Bad marketing idea of the day

You know Hostess Cupcakes? Sure you do. They're an American icon, are oh-so-tasty, and sustained a great many of us in the form of vending machine-provided meal replacements in college. (Some other time I'll tell you about the amazing bounty of food available at one of the universities I attended -- it was truly spectacular.)

The Hostess Cupcake has long had a little anthropomorphized mascot -- I think he used to be dressed up in a blue hat and a mustache and named Captain Cupcake. In recent decades, however, he's looked more like this:

I guess the decadent goodness of regular Hostess Cupcakes weren't good enough for some focus groups, so they came out with a yellow cake version that still has the trademark chocolate icing on top. Fine. No problem. The issue I have here is with the resulting mascot:

Now, maybe I'm just looking for stuff to complain about here, but what I see is a tasty little blackface cupcake. I just refuse to believe that Hostess made it through the entire marketing development phase of the Golden Cupcake without someone -- a PR lackey, a vice president, a lowly secretary -- pointing out that this little guy carries some fairly serious negative vibes.

Perhaps I'm the first.

If anyone from Hostess is reading this, you would be well advised to contact me about this so we can come to an amicable settlement to ensure that I don't take this to the forever-hungry gaping maw of the American media. CNN has a lot of hours to fill, if you know what I'm getting at, Hostess. You've been warned.