I was strolling through the grocery store yesterday when I took a turn down the cereal aisle. The kids naturally began clamoring for sugary, crunchy whatsits, but I was able to deflect their demands by pointing out that we already had a supply of said sugary whatsits. Undaunted in their voracity, they ran further down the aisle to the shelves of fruit snacks and began a new round of pleading.

Fruit snacks come in a variety of licensed shapes and brands these days, almost invariably invoking some cartoon or recent movie franchise—the usual pop-culture stuff, though a fair amount of generic shapes, like dinosaurs or the fruit from which the flavor of these rubbery neo-Jujyfruits is ostensibly derived, are also available—in order to make them interesting to kids. This I understand.

This, I don’t.

While I certainly don’t have anything against farm machinery, I can’t imagine this tie-in is really doing much for the sales of either company. It just seems sort of odd.