Hasbro is Marketing Jurassic World’s Female Velociraptors as Male
I’m kind of a huge dork and when I saw Jurassic World this past weekend, I wanted to see what kind of merchandise they have out there. I came across figures of the velociraptors, which were freaking awesome in the movie. I ordered a Blue figure because I couldn’t resist. Only, I noticed something strange. Blue is a girl. The description done by Hasbro referred to her as a he. I thought, ‘Huh, that’s weird. Maybe they just wrote a bad description.’ But, I checked the descriptions for Charlie, Delta, and Echo as well. All were described as males by Hasbro. They’re all females.
Then of course, the toys are marketed as being toys for boys. So I can only conclude that Hasbro mis-gendered the velociraptor figures so that boys would play with them. Because girls wouldn’t playing with dinosaurs and boys definitely wouldn’t play with girl dinosaurs right? Toys don’t need to be marketed toward a gender. Plenty of girls love playing with dinosaurs. I may still have quite a few from when I was a child. Hasbro certainly doesn’t need to change the gender of female dinosaurs to sell toys. If that was their motivation, and frankly it looks like it was, it’s troubling. Did they even see the movie? I can guarantee that little boys won’t care that they’re playing with girl dinosaurs. I’m disappointed in you, Hasbro.
UPDATE 6/26/15: A friend contacted Hasbro about this issue and received the following response (permission was given by the friend to share this photo):
UPDATE 06/30/15: Hasbro is slowly beginning to fix the pronouns on their Jurassic World dinosaur descriptions!
Author: Jessica Rae
Jessica has a BA in music with an emphasis in voice and spends her day typesetting, editing, writing, and moderating webinars. Jessica primarily reviews anime and comic book series. She also offers insights on various movies, books, games, and other geeky topics.
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…I don’t know why I expected anything different.
not only the raptors the indominus rex is marketed as a he also.
in the films it is mentioned in jurassic park that the frog dna used to fill in the gaps enabled the dinosaurs to be able to change genders, but I don’t think this is what they meant.
I notice all the toys are divided by girls and boys toys on their website too.
SAD
1. When will a child ever notice this? “Mommy, will you read the package for my toy and make sure the gender is correct?”
2. “Did they even see the movie?” Probably not. The guy labeling these products likely had no idea.
3. Children have this thing called an imagination that makes whatever you print on the package/instructions entirely null and void.
If they wouldn’t ever notice, then why bother changing it?
Listen brother? sister? It is not a question of what the kid’s response is. If he doesn’t know it’s a boy then he doesn’t know its a girl. The issue is why Hasbro thinks the kid will care. There is a question of what their reasoning was behind the dinosaurs needing to be boys.
In this realm, it’s more about the parent than the child. I’ll just leave it at that.
True and also sad. :/
IIII’MMMM just going to go ahead and say someone has way to much time on their hands to read a bit too much into some things…
I mean… are you really that dissapointed that the toy has no penis? or does it really matter that… oh wait… it has no vagina either?
wait a second… IT’S PLASTIC?!
no no no… you mean to tell me plastic actually has no GENDER AT ALL?!
W T F PEOPLE!!!!
the world is obviously ending now…
Schleich toys have fully detailed genitalia and they are made of plastic. Your point is irrelevant.
There is a big difference between Hasbro only making toys based on the boy characters (human or dino) and Hasbro taking characters that are explicitly one gender and changing it to the other. If they are gender neutral, why not just say “it”? Let the kids project whatever gender they want to on it.
If it doesn’t matter – then why did they change it??? Point, missed. No one is complaining that it doesn’t have a penis – did you even read the article? The point is, they are girls in the movie. WHY change them to boys in the toy? Because assumptions. And it’s the assumptions that are being called out, not the genitalia of toys.
I guess they think I have penis envy. But yes, it’s not the dinosaur lack of genItalia that concerns me, rather that Hasbro felt the need to market them as male when they’re very obviously female in the movie.
Hi, please read the rules of our website. The tone of this post is against our rules.
Furthermore, this is not about genetalia. This is about misgendering characters in an effort to uneccesarily gender toys for boys. Our gender is being defined in a way that makes us feel erased and shoved into a narrowly defined space.
Cut the sarcasm. Thanks.
The problem is that specifically marketing plastic dinosaurs – which are about as gender neutral as it comes – as male characters for boys erases a whole section of the world’s population. Book, movie, previous movies – it was a pretty big deal that all the dinosaurs were female, so why change that for a toy? I’m a parent of girls, and when my FIVE YEAR OLD saw this she said, “…..but they weren’t boys, that’s wrong. Why are they saying they’re boys?” And no, she hasn’t seen Jurassic World, but she has seen Jurassic Park – point being, kids DO notice. And at least in my kid’s case it made her not want a toy she would have otherwise.
So . . . yay for not spending money on another hunk of plastic? Sort of.
Thank you for sharing! I know some are saying kids wouldn’t be concerned at all, but some of them are! They notice. Kids are smart.
Haha, they are. And my kid has subsequently rolled her eyes and decided to take her (my) dollars elsewhere. There are some pretty amazing dinosaur toys out there, so why throw money at a company that clearly doesn’t want her business? (Not that she worded it quite that way, but that’s her obvious intent. I can’t wait to see what this kid does when she grows up.)
So your kid just happened to come across this on the website, or did she see the actual toy and make this comment? I’m thinking you showed it to her–she did not bring this up on her own. And of course she’d offended; kids are smart–they tell their parents what they want to hear sometimes. Or you’ve just trained her well to be a perpetually upset liberal.
I was reading the article, she walked by and saw a picture of a toy dinosaur and read ‘Jurassic World’ in the title. After we celebrated her stumbling through the word ‘velociraptor’ with minimal help, I asked her to read the rest of the article out loud with me because that’s what one does with learning-to-read going-into-first-graders. The following thoughts and conclusions were her own. But thanks for assuming she couldn’t possibly have figured out these things on her own.
Why make the assumption that no little girl would care? Also that only liberals would care? While I don’t think anyone is legit crying about this specifically, it does point to a larger underlying problem. That is in fact the point of my article.
You say liberal as though it’s bad thing. I don’t believe it is and I think it’s pretty great her kid can recognize problematic content so young.
Haha, to be fair! At first it was a ‘why didn’t they fact check’ situation. (Kid knows a LOT of writers, fiction and non. She knows about research and all that.) It was several minutes before she realized the other reasons it was problematic.
Consider who’s really assuming things here.
Allegedly, Hasbro considered boys the primary target group and assumed they’d be less interested if the raptors were labelled as female, so they just went ahead and declared them male. Except, they claim it’s an oversight. You can choose to believe them or not, but nobody can know for certain.
What we can know for certain, however, is this:
– You assumed that Hasbro assumed that female characters have to male in order to appeal to customers. You built an entire narrative around this assumption before you had heard as much as a peep from the company.
– You assume the same thing, i.e. that boys and/or their parents would actually think that way. And you projected that assumption onto Hasbro.
Those are your own assumptions. There’s no hard evidence of anyone else making any.
When I was a boy in the 70’s, I loved playing with both my Princess Leia and Lt. Uhura action figures. I picked them from the shelf myself and I didn’t throw them on the floor in terror and yell ZOMG COOTIES. And had I bought tauntaun or dewback figures, I sure wouldn’t have been deterred if the packaging said “WARNING: Female creature inside”. Nor would I be today if I bought them for my nephews.
Yet here you are 40 years later thinking you’re saying something progressive when all you really did was reveal your own dated prejudices about boys and corporations. Is that contributing to progress?
I said in my initial article that it was an assumption on my part and I updated it when information became available. Hasbro had already screwed up by making Black Widow’s motorcycle but not Black Widow. It came with Captain America.