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Online vendors in China are going crazy over a Peppa Pig meme

Viral promo video for Lunar New Year Peppa Pig movie inspires opportunistic sellers

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It’s a pig… it’s an air blower… it’s Peppa! (Picture: Taobao)
This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Enterprising online vendors in China are proving that it’s never too early to cash in on a blockbuster movie… even if they don’t have the rights to it.

Check these items out. Do they look familiar?

It’s a pig… it’s an air blower… it’s Peppa! (Picture: Taobao)
It’s a pig… it’s an air blower… it’s Peppa! (Picture: Taobao)

If you think it looks like a strange, metallic version of Peppa Pig, well… yeah. That’s exactly what they are.

They’re actually air blowers. If you don’t know what those are, the hand-operated types are often found in rural households, used for starting a fire on the stove. They typically cost under US$5 each on Taobao. But slap on Peppa’s good name and now they’re five times that price.

(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba -- the operator of Taobao.)

It’s all down to the viral phenomenon called “What’s Peppa” that’s taking China by storm. It was triggered by a roughly five-minute promotional video for “Peppa Celebrates Chinese New Year”, a full-length movie featuring the British cartoon darling Peppa Pig that’s coming to Chinese cinemas on the first day of the Lunar New Year -- which, appropriately enough, begins the Year of the Pig.
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