With Boogerman, Kids Get a Gross Super-Hero : Marketing: Irvine software firm’s character is a master of bodily function humor. Is flatulence better than violence? It’s big if one’s 8 to 12.

WASHINGTON —  As super-heroes go, Boogerman stands alone. Last year, when game designers at a software publishing firm in Irvine created the offensive crime-fighting cartoon character for the video game “Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure,” they knew exactly what baser instincts and market they were appealing to.

“What 8- to 12-year-old doesn’t think burping and farting are hilarious?” says an unabashed Kirk Green, spokesman for Interplay Productions. “We’re talking about something that is an everyday thing and something kids think is funny.”

Promising “pant loads of sophomoric humor” in its promotions, Interplay says it expected to raise a few eyebrows in going “decidedly lowbrow . . . with a product that deals with bodily functions.”

“Boogerman’s” story line is basically Batman with a scurrilous twist: Eccentric millionaire “Snotty Ragsdale” fights vile forces bent on ecological destruction using not the ballistics of other action video games but his “natural defenses”--forced flatulence, burp blasts, mucus missiles, etc.--all devised to tickle the pre-adolescent funny bone.

On store shelves since Thanksgiving, “Boogerman” “has been selling OK,” says Green, conceding that the product faces obstacles. Parents might not be enthusiastic about putting children in control of a super-hero adept at projectile vomiting, for instance.

“Think of it as this,” says Green. “Do you want your kid playing Mortal Kombat and having heads ripped off and sex and bad language? Or do you want them playing something a little disgusting but funny?”

Increasingly, manufacturers and media that target children as young as kindergarten age seem to have concluded that “disgusting but funny” sells. Words and actions not long ago considered private and not for polite society have invaded American mass culture.

From Nickelodeon’s nose-picking “Ren and Stimpy” to MTV’s demented “Beavis and Butt-Head,” gross gags and words once censored are on the upswing on television. Blatant or suggested flatulence scenes aired in “The Santa Clause,” “D2: The Mighty Ducks,” “The Lion King,” “Little Giants” and “Dumb and Dumber” (soon to be a cartoon show)--all movies made for young audiences. Irreverent logos and expressions appear on child-size T-shirts; “snot candy,” “gummy boogers” and “monster warts” are sold with other treats.

“The gross factor has been skewing down younger and younger,” confirms Rena Karl, editor of Marketing to Kids Report, a newsletter published in Encinitas, Calif., whose clients include Fortune 500 companies.

“It might be a consequence of the marketplace being very full of companies targeting kids,” says Karl. “The company that can break that barrier has a good chance of creating a trend or at least a really hot fad.”

Besides, she adds as an afterthought, “wholesomeness is not perceived as being a big seller.”

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Among hot new titles in children’s books since October is “The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts” (Kane/Miller Book Publishers; $11.95) by Shinta Cho. Frank and informative beyond words, the 28-page picture book meant for children 18 months to 5 years fully and humorously illustrates the physiology of flatulence. Common episodes such as bubbles in the bathtub and dietary considerations get their due in its wink-and-grin approach.

“There is something going on out there,” says Madeline Kane, the book’s co-publisher, who believes children and young parents in their homes are “more graphic in their language” than in the past. “And I’m beginning to see more books coming out that deal with these subjects more directly.”

“The Gas We Pass” is one in a series written more than a decade ago in Japan, where toilet topics are considered less a dirty joke than a fact of life.

“Scatological references, talk about poop and wieners, have always been a part of childhood humor,” says Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology at North Adams, Mass., State College and author of “Cursing in America” (John Benjamin; $14). Jay has studied the psychology of dirty words for 20 years.

“This is a very salient dimension of the kids’ view of the world,” he explains. It “hits right on the disgust nerve. That’s why these things are funny to them.”

From potty training on, says Jay, children learn the powerful and taboo nature of these bodily functions as their parents and peers tell them emphatically when something is gross. “It is almost marketed as a wedge to differentiate the kids from older kids and parents,” says Jay, “much like the way rock-’n’-roll separates kids from their parents.”

At Nickelodeon, the children’s cable channel, producers have gone to great pains to gauge limits and predict parental reaction while attempting to satisfy kids’ tastes in programs such as the summer camp comedy “Salute Your Shorts” and “You Can’t Do That on Television,” both of which delve occasionally into taboos.

“Basically, we think what is funny to kids we can probably do in moderation. And we do. And bodily functions are funny to kids--and to most of us here,” says Cyma Zarghami, Nickelodeon’s vice president of programming. “ . . . A tiny bit of naughtiness never hurt anybody.”

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Makers of “Boogerman” met resistance in an unexpected place. “MTV (which airs “Beavis and Butt-Head”) rejected our ad because it showed a man’s butt blowing out a wall,” says Interplay’s Kirk Green. “BBC absolutely refused to air it--even the re-edited one that eventually ran on MTV. . . . (As if) this is all part of the general downturn in American society, a lack of manners and morals and everything else.”

Rena Karl expects disgusting products and a little dirty language to continue to increase in the American marketplace and culture. “As long as they really don’t break the barrier of decency, there won’t be that much of a parent backlash and there won’t be much consumer advocacy backlash,” she says. “Other issues are more pressing than some product that happens to be gross.”