The super popular American Girl Dolls series has one called Addy.
She’s an escaped slave.
But, you can buy her for $110.
Anything strike you as unintentionally evil lately?
The board game Puerto Rico is wildly popular – Boardgamegeek has for some time listed it as the 4th best board game and strategy game (at one point I believe it was #1). It was designed by a now-famous German game designer, and is regarded as a leading example of the German school of game design. (This is relevant to the unintentional evil.)
The game is pretty good. I like it personally.
Leaving aside the (innovative) game mechanics, the premise of the game is you are setting up a colony in Puerto Rico in the 1500s to grow things on plantations and ship those goods back to Europe.
An essential requirement of a successful colony is to have enough colonists working in your plantations and town. These colonists are brought over from some unspecified source on a ship. These plantation workers you have shipped to your colony are represented by little abstract wooden disks.
The disks are dark brown.
I saw sweet potato spoon, cookie and savory meat pie accessories, but no chains.
Yes! It’s a great game, but every time I play I’m wondering, are they TRYING to make me feel bad about bringing more people over? Usually we just call them slaves, since that’s obviously what they are, and we crack bleak jokes about it, but good grief, how hard would it have been t omake your “colonists” purple or something?
That would fall under “shipping and handling”. (Who, when escaping from slavery, thinks “ooh, be sure to bring the sweet potato spoon”?)
In keeping with the historical atrocities theme…
Hernando de Soto was the first European to explore much of what’s now the southeastern U.S. and he was an absolutely total bastard. His men killed southeastern Indians by the thousands with guns, steel, and dogs (literally- they would throw them to the dogs they carried), they tortured and raped and stole their way from what’s now Florida through Georgia and the Carolinas and Georgia and Tennessee and Mississippi and Arkansas and Louisiana, they burned towns and destroyed millennium old cultures, and that’s not including the multitudes who died from the diseases they introduced. Thus DeSoto Caverns, a tourist trap in north-central Alabama, chose him as their mascot, Happy Hernando! (“Hey boys and girls, would you like some smallpox? Or would you rather go and pet Señor Fluffy the War Mongrel?”)
There is a funeral home in the Chicago suburbs that prominently advertises their cremation services. They’re named Adolf Funeral Home. :smack:
Not sure this is exactly what you’re looking for, but last night I was reading my daughter a Thomas the Tank Engine book, and I mentioned to my wife that Sir Topham Hat looks a lot like Varys, from Game of Thrones. After that I started reading his lines in a Varys voice, and his comments about “Hurry back, Thomas, or else someone else will pick up the children!” took on a whole new meaning, and my wife punched me in the arm.
From another thread.
Saw one the other night. I was watching music videos on OnDemand and came across Rooster by Alice In Chains (via Havoc OnDemand). It was sponsored by the Army. Huh??? 
Either someone wasn’t paying attention or has a sick sense of humor to pair those two. The video is full of horrors of war imagery from the vietnam era, some real footage, some reinacted.
The absolute kicker was a little goarmy.com bug popping up in the lower right as a ticker reads “There’s strong and there’s Army Strong”. What was the video showing at this exact point? An incredibly graphic scene where a soldier is getting his legs blown off by (what I think is) a land mine. At least it wasn’t real footage being shown there.
There was a recruiting ad after the video, featuring a soldier giving a testimonial about how the Army was right for him, but I doubt it’s going to be very effective…
[sub][sup]I’m not intending to be critical of the video, btw, just that there’s something incredibly off about mixing it with Army ads.[/sup][/sub]
I couldn’t find a cite for this, but I have a Disney 1993 holiday catalog featuring a variety of items, including a faux fur coat for children with Dalmatian spots. The description calls it “real enough to fool Cruella”. It’s on the page featuring 101 Dalmatians merchandise.
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but it’s definitely morbidly funny…
There was a building on the main street of my hometown that housed one business in the front (facing the street) and another, completely unrelated one in the back. But they both shared the sign that was out on the street.
On the top half of the sign? “Veterinary Hospital.”
On the bottom half of the sign? “Catering.”
…And the fact that it’s a German-designed game makes it funnier; the stereotypical German attention to detail and the stereotypical German failure to notice that in some cases said attention to detail might be offensive.
It ain’t bad. 
In a slightly different vein…
A kids book (in rhyme) that we own features, at one point, a bunch of kids going off to do garden work for their mother.
Off they went, with tools on shoulders
Bob, the rake, and Jill, the hoe
We think Bob the Rake and Jill the Ho sound like a pretty good match for each other.
I saw this unfortunately titled book at the library today:
Obviously published before a certain notorious event.
An advertisement for Helen Keller sunglasses:
This isn’t evil, but I’m posting it here because it’s too small to have a thread of its own:
I can’t believe they named the CPR doll Resusci Anne and not Resusci Kate!!!
Settlers of Catan, probably the most widely popular and successful German game, has a board with hexes representing several types of terrain. It also features a piece called the Robber. The Robber always begins the game on the desert. The piece representing the Robber is a vaguely human-shaped black pawn.
There’s a retirement place around here that my company used to deliver to. When they first opened up they had a banner that said “Senior Living’s Best Kept Secret”. I don’t know if it was on purpose or not, but they mostly dealt with people with Alzheimer’s. C’mon, that had to be a joke, right? I’m sure part of it was because when they built the location it was way out in a part of the city with nothing built up around them for miles and it was hard to find…but still “best kept secret”…the people that live there don’t have a good memory anymore, you be the judge.
