Tiny kids hired as models for inflatable swimming pool photo

Since David Ng is our guestblogger for the next couple of weeks, I thought I'd pull up this post from 2008. On the right are David's kids standing in front of the Wild Waves Water Park he bought for them. On the left are six of the smallest children on the planet, who have earned their parents a fortune as models for outdoor recreation products.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

You ran this story way back in 2008.

http://boingboing.net/2008/09/19/kiddie-pool-photo-on.html

I thought it looked familiar.
knoxblox

Stop hating on the tiny people!

Seriously, I could have modeled for this box cover when I was a kid. I was seriously small.
sharkcellar

Bwahaha! I’ve experienced this same scenario. My daughter’s cousin brought by a super water slide (or some such variation on that title) and on the box there are these kids shooting down a water slide that appears to be about 20 ft long blasting 5 foot jets of water in refreshing arcs over them. Upon opening the box, this thing was barely 5 feet long and the jets of water barely broke a foot (maybe two or three when you slammed your foot on it). Later on I spent a good while studying the perspective distortions on the clearly photoshopped packaging, beer in hand and glad that I wasn’t the sucker that purchased this piece of crap.
Anonymous

The key is in the name of the company. they clearly make bonsai products for bonsai children.
Anonymous

Is that really photoshop? I think the playset on the left is just a much larger set. Judging from the yellow junk on the sides, it even looks different.
Hamish Grant

Maybe they just didn’t inflate the thing fully..? ;)
John Greg

Marketers, advertisers, are teh propaganda debbils all!
Echo7

Those “Banzai” and similar products all do the same thing.

The kids are stock shots that are photoshopped into the product shot at differing scales. It’s all a composite image.

If you spend some time looking at the various boxes at a Wallmart/ToysRUs store, you’ll start to see the same kids across different boxes (even from different companies) for these so called “pools”.

It’s funny trying to connect the dots on the shelves of varying inflatable pool boxes finding the same kids, even same *shots* of the kids but angled differently in the composites.

Ridiculous really.
- Anonymous
  
  It’s true. Go down the aisle in Walmart during summer. Look at the shadows on the people. They don’t quite match up to the shadows in the picture. It’s obviously photoshopped. I noticed this when I bought a waterslide from the company Bonzai. It was half the size of the one in the box picture.
danwarning

OR they just made a bigger one to shoot the box picture with.

That strikes me as a little more likely.
- Mark Frauenfelder
  
  And Dan Warning wins the Occam’s Razor award for the thread.
  - Skep
    
    “Mark Frauenfelder replied to comment from danwarning â€¢ #14 â€¢ 3:27 PM Friday, Aug 20, 2010 â€¢ Reply
    
    And Dan Warning wins the Occam’s Razor award for the thread.”
    
    You are assuming that it is easier and cheaper to build a custom one-off pool just for photography. These days that is not a valid general assumption.
    
    Banzai seems to make a habit of photoshopping in undersized children onto their products. Here is a less dramatic but clearly photoshopped waterslide. Compare the box art to the customer photo. In this case, the water slide is pretty large, but at least 50 percent smaller than the box art is meant to suggest.
    
    http://www.amazon.com/Banzai-Wipeout-Curve-Water-Park/dp/B001LO25DY
    
    These days Photoshop is the simpler assumption.
MrJM

Forced perspective.
Antinous / Moderator

PiÃ±ata at #5.
- Anonymous
  
  Yeah, I was too quick to post, before reading the whole thing. Dumb, I know.
  
  Next time I’ll keep my mouth shut.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Don’t worry. I’m using your martyrdom as a teaching moment. BECAUSE EVERYBODY DOES IT.
emmyymme

I’d go with they made a bigger one for the picture as well… I know someone who used to make cans of coke for commercials that were bigger than the real ones to show up on tv better.
- a random John
  
  I thought that for the most part Coke ads show people drinking Coke in glass bottles, the sort that are no longer sold by the Coca-Cola Co. in the USA. Why in glass bottles? Because everybody knows that you want to drink your Coke out of a glass bottle that is so cold that it looks like it is sweating. Also, you want it made from real sugar, so it tastes like a summer from your childhood.
  - ranomatic
    
    I know you waiting for someone to respond with this, so two words – Mexican Coke.
    
    One of those (for the whole group of course) would make the tiny children in the photo even happier.
mst3kmoxie

This is why you scan the tiny print for the dimensions.

Then if *that’s* lying, you burn the pool company to the ground. (Or maybe that’s just what I do.)
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  That’s why they label them with metric in the US and imperial everywhere else.
Anonymous

plastic pool is either made in China or the shire, either way they have smaller children there… the only ‘shopping’ that was done was to attempt to Americanize the children.

on the other hand… pool, slide, ring toss, basketball!! I want one.
Anonymous

@ Dan, No if you’ve seen this kind of product in person you can tell it’s photoshopped and typically not well.

It relies more on kids screaming “Look! Look! I want that!” than actual product quality.
Stefan Jones

Proof that those Indonesian Hobbit People survived to modern times!

* * *

This reminds me of an old Mad Magazine story comparing a house as described by a real estate listing and the actual home. They were the same shape and layout, but the reality was small and crappy.

I’m also reminded of the old comic book adverts for spaceship and submarine play structures that turned out to be made of folded cardboard.
- hungryjoe
  
  Fucking Homo Floriensis, how do THEY work?
Anonymous

“Note that the Banzai company fully stands behind their Wild Waves Water Park product. The Banzai company, however, can make no claims as to the size of your children.”
OldRipbeak

Looks like the comments from 2008 were also reposted, right down to the “didn’t this already appear on Boing Boing?” comments. Though I must say that I found the first-round comments slightly more humorous. :)
Lucifer

ever seen the size of burgers in McDonalds or Burger King ads? They look HUUUGE and tall and with thick dictionary-sized beef patties glistening with flavor and fresh crispy lettuce leaves lovingly layered against the firm tomato slices…
yeah, they really look like that when you order one.
Anonymous

Unfortunately people have grown up thinking Photoshop always existed. This kind of stuff has ALWAYS been done in advertisements, long before Photoshop was a dream.

Look at the basketball hoop at the top of the arch and how small it is in the ad photo. The manufacturer has made a bigger pool for the ad shot and then made a small version to ship….
Anonymous

I’m convinced IKEA do this to make there furniture look bigger that it really is.
Anonymous

Someone here locally had one of these up for sale…for $225.

The slide and pool inflates to 9 1/2 ft high and the pool to 12ft.
The pool is only about 2ft deep.
We used it only this summer.
Moved to a smaller house and there is not enough room to set it up.
It is a little sun faded but it is still in good shape.
Contact xxxx at xxx-xxx-xxx between 10am-9pm and leave a message.Will not respond to emails or text so please don’t send any.
Thank You.

nowhere in the ad did it mention -anything- about the kids enjoying it.
Lady Strathconn

I actually took pictures of some of the boxes at Wal*Mart this year. One pool was in two different boxes with the exact same photo with different women and kids. These same women and children were on various other boxes in the same poses with different pools.

This is another great pool fail: http://failblog.org/2010/05/31/epic-fail-photos-actual-size-fail/
- cjp
  
  That’s an epic actual size fail. Love it. Moar, please.
littlebone

So, Randy Newman was wrong?
spcfgt

Don’t buy that Banzai bullshit. What a terrible product it is, even if you read the dimensions beforehand. Just garbage, don’t bother.
mtdna

Ungrateful little wretches.
- Anonymous
  
  ungrateful HUGE wenches
pdo

Honey, I shrunk the toys.
Anonymous

I worked until recently at a company that deals in store returns/closeouts/etc and we saw a fair amount of Banzai products come through, as well as similar inflatable water toys. Most of them had some pretty obvious ‘shopping going on, but Banzai was by far the worst. The children are all tiny and often appear to occupy non-Euclidean space (body parts appearing in front of parts of the toy when they should have been behind, etc) and also are so light that they never deform the edges of pools when they sit down. I regret to say that judging by the way they are sitting in the water, some of these tiny children also have no legs. My personal favorite however was the person whom my co-workers and I dubbed “The Sketchy Guy”. He appears on several Banzai product boxes (obviously the same picture each time) and has a creepy expression on his face as he watches children playing on inflatable toys in the pool.
Brainspore

Damn, David’s kids are HUGE.
- David K. Israel
  
  LOLOL
sloverlord

This is no laughing matter. Tiny kids everywhere are having their livelihoods threatened by Photoshop.
ranomatic

In the words of the immortal Larry, the Cable Guy – I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.