Tooth Tunes: One Scary Product for Kids!

Infomercials have a reputation for selling bizarre products such as Rejuvenique, AromaTrim, and the good ol’ FlowBee. But there is one product current being advertised on a regular 30-second commercial during Saturday morning kids’shows that matches any infomercial gadget in its strangeness.

It’s called Tooth Tunes. Tooth Tunes is a toothbrush, manufactured by toy-maker Hasbro, that is supposed to encourage kids to brush their teeth for a full two minutes by playing a song while brushing. Tooth Tunes plays the song as long as it can detect the pressure of the brush against the teeth.

Each ToothTunes, which sells for $9.99, contains a different song. Most of the available tunes are either contemporary songs or classic bubblegum pop—the kind of stuff you would expect young kids to be into:

Hilary Duff (Wake Up)
Destinys Child (Survivor)
Kelly Clarkson (Walk Away)
Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana (Best of Both Worlds)
Black Eyed Peas (Let’s Get It Started)
Jesse McCartney (Beautiful Soul)
Smash Mouth (All Star)
The Cheetah Girls (Shake A Tail Feather)
High School Musical (Get’cha Head in the Game)
High School Musical (We’re All in This Together)
Jamiroquai (Canned Heat from the movie Napoleon Dynamite)
Beach Boys (Fun, Fun, Fun)
Aly & AJ (Walking on Sunshine)

But then they also include some hits from late 70s/early 80s:

Queen (We Will Rock You)
KISS (Rock & Roll All Night)
Village People (YMCA)

Huh? The target market for Tooth Tunes is probably kids 8-11. So why include this fossil rock in the mix? These songs were already getting kind of old when I was a kid.

They also have a ToothTunes that plays the Theme from Rocky, “Gonna Fly Now,” which may in fact be the weirdest song choice for this product.

In the TV commercial for Tooth Tunes, they feature “Rock & Roll All Night” by KISS. That makes a lot of marketing sense to me: I’m sure kids these days are eager to put Gene Simmons in their mouths.

Here is the ToothTunes TV commercial:

You can see a video of some guy using Tooth Tunes here:

And here is a lame parody of the Tooth Tunes commercial on YouTube.

Warning: The audio at the link above is NSFW (Not Safe for Work), which is really scary since it looks like 9-year-olds made this thing.

I think this video is a good example of why TIME magazine felt compelled to name “You” as Person of the Year for 2006.