/ Mark Frauenfelder / 4:23 pm Tue Feb 1, 2011

Unusual location to put a straw on a princess sippy cup

princess-pecker.jpg

My sister took this photo of a Disney princess sippy cup with an odd location for the drinking straw.

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  9. Gaston is going to be so relieved she didn’t choose him after all. If there’s one thing that sets him off more than rejection, it’s being one-upped.

    2. @ brainspore: Thank you! Buzz is much better than this one. I’m seeing so much repeat stuff on BoingBoing or two year old news. What gives?

      1. I like the other one because you can describe it as “Buzz & Woody.” However if I had a penis as disproportionally large as Belle’s I suppose that I might refer to it as “The Beast.”

  13. I like how she looks at you reverentially WHILE you suck from her plastic phallus. It’s like she’s waiting with baited breath for you to opine on the deliciousness of her contents. Very creepy, and wide open to feminist outrage.

  16. This was covered already. (though perhaps not here exactly) It was concluded that:
    (1) character tie-in forces a large upper body on top of drinks cup.
    (2) the physics of straws force an angled-upwards pipe somewhere below that character representation
    (3) phallus-pareidolia can take it from there.

    Proof that this is an unavoidable result of merch engineering is that you-all are snickering about it when it’s a female character.

  20. I thought this looked familiar … :)

    And Cory mentioned that the top probably rotates, so the straw *CAN* come out the back, or the side.

  21. …Meanwhile…in the Princess Sippy factory….

    Holycrap guys!! where do we stick the darn straws??

    in her bum….?
    in her skull….?
    in her chest…..?

    …f**k it… stick it in the front of her skirt and deal with the boingboing fallout….

  22. “Proof that this is an unavoidable result of merch engineering is that you-all are snickering about it when it’s a female character.”

    Don’t judge our love. Something that feels this right can’t possibly be wrong.

  27. In this pic, it makes you wonder just what Dora is exploring back there.

    Obligatory grammar snark: if her breath is baited, I think I will bate mine.

  28. I want to know where I purchase one of these, or even better the Buzz Lightyear cup, for drinking water in my office cube. If you know, please share.

  29. Well, one of her songs in the Broadway musical is “A Change in Me.” Now I understand what she was talking about.

  31. Hey, I have an idea. How about we abandon the whole anthropomorphic sippy-cup idea, and just print cartoon pictures on the side?

    On a side note: None of these are as bad as the Jar-Jar Binks tongue lollipop.

  32. See’s just looking up at you with a big doe-eyed expression silently saying, “Suck me. Suck me dry.”

  35. “New and a bit alarming/ who’d have ever thought that this could be?”

    or

    “There may be something there that wasn’t there before…”

  39. Can’t they just give away a toy when you buy a regular cup?

    I wonder what all those kids thought when they were mass-assembling these things for their American overlords.

    1. Belle becomes a princess when she marries the prince, who was turned into the beast. She’s as much of a princess as Cinderella is.

  45. Yes. I have one of these. (It’s my Burning Man cup).
    Yes. The top rotates, so the straw isn’t necessarily a phallus (It could be, for instance, an enema tube.)
    Yes. The best part is that she stares lovingly into your eyes as you take her into your mouth.

    Best plastic purchase of the past year for me, yessir.

  46. This is nit-picky, but that’s not actually a sippy cup. A sippy cup is one of those safety cups for babies with a little sipping spout on the cap. This is a novelty cup with a built-in straw, meant for children, not babies.

  47. Also, I should take a picture of the Aurora/sleeping beauty bath soap dispenser my daughter received as a gift. You have to take Aurora’s torso off to open the lid for the soap. Once the torso popped off unexpectedly while she was taking a shower, causing her to exclaim “Aah! I’m being attacked by flying princess bodies!”

  49. Wait, wait; I thought it was “TWO Girls, One Cup”.

    I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. 55 posts and no one had gone there.

  50. Disney’s latest product: “Liposuction Belle” (was wonderin’ how those Disney princesses kept themselves so thin…)

  51. Honi soit qui mal y pense

    Ein Schelm wer Arges dabei denkt …

    as one poster said correctly … teh straw has to come out SOMEwhere … not many choices (how about the armpit?)… but oh so much fun for the BB community

  53. To those saying the straw had to come out somewhere: the top of the head would have been super logical and non-phallic. It might have even made the cup easier to drink from. As designed, if the straw is canted strongly downwards I wonder if the whole thing would act as siphon, emptying its self.

  54. I used to work for Disney Consumer Products and I can tell you exactly how this happened. DCP has a set of weird rules which are so cast in stone over the years that nobody questions them. One is that you can’t have a straw coming out of the character’s head because that would look like you were “drinking their brain.” You will almost never see a Disney product with the straw coming out the top, so designers are forced to come up with alternate solutions –occasionally with unexpected results.

  56. What is tuely creepy about this thing is the adoring gaze of the character. Kids must have to drink with their eyes closed or else those little plastic eyes would be an inch from their nose with each sip.

  62. I’d call it a strange shape for a sippy cup, because really, there’s no good place to put a straw on something human body shaped.

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