The Energon Pub

An article on the entertainment section at TheStar.com has appeared about The Federal Trade Commission and guidelines for Marketing towards young children. The article states that the FTC is naming the Michael Bay Transformers movie as the focus of their complaint.

According to the star, the Federal Trade Commission is urging the Motion Picture Association of America to reconsider their guidelines that allow some PG-13 movies in the United States to be marketed towards young children. The issue was taken notice by the FTC after a complaint from an advocacy group that claimed that the movie was advertised towards childeren as young as two years of age. This conclusion was drawn after commercials for the movie was aired during kids shows like Fairly Odd Parents and Jimmy Neutron.

Read the full article here.

Cannot say I am surprised.

Advocacy groups seem to hold a lot of sway. Crazy people always do.

well at least Hasbro should listen. that was stupid on their part marketing all those TFTMs with their fragile parts and Automorph at 5 year olds...how do they expect those toys to last at their hands?

but well, business is business...

I would agree that there is a discrepancy between the targeted audience of the PG-13 movie, and the target audience of the toy lines.

I also remember being a kid and I knowing a movie probably wasn't any good unless it was rated PG-13 or higher.

You could also argue that the "kiddie-advertisements" are actually for the older Transformers-fans who have small children of their own! And Primus-knows there are alot of them. Responsible parents would be watching television WITH their children anyways. And Hasbro knows that fans who are parents want to endulge their own kids into Transformers, no matter their age.

Our tax dollars hard at work...

[/Sarcasm]

People are always going to find something to complain about, this is just anothe one of those things

May I say this was expected? oh I said it already and some else did, at a point you have to realized what youngest kids are watching and even when I have a Autobot tatoo sign on my shoulder, some things shouldn't be addressed after certain age

So can we assume Animated is a preemtive strike on these people?

1. These advocacy groups are usually made up of the same busy body soccer moms who think it’s a good ideal to basically raise their children like veal calfs and banning tag at schools is good.

2. Just because they advertised during shows that may have 2 year olds watching doesn’t means that said two year olds are going to even want to see Transformers.

3. If said two year olds want to see it then its their parents decision if they will take them to see it or if its inappropriate for them, not some advocacy group.

It's REALLY hard to take this seriously while Ronald McDonald is selling toddlers heart disease and diabetes...

PRIORITIES GODDAMNIT!!!!

As much as I love Transformers and the movie, I can't say I disagree. My 5 year old loves Transformers too, but we will only let him watch parts of the movie. Much of the content is geared towards teens and adults, not 5 year olds. I felt pretty awkward when he asked what was so funny about Sam's happy time. Then again, we are actually responsible parents who prefer to be in charge over what our children see and don't see. I want to be the judge, not some consumer advocacy group.

It seems the toys were designed for an older age group too, seeing how fragile some of them are.

Abilor wrote:It's REALLY hard to take this seriously while Ronald McDonald is selling toddlers heart disease and diabetes...

PRIORITIES GODDAMNIT!!!!

That's McHeart Disease and McDiabetes !

Yeah priorities!

Transformers the movie was geared towards 2 year olds ? this is actually an old story dating back at least 5 months now but what two year old understands all of what they would be seeing in that movie anyway ?
I saw the movie five times in the theater and not anyone under the age of 15 was ever present that I noticed.

This is BS and it's the parents job to do exactly that, PARENT your kids and stop blaming everything on tv,music,movies and so on.
Just because an ad appears on a childrens show doesn't mean only two or three year olds are watching especially a show like transformers where even the current animated version is geared towards a younger audience and a lot of the people here have watched it and gee I'm guessing most people here are not two years old!
Parents, do your bloody jobs and quit making excuses, the tv set is not an instant baby sitter for your kids!

Sigh. The cartoons kids watch these days can be just as bad. The parent doesn't have to take the kid to see the movie anyway.

Hasbro is no different than Marlboro. Gotta hook'em when they're young.

This seems that several movies have done this during this past year, not this one. It is unfortunate that some advertisements get leaked into shows that are geared towards young children. Also, there are movies that developed toys for those movies. In all of the movies that are related PG-13, I have seen many young children aged at 2 or 3 years old with their parents.

Nemesis_Apoc wrote:Hasbro is no different than Marlboro. Gotta hook'em when they're young.

Except Hasbro's products won't leave kids with a plastic ring in their throats.....er.....wait a minute......

Honestly, Just because they are tied into a movie, you can't forget what they are: toys....children's toys at that. So Bumblebee in the movie peed on a guy....dosen't mean any of the BB toys have a squirt gun feature lodged into the crotch.

My 3-year-old son has several of the kiddy-marketed TF toys, & I have no problem with that. Without the movie's adult content to back them up, they're nothing but hunks of plastic.

& IIRC, that's the whole reasoning for why Hasbro ever marketed them towards kiddies in the first place: so that younger kids wouldn't have to miss out on the Transformers movie characters just because the movie was out of their age range......not to cause them to want to watch the movie so much as fill the void for the ones that couldn't watch it. it's kinda a nice gesture. Besides, you don't see people getting pissy about the Spider-man & Friends toys & merchandise, even though the Spider-man movies are PG-13.

2? No, that's absolutely ridiculous.

The rest of it? I completely agree.

It was a movie aimed at teens and adults (i.e. collectors, old school fans) and it definitely wasn't kid material.

1.) Violent. (Excessive considering the source material.)
2.) Foul language. (More than had ever been in US TF material.)
3.) Sexual situations. (Absolutely unnecessary for the film.)

It was a great movie, no doubt, but it certainly wasn't kid friendly. If I was a parent and hadn't seen the film beforehand, I too would be ballistically infuriated by the content. It's based on a kid's toyline and show, and there are plenty of tie-in toys that kids would want.

As much as I hate to admit it (beyond the age 2 thing...) this argument is sound.

This is why I like TransFormers: Animated, it really *does* encompass all audiences and entertains without selling out or compromising quality.

so what, then how young is too young,
it shouldn't matter parents will take them to a
movie like that if they choose

Ultra Markus wrote:so what, then how young is too young,
it shouldn't matter parents will take them to a
movie like that if they choose

Alright, fair enough. However, there are plenty of parents out there who wouldn't take their child to see it. They know to avoid the potential problems that will arise from a viewing.

It's those smart parents that this complaint is for. The sensible ones.

Those of you who think this group is complaining for nothing:

Would you think the same way if you were NOT a Transformers fan? I mean, while I think these things sometimes sounds ridiculous to me, it is also good to rememer that we human beings use to defend the things/TV shows/movies/etc. we personally like, even if it's irrational.

So we, as TF fans, probably aren't the most unbiased people to comment on that complaint. But if there really has been aggressive marketing towards little kids, it does sound kinda weird.

Speaking objectively, I can think of all kinds of things that kids are exposed to that are of far more questionable content without having to go anywhere near a movie theatre.

If these people want to form groups to yell about movie content to either call out the film's producers or warn their like-minded ilk, fine. As long as they're not kidding themselves that most of the things they find offensive can be found in everything from nursery rhymes to the evening news to the bible. It all depends on how you look at it.

Most of the suggestive stuff in there would've flown right over their heads, not unlike the morbidity of many a nursery rhyme. "Rock-a-bye baby" has a baby falling out of a tree!

Personally, I think if they'd like to defend their children from the media-saturated world, a good start is as simple as communication. Kids are people too, and people always respond better to respect.

There's no need to dumb things down. Trust your instinct as a parent and respect your child as a person. Transformers was PG-13, and was at one point rated R. The movie was intended for an older audience, and a simple amount of research would reveal that to any parent. The rest is their responsibility, not Hollywood's, or the target audience of the film (the people who inevitably pay the price for these little "outrages").

In any case, in the Transformers movie that came out when I was a kid, Spike said "****", and Optimus Prime died!. Also, a Junkion kissed a Dinobot.

The worst effect all that had on me was over two decades of throwing money at the franchise in question.

It was not a kid's movie.

This should have been quite apparent to anyone with half a brain.

Clues to fill you in that it is not a kid's movie:

1) It is rated PG-13. Duh. Got a 2 year old? Don't take it to a movie that needs Parental Guidance for children under 13!

2) It was directed by Michael Bay. Has he ever directed episodes of Barney? No. He directs movies in which things blow up and people curse a lot while women look like eye candy.

3) It had no little kids in the cast.

4) Most every commercial for Transformers made a point of trying to show the realism of the situation and set up a scary vibe OR focus on showing the female star's stomach. Hmmm... for kids? No.

While I am in agreement that the movie did not need to be advertised during cartoons aimed at extremely young children, I am sick of groups trying to censor material that parents should easily be able to censor themselves. These are the same groups that will complain about the content in Grand Theft Auto even though the label states explicity on the cover that it is not for little children.

Put the responsibility back where it deserves to be. On the parent.