Mom Puts Lots of Mustard Into : Mom Puts Lots of Mustard Into Fight Against Burger King’s Ads

Watch out Burger King, Cindy Yohe is watching.

You say you’re feeding fast food to a hungry and impatient nation. She says you’re undermining parental authority and contributing to a wave of food-flinging.

For three years Yohe, her Marine Corps husband and their two young sons lived in Okinawa, where television is free of commercials.

Just as the Yohes returned, Burger King began a multimedia, 18-months-in-the-planning advertising and promotion assault to recapture the kids’ market from McDonald’s. A key thrust is saturation advertising on Saturday morning television.

Each month, kiddos are offered a new toy. For January, it’s “lickety-splits,” one-inch plastic replicas of a burger, a stack of fries and a soft drink. Complete with tiny wheels.

“Now it’s OK to play with your food,” says the TV announcer. Enough, said Yohe.

She has sons Christopher, 3, and Colin, 11 months. Like parents everywhere, she spends her days warning/cajoling/threatening/pleading, “Don’t play with your food!”

She called Burger King’s marketing department in Miami to protest. She called Burger King’s consumer affairs unit.

She called the Parent Effectiveness Training people in Oceanside. She called Scott Hume, burger beat reporter for the Chicago-based magazine Advertising Age.

She enlisted her sister, Wendy, in Beaumont, Tex., to make similar calls.

“I think Burger King doesn’t understand the powerful impact it’s having on kids,” Yohe said. “It’s impossible to tell your kids something is wrong when television is telling them it’s OK.”

Look closer, says a Burger King spokeswoman. Only plastic food is on screen when the announcer says “Now it’s OK . . . “

Besides, the “lickety-splits” toys and commercials are about to phase out. Next month’s toy is something thought to be immune from controversy:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle badges.

Getting Their Motors Going

Yes, that was “Roger & Me” director and star Michael Moore at Grossmont Center in La Mesa talking to people who had just seen his darkly comic documentary about his futile two-year quest to talk to General Motors boss Roger Smith.

He came to Grossmont to gauge the response from a “non-industrial, non-liberal” community to his tale of the despair caused by GM closing its plant in Flint, Mich. Reaction was generally positive.

But the audience also included an elderly woman waving a critical editorial from the Flint newspaper. That’s fine with Moore.

“The whole idea of ‘Roger and Me’ is to get people talking about how economic forces shape our lives,” he said. “Theater managers are complaining that people are milling around after the movie talking.”

Taking Another Fling

I hear San Diego calling.

- The ultimate San Diego County press release has arrived.

It announces that Stacy Anderson of Cardiff has joined the Coldwell Banker real estate firm in Encinitas.

Among her qualifications: she’s a competitive Frisbee player and won the 1989 women’s and mixed pairs world freestyle titles. She’s flung her disk at Sea World and Disneyland.

And she can find you a marvelous two-bedroom fixer-upper for a mere $300,000.

- The 1992 mayor’s race has its first announced candidate: magician Loch David Crane. I hear he’s promising to pull a new sewer system out of a hat.

- Superior Court Judge Dick Murphy has hired political consultant John Kern for what promises to be an uncontested reelection this year.

Does this mean Murphy is looking ahead to the 1992 mayoral? “No comment.”

- Reporters all over town are replaying the FBI tape on which Richard Silberman compares hookers in Atlantic City with those in New York.

Silberman gives a zesty description of being solicited by a busty lady near Grand Central Station: “This broad takes her T-shirt and lifts it up and she says . . . “