Like most parents who watch their children grow up, it sometimes eerily feels like you’re watching someone else’s life on TV. You can’t always be there, and your child eventually takes on a life of their own with their own friends and activities. You hope for the best, because if your child was anything like you were as a child, you know they’re up to something when you’re not around.

That’s more or less what’s happened with my Trunkmonkey concept. Originally started as a sick joke back in 2000, the idea took off and spawned a life of its own, creating a cult mascot that’s now graced thousands of Subaru owners’ cars. The joke was more or less contained within the Subaru community, and all was well.

But then Suburban Auto Group released a series of Superbowl commercials featuring a Trunk Monkey, and the innocence of the Trunkmonkey was lost. Although R/West, the creators of the Trunk Monkey ads, claim that they came up with the idea on their own, I’m hard pressed to buy that story. There are too many parallels, right down to the security Trunk Monkey wielding a crowbar.

But, alas, what can you do? When a joke is let loose into the public domain, there’s not much you can do to stop it once the ball gets rolling. I might as well just cash in.