There was a time, as a small child, when the single definitive thing that scared me more than anything else in the world was a TV spot for Honey I Shrunk The Kids that played ad nauseam during the film's UK release in early 1990. Honey I Shrunk The Kids is, of course, about as innocuous a family film as they come (the most emotionally intense moment involves a showdown between two stop-motion creepy crawlies) but perhaps it will make more sense when I explain that the spot concluded with a shot of Rick Moranis about to devour his shrunken son with his Cheerios, with his son screaming "Dad! Don't eat me!" I find it odd, with hindsight, to contemplate that there was a time when Rick Moranis struck nothing less than white hot terror in my soul, but there you go. So extreme was my fear of that TV spot that it rapidly expanded into a fear of all promotional material for Honey I Shrunk The Kids in general - meaning that my very worst nightmares were realised the day that my family took a trip to London and had to navigate an Underground absolutely choc full of posters for the film (for better or worse, movie posters can have a tremendous impact in the London Underground, thanks to the immensely claustrophobic atmosphere down there). I decided that Honey I Shrunk The Kids was an evil horror fest and vowed that I would never, under any circumstances, be made to watch it - until a year later, when my family rented the video. I got to see everything in context, Cheerios scene and all, and realised that the film was way too ludicrous to be the stuff of fear. A part of my old phobia does still linger, however, in the sense that I've never had much of a stomach for Cheerios.
Recently, I took the time to look up the spot on YouTube, with the intention of reevaluating it with adult eyes and having a laugh at my four-year-old self for having ever been so terrified of something so goofy-looking. It backfired enormously, because rewatching it I got a surprising case of the chills all over again. That image of cannibal Moranis and his shrieking son is absolutely horrible out of context, and it's one heck of an unsettling moment to close your promotion on. I'm sure that most older viewers at the time would have reasoned that it was a Disney movie and as such it was highly unlikely that they would incorporate an act of cannibal filicide, but when you're four years old you have very limited means of making sense of such things and to me it was simply a nightmare image that the TV inexplicably insisted on bombarding me with again and again.
In the years that followed, I never saw another ad that terrified me on anywhere near the same level as that Honey I Shrunk The Kids promo, but as we got deeper into the 90s there were a number of ads which got to me in a more of an unnerving, skin-crawling kind of way. Ads which didn't so much terrify me as they did royally creep me out. Ads like a promotion for Roysters crisps, which had me pretty extensively haunted in the spring of 93. God, this one was strange. Kids of the 1970s often assume that kids of the early 90s had it easy because they could tune in and not expect to be ambushed by the sight of a robed ghoul voiced by Donald Pleasence roaming the wetlands and reveling in human misery. And true, we had little quite so overtly nightmarish to contend with, but on the whole I think people underestimate just how strange and unsettling a number of early 90s ads could be, particularly for a young kid having to process the bizarre onslaught of colour and surreal imagery The Powers That Be would throw at us in an effort to sell us junk food.
This ad, directed by Geoff Boyle, fashions a twisted little fantasy from a deeply banal snippet of family interaction, in which a father and son out camping in the great American wilderness are too caught up in their snack food fixation to pay much notice to the amazing wild specimens romping around them - ultimately to their detriment, when they're confronted by one such specimen who might be intent on making snack food out of them. The kid, Roy, initiates a rather uninspired game of "I Spy" in which he barely peers beyond the contents of his crisp packet (also, "A = Another Roysters" strikes me as pretty flagrant bending of the rules of I Spy) but this goes down well with his father, who's way too dense to pick up on what else is going on around them anyway. Meanwhile, their animatronic dog gets up to a whole lot of frowning, which is presumably intended to mirror the viewer's disdain at the obtuseness of these two stuid humans. It takes an unexpectedly tragic turn, with the father thinking that he's cracked the pattern in Roy's game, unaware that Roy has already legged it with the dog, abandoning his slow-witted father to the jaws of the hungry tiger right behind him. That's a pretty dark note to close on, although you could argue that it's all done in a very lighthearted, cartoony way, and that the father isn't actually "dead" because you can still hear him talking from inside the tiger's belly. Maybe the cat will vomit him up later and all will be well.
It wasn't the appearance of the man-eating tiger at the end that spooked me so much as the entire ad representing a perfect cocktail of bizarrely off-kilter elements - the cheap, jaunty music, the deliberately cardboard acting, the freaky animatronic dog. Presumably, the intention here was to create a kind of live action cartoon, but the blend of live action with surrealistic imagery gives the ad a decidedly warped flavour, making it play almost like a kinetic version of one of those "What's wrong with this picture?" puzzles. This is an ad that goes to great lengths to evoke the sense that everything about it is somehow wrong. To that end, it's handy that absolutely none of the wildlife seen in this ad are native American fauna - they are, in order of appearance, domestic rabbit, blackbuck/Indian antelope and Bengal tiger, meaning that either there's been a massive security failure at a local safari park or we've wandered into some kind of uncanny alternate American wilderness. Visually, there's a whole lot of weirdness happening here, from the elastic bunny that leaps in at the start to the conveniently-placed "A is for Antelope" sign that flashes out of nowhere. What really pushes it over into borderline all-out nightmare territory, though, is the use of the "Too Late" title card, which emphasises the sinisterness of the father's predicament in a manner that stands almost contrary to the lighthearted delivery of the final punchline. It's in that title card that the ad goes to from being an incredibly freaky live action cartoon to something legitimately bone-chilling.
Oh yeah, and I'm certain that later on in 93 a variation appeared where, in place of the "Too Late" card, we got cartoon imagery of the dad's eyes in pitch darkness (the implication again being that he's inside the belly of the tiger). I only saw that version once, and it was also the very last broadcast I ever caught of this ad. I wonder what prompted the change - did they get feedback that not enough viewer had grasped from the "Too Late" card and "tonsils" gag that the dad had been swallowed by the tiger, or did they hope to soften the darkness of the ending by making it all the more obviously cartoony? Either way, without that all-important "Too Late" card, the ad lost a huge chunk of its bite. They turned a live action cartoon into a literal cartoon and caused it to seem a lot less warped as a result.
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