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Why Buy a Mattress? Children's Folklore and Consumer Culture

November 17, 2015
Why Buy a Mattress? Children's Folklore and Consumer Culture ©Zorandim/Shutterstock.com

There is no denying that children’s folklore bears the stamp of commercial culture, but kids are always ready to adapt and satirize popular advertisements. A significant number of children’s parodies of commercials involve the ingestion of a well-branded product and address the implied dangers of voracious consumption.

There is no denying that children’s folklore bears the stamp of commercial culture, but kids are always ready to adapt and satirize popular advertisements. A significant number of children’s parodies of commercials involve the ingestion of a well-branded product and address the implied dangers of voracious consumption. For example:

 

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Makes you vomit in the pot.
Looks like water, tastes like wine,
Oh, my god, it's turpentine.

             

I hate Bosco,
It's full of TNT.
My mommy put it in my milk
To try to poison me . . .

             

Comet tastes like gasoline,
Comet will make your eyes turn green.
Comet, it makes your teeth turn red,
Comet, it makes you wet your bed.

 

It seems fitting that these parodic folk songs, which are reactions to relentless advertising and branding, telegraph children’s acute awareness of themselves as consumers. We might compare one recurring example that a number of my students in Ontario have collected in field projects. Sleep Country Canada ads proliferate across the airwaves here, and the company’s memorable (sometimes nagging) jingle has been rated as one of the nation’s catchiest advertising melodies: “Sleep Country Canada / Why buy a mattress anywhere else!” The jingle certainly reverberates through the brains of children who in summer camp sing: “Sleep Country Canada / Why buy a mattress, you’ve got a couch!” What is written as a claim of brand superiority becomes for children a refreshingly anti-consumerist message: why buy a mattress at all when you can reasonably utilize the resources you already own? In the spirit of reduce, reuse, and recycle, this is an environmentally friendly parody. Another version is more frugal yet—even severely so: “Sleep Country Canada / Why buy a mattress, sleep on the floor.”

Exposed to nearly 8,000 brands a day, children are potential lifetime customers and, therefore, primary targets. Admirably, they employ folklore as a mechanism to defuse, interrupt, or undermine the advertising onslaught.


Greg Kelley is an instructor of media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of "'The Joke's on Us': An Analysis of Metahumor" in The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert.

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