a time when Violin was perhaps just entering the target range of these toys and fortunately either they weren’t available or we simply had not come across any. Unfortunately his videos were in ample supply and I had my fill surprisingly quickly, even beside a child who watched the utterly braindead and marketer-approved “baby shark” on a loop. blippo is extraordinarily annoying and creepy. He tries to put forth an “educational” image but it is fake. Even these boxes say “collect them all,” which is a fundamentally uneducational thing to encourage anybody to do at any age.
It seems that many adults also think he was/is creepy but cannot articulate why. I can. I just never had a justification to until he appeared in real space that I potentially have access to. He is creepy because he is phony and gross. Even before I knew he was a shill for mass-produced landfill filler I thought that, though that helps me put it better in perspective. That guy looks like he smells like human fecal matter and apple juice. Largely due to the combination of neon plastic clothes like kids wore in the early 1990s but the full grown man body and the fact that he is never ever fully shaven and his mouth never fully closed. he looks like a mentally disabled adult. which isn’t a crime but I was in special education, as a student, for a long time, and this guy reminds me of some of the more tragic cases, except it’s totally deliberate. including the attire like a parent chose and applied it, the ugly hat that looks like a helmet and worst of all the facial hair. That cartoon drawing of him makes sure to color in the place where his beardling is in a slightly darker color. Not a real beard, just light annoying hair so that he looks dirty. it reminds me of when somebody uses scissors to cut the tag off of blankets or cushions instead of removing the stitching, so there is always tag residue and it is worse than the full tag being there because I KNOW it is there but it can hide. I don’t want to worry about Blippy hiding in my bed when I stay at a motel.
The writer of that other piece annoyed by blippi concedes “He’s wholesome” but he isn’t! He is bad. He’s even named after the sound of swear words being covered up on broadcast television. In actual video blechhi is loud and obnoxious, and again it is totally deliberate and calculated. I think hating something for being deliberately annoying is valid. Even if an annoying thing has ostensibly educational goals. It is not socially educational. Nobody should aspire to act how he acts. And the guy is maybe educational about one tenth of the time, and just being a noisy jackass the rest of the time. The contradictions are maddening. He is childlike but built like some creep who got drunk at your house and passed out on your couch. he is exuberant and innocent yet condescending if you have soda in your house. He is utterly amasculine, but with that ugly forced mini-beard like he is a stock photo of a “rebel entrepreneur,” while dressed and talking like
Tony Barbieri, writer of ‘Monroe,’ Mad Magazine’s worst recurring feature, portraying Jake Byrd, one of Jimmy Kimmel’s numerous worst recurring features. Who is also unforgivably annoying but fortunately not marketed at toddlers and thus never going to get into the toy section of a department store.
I had to delete the email that I forwarded to myself with the store photograph in it just because seeing his sleaze makes me so uncomfortable. I mean blippy’s sleaze, not byrd’s, but byrd would also have to go in the mercifully improbable same situation. And then I avoided looking at the picture between then and today, and realized I initially misread, at small size on my mobile machine, the command “let’s roll” as “let’s pop,” and prepared some statements about why “let’s pop” is a stupid thing to say and now I can’t even use that*, and I think that also counts as a valid reason to not like blipli. Certainly it is better for his case that he isn’t commanding children to pop with him, but I don’t want him commanding children to do anything with him. I’m not saying I think he is a sexual predator, but I would only be about 5% surprised if he was. But I also am never surprised when anybody who gets rich off of youtube videos turns out to be one of those or a neo-nazi, and it seems like they all eventually do.
Isn’t it fundamentally un-wholesome of me to encourage such a strong rejection of someone, especially an ostensibly educational persona, based on how they look and sound? Not if the rejectee is only pretending to look and sound that way. blippi is deliberate, blippi is an act, by an actor, and I have every right to disapprove of that act simply on the basis of its outward appearance. And as noted he’s also selling toys designed to look like him now.
Say what you must about Michael Jackson, but dressing like a clown, having a ferris wheel at his house, having a life-size cardboard cutout of Peter Pan in his bed room, that wasn’t an act, that was real, and everybody could see it, and they STILL let their kids sleep next to him. It is bizarre now that youtube actors in a sense emulate some of Jackson’s weirdness on purpose and they still get encouraged for it.
*
what does “let’s pop!” mean? surely this is not encouraging children to overinflate themselves, but I don’t know what else it might mean in this context. it reminds me of when TNN The Nashville Network realized Nashville, Tennessee, after which it was named and at whose residents it was aimed, was just one place that people in most other places didn’t care about and rebranded itself “the national network” and used the slogan “we’ve got pop!” and it failed because that is stupid and meaningless and STILL didn’t make anyone forget that the N really meant Nashville, then they turned into Spike TV because spikes are always marketable. Someone in chicago was once murdered for popping, I know that much. So at least start with the ringleader.
actually I am glad I can’t use that, as it is fairly lame and poorly realized, and as much as it’s blippi’s fault I can’t use it, it’s also blippi’s fault I wrote it.
I KNOW it isn’t my fault! Just tell me WHAT went wrong instead of whimpering at me.
1930s technology is apparently more reliable. I would rather my niece watched old Popeye cartoons than Blippi; these are more realistic depictions of actions and consequences. None of those shallow twenty first century values of phony smiling fake-kindness, conflict avoidance and ultra polished blemish free cowering-from-controversy garbage
You know what, I’m busy, I have to get ready to not have thanksgiving.
I actually wrote about these cartoons over a year ago but since they are apparently rightfully unpopular they never came into my business again after the first time and I forgot they existed and didn’t finish.
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The sugar method/the scramble game sez:
I had never heard of Blippi before reading this. I’m still rather skeptical that such a person exists. What’s more, while and immediately after reading this, I could not help but repeatedly mentally replay the Flipper theme song, only substituting “Blippi” for “Flipper”. Nevertheless, it strikes me as extremely unlikely that, even in the implausible event that a being such as Blippi to were to indeed exist, they would also “live in a world full of wonder”, and the above images do little to dissuade me from this position.
ZoomZoom sez:
If you are interested in disturbing images of Blippi (which is most images fyi) they are readily available on his website. They help show you what is wrong with him like he’s riding a John Deere thing and can’t grab the steering wheel because he is making T-rex arms. Either way they are under “Offline Videos” and they are expensive.
Frimpinheap sez:
aren’t tractor things a major source of home-based maiming and death? Maybe he will get himself killed soon enough and I won’t have to fantasize about it in my mouse-over text.
I would never confuse blippi with flipper due in large part to the “no one you see is smarter than he” line. Although numerous look-alikes were used to portray the singular Flipper and I hate to think of there being multiple blippis with the same appearance and lack of skills. If we can get even one blippi out from in front of the cameras to in front of the riding lawn mowers we will have done the world a service.
pindohodo sez:
This Blippi person is indeed hard to look at, but so is that Popeye revamp! Of course, this is “Popeye for kids” which is a totally different audience than his earlier cartoons, right? And boy oh boy, they did a good job of taking the Popeye characters’ simple yet appealing designs and change it into something that’s simple and awkwardly ugly. I never realized how much Popeye needed his knobby elbows for visually balancing his giant forearms until I saw this redesign! And I have no idea why someone thought he needed a blond cowlick sticking out from under his hat. Or maybe this is the adult form of his child from the “Popeye and Son” show?
Frimpinheap sez:
everything about it is ill-conceived, obnoxious and cynical. My position is: if you think proper Popeye is not “for kids,” then just don’t show Popeye to kids. They aren’t lacking for stupid garbage to look at. If you fundamentally change it to be something else, even stuff that can’t even be remotely claimed as offensive, such as Popeye being middle-aged or older and Bluto having a beard, then it isn’t Popeye. It’s something else that can’t stand on its own and thus has no reason to exist. I probably could have gone ahead and stuffed what I wrote about it in here but I would then also need to describe it and find additional pictures of it, and also the gushing idiotic text used to promote it a few different places that describes the changes and why they are such a great idea.
Your idea linking it to another bad Popeye cartoon is in fact a superior premise.
Prescription Pudding Pinged With:
[…] the page owner) to realize that he is missing a beard. How is a BEARD offensive? I realize I said blippi’s beard was offensive to ME but first of all it isn’t a real beard and presumably he has the […]