Spastic - "Spaz" Products

"Spaz" Products

Multiple products in America use the word Spaz as part of their name.

Controversy arises if products are sold in the UK under the same name. In particular the manufacturers and importers of the Spazz wheelchair were criticised by the British charity Scope when they put the wheelchair on sale in the UK. Scope expressed a fear that the usage of the word as an insult would increase again, after a steady decline since the 1980s.

A caffeinated lipbalm created by a police officer is called "SpazzStick." "Spaz-Stix" is a company that produces high end remote control car/plane paints.

An energy drink is called "Spaz Juice" and has a slogan, "all the energy you need to annoy everybody else."

The Transformers Power Core Combiners line of robot toys includes a character named "Spastic". Hasbro, the makers of Transformers, said that it would not release "Spastic" in the UK. This did not stop vocal British fans from alerting various news outlets, eventually resulting in the name being changed for all markets to the less-offensive "Over-Run." The on-box biography for the Transformers toy called Strafe described him as "spastic" in early releases, but when the controversy erupted about the word, they changed the word to "twitchy."

On June 29, 2007, Ubisoft of France pulled one of their games called Mind Quiz: Your Brain Coach, for referring to players who did not perform well at the game as "Super Spastic". The company stated "As soon as we were made aware of the issue we stopped distribution of the product and are now working with retailers to pull the game off the market." Similarly, Nintendo recalled Mario Party 8 in the UK after releasing a version containing the line "turn the train spastic" in its dialogue.