For those of us of a certain age, this isn't a new phenomenon, having spent the formative years of our youth bombarded by Saturday morning cartoons that, in many cases were thinly-disguised advertisements (ask your parents or grandparents if they remember Linus The Lionhearted, Lovable Truly, Sugar Bear, Tennessee Tuxedo, and their cereal-shilling compatriots). In the mid-1960's the FCC banned the practice of cartoon characters appearing in commercials on the same programs in which they were featured, which in turn ushered in the era of squeaky-clean "educational programming" (instead of a prize in every box you got a lesson in every program) until Congress passed the Children's Television Act in the early 1990's that essentially re-opened the door for content creators to use children's cartoons as blatant product placements.