A very popular toy news story lately has been a Floridian woman’s attempts to get Breaking Bad action figures banned from Toys R Us. Apparently the Walter White action figure comes with a small tray of blue meth or something. If you’ve been living under a rock that was underneath an even bigger rock for the past ten years and have managed to never converse with another human and are currently reading this article on a stone tablet because you don’t have the Internet, Breaking Bad was a very popular show about a teacher with cancer who started cooking meth in order to make cash to pay his medical bills. It starred the guy that played Tim Whatley, who was Jerry Seinfeld’s dentist. When he started going all evil and “I’m the king of meth” on everyone, he grew a goatee, following the standard Star Trek/Abed on Community protocol that growing a goatee immediately makes you the evil version of yourself.
And that, I think, is the real issue here. Not blue meth, or meth, or drug dealing, or surprising levels of acting skill, but goatees.
This woman in Florida, a so-called “concerned mother,” might have been wary of fake drugs being pushed in her neighborhood’s friendly Toys ‘R Us, but the real threat here was Walter White’s goatee, and I think she was heading in the right direction with her inflammatory ire.
Think of the last time you saw a morally upstanding character with a goatee. That’s right. You can’t.
Even the one you just thought is probably a no-good dirty bastard when you’re not looking directly at him. At most he’s probably morally shady.
I’m not going to make a list. You can google it if you’re that curious, but you will not find anybody on that Google image search with a goatee that doesn’t have a look in his eye like he will steal the pie off of your windowsill. And he will eat that pie, and guess what? It’s blueberry. And you know what else? That blueberry pie will be all up in his goatee, and he will carry that with him the rest of the day, mocking you and everybody else with the sweet sweet leftover blueberry pie as if to say “yeah, that’s right, I stole your pie, and I can taste it for several hours afterwards because of this luscious goatee, that I grew because Walter White had one on that show.”
Exactly. Morally shady.
Is that the type of toy you want your kid to play with? I know I don’t want my theoretical children that still partially live inside of my testicles playing with a toy that may be morally shady. I want them to be morally unshady. They can wear some sunscreen with an SPF of righteousness if they want their moral center to stay unmelanomaed.
What the hell kind of secret is your chin hiding, after all. A pimple? A mole? A birthmark? A scar? A gun?
That kind of secretive nonsense is exactly what I don’t want to expose my kids to. If I have to, I will make it my business to chase each and every one of you goatee-wearing morally shady ninja-chinned mofos down and give you a wild west style shave with a brush full of foam and a straight razor and a strop.
Yeah, a strop.
If anything, I don’t think this woman — if that is her real name — did as thorough a job as she could have done. I doubt that Mr. Walter White is the only goatee-wearing action figure out there. All these other toys with things on their chin that they have to hide should be stricken from the toy aisles as well, lest they give people the wrong ideas about proper face maintenance. Next thing you know, it’ll be so widespread you’ll be unable to find a morally unshady toy out there. Imagine Stormtroopers with goatees. Imagine Optimus Prime with a goatee. Just think about the horror when little Jane goes to Toys R Us and she finds a Barbie with a goatee, or little Johnny wants to get the latest Marvel Legends action figure from Avengers 2: Age of Ultron and Captain America has a goatee, or even worse, Ultron has a goatee, but it’s made of metal.
This woman was a genius. Sure, it was under the pretense of a toy that came with small, plastic, unsmokeable blue meth, but she was surreptitiously attacking the real problem plaguing the toy aisles, and, if we continue down this ethically umbrellaed path we’re currently heading down, the future of our entire world and way of life as we know it: action figures with goatees.
Because otherwise, this would all be an intensely stupid campaign to get notoriety for a stupid cause that could be handled by three simple little words: hey, kids, drugs suck.
Discuss…unless you have a goatee. If you do, leave it at the door and wipe your feet.
