Screen captures of an Omakase ad for Muppet knock-offs and an Amazon page listing Oscar the Grouch for sale ..
So Amazon.com has apparently gone in the Muppet knock off business?
A few weeks ago I started using Amazon’s Omakase program – an advertising platform that auto-recommends products from Amazon for visitors to a web site – on a couple of my sites and this morning I got an email from an alert reader who was being served ads from Omakase for Muppet knock-offs listed on Amazon. I had to check this out to make sure it wasn’t some kind of error or that I had missed announcements about new Muppet photo replicas, but after some quick searching sure enough I discovered a bunch of Muppet knock-off puppets, all listed for sale on Amazon.
The Muppet replica problem has been around for a few years (mostly on ebay), but it’s really surprising to see items like this listed on Amazon. The seller of these items doesn’t appear to be Amazon itself, but a 3rd party who is selling these for some serious money with Amazon (of course) getting a cut of it.
Here’s a quick rundown of the characters listed on Amazon and what they are going for:
- Miss Piggy – $2,650.00
- Oscar the Grouch – $1,295.00
- Zoot – $895.00
- Scooter – $895.00
- Bunsen Honeydew – $795.00
- Animal – $895.00
- The Count – $795.00
- Grover – $795.00
- Ernie (listed as “currently unavailable”)
I really dislike the idea of these being advertised – even inadvertently – on my sites so I’ve temporarily removed all Omakase links from PuppetVision until their customer service can tell me how to block these from appearing. I’ll leave the copyright/trademark issues here for someone else to deal with, but if I was Master Replicas (they have the actual license to produce legitimate Muppet replicas) I’d be pretty upset Amazon is allowing this stuff to be listed and profiting from it.
