Aardman - "Visit London Zoo" (1990)

Advertisements made up the bulk of Aardman's bread and butter in the 1980s and into the 1990s - in fact, between Conversation Pieces in 1983 and Lip Sync in 1989, virtually all of the company's output consisted of TV ads and music videos (most famously for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer"), with our favourite Aardman short, Babylon, being the anomaly in all of this.  Some of the adverts that they worked on, such as those for Scotch VHS (skeleton) and Lurpak (Douglas the trombonist), caught the public's imagination and are still regarded fondly as classics.  This one-off advert for London Zoo, which I found nestled among the ad breaks of a London Weekend Television broadcast of Disney's Dumbo from 1990, isn't particularly well-remembered, and certainly that's collective memory's loss, because it's wonderful.

Actually, since I've never read of any specific reference to this advert in any Aardman-related literature, there's no way that I can say with 100% certainty that this even was one of theirs...but it looks so recognisably like an Aardman product that the only other possibility would be that it's the work of someone who blatantly saw Nick Park's Creature Comforts (1989) and was eager to replicate that visual style right down to the very last detail.  Not only does the Stinkpot Turtle have a characteristically very "Nick Park" mouth, but he also bears more than a passing resemblance to Frank the Tortoise, a character shortly set to feature in a series of advertisements for the electricity board (arguably Aardman's most well-known advertising campaign) inspired by the original Creature Comforts film.

The concept of this advertisement is fairly novel - a succession of exotic-looking animals hurl quirky-sounding insults at one another, the gag being that these supposed insults actually are the real names of the species in question (I can only assume that London Zoo had representatives of each in its collection at the time).  The chain begins with an audacious Dog Faced Newt who calls out to a Stinkpot Turtle, who evidently doesn't appreciate the moniker, and it goes on right through to a Springhaas (sounds like "Spring Arse", get it?), who, finally, offers up the sales pitch: "If you don't know your aardvark from your emu, visit London Zoo."  Each character is so appealing, and so charmingly designed that I honestly wish that we could have seen a lot more done with this bunch (further adverts and a spin-off television series certainly wouldn't have gone amiss).  As with many Aardman works, it's the attention given to minor/background details, such as the Fat Tailed Lemur's ice cream and the Two-Toed Sloth's sunglasses, which really pushes it into that extra level of beguilement.

Here is the cast of animals in question:

Dog Faced Newt
(Paramesotriton hongkongensis)

Stinkpot Turtle
 (Sternotherus odoratus)

Fat Tailed Lemur
 (Cheirogaleus medius)

Short-Necked Skink

(Trachylepis brevicollis)

One-Wattled Cassowary
 (Casuarius unappendiculatus)

Two-Toed Sloth
(Choloepus didactylus)

 Orange Rumped Agouti
 (Dasyprocta leporina)

Springhaas
(Pedetes capensis)

Darling though this advertisement was, it evidently didn't spring too many arses off sofas and into zoo grounds, as London Zoo was experiencing a financial crisis at the time, and by 1991 was on the brink of closure.  Arguably, this advert had the misfortune of coming out at a point where enthusiasm for the product in question was at an all-time low, which it could do little to remedy (in the end it took a formal announcement that the zoo would close for an outpouring of public support to begin and ultimately save it), and consequently wound up being lost in the cracks of Aardman's lengthy advertising resume.  Mind you, it's not as if interest in the product itself was ever crucial to the success of an Aardman advertising campaign (numerous people thought that Frank the Tortoise and friends were plugging British Gas, no matter how many times they said "electricity") so I'm not sure if that's much of an excuse.  Ah well, is it too late for us to give this thing a cult following now?  I know that you're all eager to have one of those Fat Tailed Lemurs in plush form to go atop your workstations.