It's a stupid pillow!  It's a stupid pet!  It's a stupid Pillow Pet!  This year's inescapable holiday infomercial and product is the Pillow Pet, and its many knock-offs.

The idea behind the Pillow Pet is two-fold:  First, that you want to have a stuffed animal with a vertical orientation.  And second, that you do not want to use a stuffed animal for a pillow (because of its vertical orientation).  Can you see the "stupid" part yet? 

There is no reason on God's green Earth why you should have a convertible stuffed animal/pillow.  All you're doing is cinching the stuffed animal in the middle.  This product literally has no reason to exist.  And yet, kids are going insane for it.

Kids love things that turn into other things.  (Transformers, Polly Pocket, et al.)  Even if it's one stupid thing (a goober stuffed animal with a strap on its belly) that turns into another stupid thing (a pillow covered in fake fur). 

The ad jingle is a "Kidz Bop" recitation of the slogan, over and over again.  It's a pillow!  It's a pet!  It's a Pillow Pet!  Watching this ad is like being stuck on the "It's A Small World" ride.  The main thrust of the ad is: kids really love Pillow Pets. 

(There must be a special rung of Hell reserved for infomercials which are aimed at children.  Infomercials are bad enough.  And the products that they sell - shoddy and overpriced - should as a general rule not come anywhere near children.  Not to mention, they always have really obnoxious music.)

My favorite part of the ad from a semantic standpoint is the sequence where they run through the list of all the available Pillow Pets.  Each one is portrayed in its "natural habitat."  The dog, for example, is standing in a park beside a tree.  The bumblebee is sitting on a rock beside some flowers.

This obviously posed some challenges for the ad's art department.  The unicorn, for example: apparently a unicorn's natural habitat is a daybed with pink blankets.  (Well okay, ya got me there.) 

The dolphin is another problematic one, from the director's perspective.  Since you can't really put a pillow underwater.  Instead, the dolphin is depicted sitting atop some rocks beside what appears to be a waterfall.  Problem A being that dolphins don't live in waterfalls.  Problem B being that it makes me have to pee.

From a technical standpoint, the ad shows a woman putting a Pillow Pet into the washing machine.  However, reports on the internet claim that the Pillow Pet is "surface washable only," meaning it can't go through the laundry.  This raises the tricky question of why you would give a non-machine-washable pillow to a five year old. 

Not to mention, there is a reason why we use pillow cases, people!  And that reason is: drool.

But the biggest problem by far with Pillow Pets is that, let's not mince words.  You give your kid a Pillow Pet, you're basically raising yourself a furry.  Just an FYI.