Posted 3:38 PM by Angie Schultz

Adventures in Advertising

Prim and proper Andrea Harris is raising a delicate eyebrow at a booze commercial. She thinks the innuendo in it is a little "out there".

Let me tell you about Australia. Most Australian commercials were much like American commercials---some amusing, some annoying, most boring. But some of them were more than out there.

Take, for example, the Bacardi Breezers commercials. These would involve a handsome young person in sober dress talking to someone in a dull business situation. Then something would be said which would cause the young person to think back to happier times, when he was blind stinking drunk on Bacardi.

For example, one showed a job interview. Our Hero is asked, "How many people did you have under you?" and he flashes back to the time when he was floundering on his back on a sticky dance floor with two hot babes, awash in spilled Bacardi. In another commercial, Our Hero is a woman, who remembers the time when she was riding a half-naked man bareback---er, piggyback---and urging him on with her cowboy hat.

I would have loved to see one of those "Bacardi urges you to drink responsibly" disclaimers on those.

Another set of commercials were for Tim Tams, an authentic Australian treat. They're rock hard cookies which comes in many flavors now, but it's basically a dry chocolate cookie covered with over-sweet chocolate. In these commercials, two pretty young women have somehow summoned up a very hunky genie and have demanded that he give them endless Tim Tams.

Now, a time-honored way of eating Tim Tams (which are shaped like small candy bars) is to suck liquid up through them, thus softening the hard cookie inside. Can you see where this is going? So in one commercial the two young women do this, while the camera lingers lovingly on their rosebud-like lips, puckered tightly about the Tim Tams. sluurrrp...slurrrrp

Abruptly one young woman stops and asks the other, "Whatcha thinking about?" The other woman considers for a second. "Nothing." "Me too," her friend agrees, and they go back to their Tim Tams. sluurrrp...slurrrrp The hunky genie, sitting on the couch between them, writhes a bit, then conjures up a pillow and ostentatiously places it on his lap. Ha ha!

(Here's an article discussing the relationship between Tim Tams and oral sex. They also mention the much-missed Mint Slice---a chocolate mint cookie---which is much better than the Tim Tam and clean of sin to boot. Except maybe gluttony.)

However, for sheer what-the-hell mindboggle, nothing beats the YoGo commercials. YoGo is what Americans would call pudding; it comes in little plastic tubs. It's sold with a series of claymation commercials featuring YoGorilla and his pal Snake (Here's a picture.) In the first commercial, they're tooling down the highway in their sports car when there's a call on the mobile TV-phone. A raspy-voiced white-haired rhino with a vaguely Southern US accent is calling to tell them that aliens have stolen the world's supply of YoGo, and that he himself is down to his last tub.
(Note that when the world's in trouble, the one who summons YoGorilla is not the Australian PM, not the Queen, not the Secretary General of the UN, but the POTUS.)

Standing next to the President's desk is a vaguely canine woman sporting a puffy black hairdo and wearing a blue dress. As the President gestures, he knocks the tub over and the YoGo splashes all over the skirt of her dress. She looks disgusted.

After some adventures in subsequent commercials, YoGorilla and Snake land the alien spaceship on the White House lawn before cheering crowds, and are greeted by the Rhino-Clinton and Lewinsky-Dog, the latter still in her stained dress.

Oh, yeah, it's American culture that's vulgar, that's right...